Get used to it: climate change is showing up as real effects right now, with people dying from heat exhaustion in the continental US. CC-licensed photo by Felton Davis 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. A holiday, you say? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

REvil is increasing ransoms for Kaseya ransomware attack victims • Bleeping Computer

Lawrence Abrams on the (suspected) Russian group behind the attack on VSA, which provides remote login software for thousands of companies, via a zero-day exploit. Timed for Friday evening in the US, just as people headed off to the three-day weekend:

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When conducting an attack against a business, ransomware gangs, such as REvil, typically research a victim by analyzing stolen and public data for financial information, cybersecurity insurance policies, and other information.

Using this information, the number of encrypted devices, and the amount of stolen data, the threat actors will come up with a high-ball ransom demand that they believe, after negotiations, the victim can afford to pay.

However, with Friday’s attack on Kaseya VSA servers, REvil targeted the managed service providers and not their customers. Due to this, the threat actors could not determine how much of a ransom they should demand from the encrypted MSP customers.

As a solution, it seems the ransomware gang created a base ransom demand of $5 million for MSPs and a much smaller ransom of $44,999 for the MSP’s customers who were encrypted. [But] in numerous negotiation chats shared with and seen by BleepingComputer, the ransomware gang is not honouring these initial ransom demands.

…For victims of the Kaseya ransomware incident, REvil is doing things differently and demanding between $40,000 and $45,000 per individual encrypted file extension found on a victim’s network.

…Since the attacks on Friday, Kaseya has been working on releasing a patch for the zero-day vulnerability exploited in the REvil attack.

This zero-day was discovered by DIVD researchers who disclosed the t to Kaseya and helping test the patch.

Unfortunately, REvil found the vulnerability simultaneously and launched their attack on Friday before the patch was ready, just in time for the US Fourth of July holiday weekend.

It is believed that over 1,000 businesses have been affected by the attack, including attacks on the Swedish Coop supermarket chain, which had to close approximately 500 stores, a Swedish pharmacy chain, and the SJ transit system.

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There’s no obvious end to this, unless Russia starts getting hit by ransomware groups, perhaps based in the US. That would either means an arms race, or a truce. Given current conditions, the former feels more likely.
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May 2018: Explainer: six ideas to limit global warming with solar geoengineering • Carbon Brief

Daisy Dunne, writing in May 2018:

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Scientists agree that cutting global greenhouse emissions as soon as possible will be key to tackling global warming. But, with global emissions still on the rise, some researchers are now calling for more research into measures that could be taken alongside emissions cuts, including – controversially – the use of “solar geoengineering” technologies.

Solar geoengineering is a term used to describe a group of hypothetical technologies that could, in theory, counteract temperature rise by reflecting more sunlight away from the Earth’s surface.

From sending a giant mirror into space to spraying aerosols in the stratosphere, the range of proposed techniques all come with unique technical, ethical and political challenges.

Carbon Brief spoke to the scientists who are pioneering research into these techniques to find out more about their potential uses, shortfalls and overall feasibility.

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They’re ambitious. Three years on, none of them is being tried. Meanwhile millions of dollars of venture capital have been sunk into companies that at best don’t make things any better.
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Drought’s toll on US agriculture points to even-higher food prices • WSJ

Danny Dougherty and Peter Santilli:

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The Southwest is suffering through one of its worst droughts on record amid a critical reduction in the amount of water from snowpack runoff.

Roughly 9.8% of the US is currently in what climate experts refer to as exceptional drought, the most severe designation, which is characterized by widespread crop and pasture losses and shortages in reservoirs, streams and wells amounting to water emergencies. About 44% of the nation is experiencing some level of drought, with a further 13% currently affected by drier-than-normal conditions.

Reduced snowmelt is one of several factors that contribute to drought conditions, along with dry weather, warmer temperatures and population growth, which puts added strain on water resources.

The current drought is on pace to be one of the worst ever. One of the hardest-hit states is California, home to about 70,000 farms and ranches with a combined output of about $50bn a year. The dairy industry accounts for the largest chunk of the state’s agricultural revenue, followed by almonds and grapes.

The agricultural industry throughout the West has suffered in the past decade from a number of climate-related disasters, including a severe drought in 2014-15. US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has said federal support and relief programs “need to be redesigned to meet the reality of longer-term weather incidents and climate-related incidents that create not just a month, or two- or six-month, problem, but create years of problems and potentially decades worth of problems.”

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Gamers are better than scientists at catching fraud • The Atlantic

Stuart Ritchie:

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Two weeks before Dream’s confession [to having used special software in order to complete a record-breaking speed run in Minecraft], and halfway around the world, another fraud scandal had just come to a conclusion. Following a long investigation, Japan’s Showa University released a report on one of its anesthesiology researchers, Hironobu Ueshima. Ueshima had turned out to be one of the most prolific scientific frauds in history, having partly or entirely fabricated records and data in at least 84 scientific papers, and altered data and misrepresented authorship on dozens more. Like Dream, Ueshima would eventually come clean and apologize—but only after a data sleuth had spotted strange anomalies in his publications. Many of his papers have already been expunged from the scientific literature.

If you haven’t heard about this historic low point for scientific publishing, I don’t blame you. Aside from the specialist website Retraction Watch, which exists to document these kinds of events, not one English-language media outlet covered it. (There were a few stories in the Japanese press.) The case garnered little social-media interest; there was no debate over the lessons learned for science.

Does it strike you as odd that so many people tuned in to hear about a doctored speedrun of a children’s video game, while barely a ripple was made—even among scientists—by the discovery of more than 80 fake scientific papers? These weren’t esoteric papers, either, slipped into obscure academic journals. They were prominent medical studies, the sort with immediate implications for real-life patients in the operating room. Consider two titles from Ueshima’s list of fraudulent or possibly fabricated findings: “Investigation of Force Received at the Upper Teeth by Video Laryngoscopy” and “Below-Knee Amputation Performed With Pericapsular Nerve Group and Sciatic Nerve Blocks.” You’d hope that the mechanisms for purging fake studies such as these from the literature—and thus, from your surgeon’s reading list—would be pretty strong.

Alas, that’s often not the case.

…Science has its own advanced fraud-detection methods; in theory, these could be used to clean out the Augean stables of research publishing. For example, one such tool was used to show that the classic paper on the psychological phenomenon of “cognitive dissonance” contained numbers that were mathematically impossible. Yet that paper remains in the literature, garnering citations, without so much as a note from the journal’s editor.

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Journal retracts study that claimed widespread Covid-19 vaccine deaths • Gizmodo

Ed Cara:

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It wasn’t long before scientists associated with the journal Vaccines began to protest the study’s publication. Within days, prominent scientists such as Katie Ewer, a member of the Oxford University team who helped create their now widely used covid-19 vaccine, resigned from the journal’s editorial board. A day after her resignation, the journal placed an expression of concern on the paper, meant to alert readers of the many criticisms it had received, and announced it would investigate the matter. The announcement didn’t seem to stop the bleeding, though; at last count, according to the publication Science, at least six scientists in total have resigned from positions as associate or section editors with the journal.

Finally, just today, Vaccines’ remaining editors came back with their verdict, announcing that the paper would be retracted. In their notice, they pointed to “several errors that fundamentally affect the interpretation of the findings,” including the misrepresentation of the Netherlands’ vaccine safety data. The editors also noted that the authors were asked to respond to the criticisms made of their paper, but “were not able to do so satisfactorily.” The paper was then retracted under their protest.

“The paper was deeply, fundamentally flawed, comparing two numbers that were poorly conceived and incorrect in numerous ways. It should not have been published, but at least it is now retracted,” Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist from the University of Wollongong in Australia who earlier wrote a detailed criticism of the paper, told Gizmodo.

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The study claimed that anyone who died after being vaccinated died as a result of the vaccine. Amazing how people who have been claiming for months that the Covid death count isn’t correct because “it includes people who didn’t die actually OF Covid” should now sing hurrahs for a study using the opposite argument.

Also puts peer review in a very poor light. You’d have hoped that one of the readers could have done better than, well, half the internet.
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GM to source US-based lithium for next-generation EV batteries through closed-loop process with low carbon emissions • General Motors

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General Motors has agreed to form a strategic investment and commercial collaboration with Controlled Thermal Resources to secure local and low-cost lithium. This lithium will be produced through a closed-loop, direct extraction process that results in a smaller physical footprint, no production tailing and lower carbon dioxide emissions when compared to traditional processes like pit mining or evaporation ponds.

Lithium is a metal crucial to GM’s plans to make more affordable, higher mileage electric vehicles.

The relationship between GM and CTR is expected to accelerate the adoption of lithium extraction methods that cause less impact to the environment. A significant amount of GM’s future battery-grade lithium hydroxide and carbonate could come from CTR’s Hell’s Kitchen Lithium and Power development in the Salton Sea Geothermal Field, located in Imperial, California. With the help of GM’s investment, CTR’s closed-loop, direct extraction process will recover lithium from geothermal brine.

As an anticipated part of its $35bn global commitment to EVs and autonomous vehicles , GM will be the first company to make a multi-million dollar investment in CTR’s Hell’s Kitchen project.

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According to this article from last November, geothermal brine extraction is incredibly efficient compared to other methods, particularly above-ground mining.
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In video, Exxon lobbyist describes efforts to undercut climate action • The New York Times

Hiroko Tabuchi:

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The veteran oil-industry lobbyist was told he was meeting with a recruiter. But the video call, which was secretly recorded, was part of an elaborate sting operation by an individual working for the environmental group Greenpeace UK.

During the call, Keith McCoy, a senior director of federal relations for Exxon Mobil, described how the oil and gas giant targeted a number of influential United States senators in an effort to weaken climate action in President Biden’s flagship infrastructure plan. That plan now contains few of the ambitious ideas initially proposed by Mr. Biden to cut the burning of fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change.

Mr. McCoy also said on the recording that Exxon’s support for a tax on carbon dioxide was “a great talking point” for the oil company, but that he believes the tax will never happen. He also said that the company has in the past aggressively fought climate science through “shadow groups.”

On Wednesday, excerpts from the conversation were aired by the British broadcaster Channel 4. The affiliate of Greenpeace that recorded the video, Unearthed, also released excerpts.

In a statement, Darren Woods, Exxon’s chief executive, said the comments “in no way represent the company’s position on a variety of issues, including climate policy, and our firm commitment that carbon pricing is important to addressing climate change.”

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So, nothing about actually doing anything about it.
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How to cope with the climate apocalypse • Financial Times

Simon Kuper:

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More existentially, adopt the outlook that almost all humans had until about the 1950s: don’t make any presumptions about your future. Don’t structure your life around distant pay-offs. Which entity will be able to pay your pension in 2050?

Then there’s the moral question: do you want to be part of a climate-destroying system? It’s tempting to shove all the blame on the fossil-fuels industry, but almost everyone with a job in a developed country is complicit — shop assistants, hotel staff and journalists whose newspapers are funded by readers from carbon-intensive industries.

Anyone with gas heating, a car and the occasional plane ticket lives off climate destruction. Almost everything we call “progress” or “growth” makes things worse. Our children probably won’t admire our careers.

The stereotype of the apocalyptic survivalist is the lunatic in a tinfoil hat with an AK-47 on a mountaintop. (The upscale version is a mansion in New Zealand.) But there are more social ways of opting out. I witnessed one when I moved into the crumbling Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood in East Berlin in 1990, just after the fall of communism.

Many of my new neighbours were young East Germans who had rejected what they considered the evil communist system. They had no official employment, or worked in low-status jobs as librarians or nurses or, like the young Angela Merkel, in non-communist professions such as physics. Some lived off grid, without telephones, perhaps with stolen electricity. Their little community was riddled with informers, yet people helped each other, expecting nothing of the future. Oddly, they may have been our future.

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Climate change has turned deadly. It will get worse • The Washington Post

Sarah Kaplan:

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If we continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, studies suggest, the Earth could be 3 to 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the end of the century. The Arctic will be free of ice in summertime. Hundreds of millions of people will suffer from food shortages and extreme drought. Huge numbers of species will be driven to extinction. Some regions will become so hot and disaster-prone they are uninhabitable.

“It’s a very different planet at those levels,” Wehner said. “This is really serious. As a society, as a species, we’re going to have to learn to adapt to this. And some things are not going to be adaptable.”
Extreme heat is likely to be one of those things. Studies of heat waves suggest that a half a degree Celsius increase in summertime temperatures can lead to a 150% increase in the number of heat waves that kill 100 people or more. Research published last year in the journal Science found that the human body can’t tolerate temperatures higher than 95 degrees when combined with 100% humidity.

The scene in emergency departments across the Northwest this week underscores that science. Wait times at the OHSU emergency department were 5 to 7 hours, Tanski said. At Swedish Health Services — Cherry Hill in Seattle, doctors were seeing patients in hallways because all the rooms were full.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said David Markel, an emergency physician at the Seattle hospital. During an overnight shift on Monday, he treated 12 patients for heat illness. Some were so sick their kidneys and livers were failing, their muscles starting to break down.

“I don’t claim to be an expert in climate change or environmental science,” Markel said. “But I definitely care for people who are impacted by the extremes of climate. … And it’s like, the more crises we face the more clear it is.”

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‘They said I don’t exist. But I am here’ – one woman’s battle to prove she isn’t dead • The Guardian

Kim Willsher:

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The trouble began in 2016. When Jeanne Pouchain’s passport application was declined, she was annoyed – but assumed she must have forgotten an important piece of paperwork.

Several weeks later, at a doctor’s appointment in her town of Saint-Joseph, outside Lyon in south-east France, both Pouchain, then 53, and her GP were perplexed when his computer spat out her carte vitale, the green card that gives access to the French public health system. Pouchain put it down to a technical blip. She assumed that was also the reason her pharmacy suggested she would have to pay in full for her diabetes drugs.

It seemed like a series of annoying coincidences; the kind of red tape many in France find themselves tangled up in at one time or another in a country notorious for bureaucracy. It was irritating but would, she assumed, eventually be resolved.

But when the former cleaning company boss received her bank statement and discovered her business account had been plunged into the red, even though she had paid in dozens of cheques, she started to become seriously concerned. “I knew money should have been going into my account, but there was nothing in it. So I went to the bank. It’s only a small branch; I’ve been with them for 27 or so years and they all know me,” she says. “The director came out and told me, ‘I’m sorry, you don’t exist.’ I said: ‘But I am here, you know me.’ He told me: ‘I don’t have an explanation for this. But what can I do?’ He said there was no record of a Jeanne Pouchain and no accounts in that name.

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An amazing story.
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How they shot the wrong-way car chase in ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ • Film School Rejects

Meg Shields:

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William Friedkin‘s take no prisoners attitude is the stuff of legend. This is the man who shoots blank guns on set and films without permits while speeding through New York City at ninety miles per hour. The New Hollywood shenanigans bracket is competitive. But Friedkin is outrageous, passionate, and willing to go to great lengths to get what he wants.

It’s not a huge stretch to compare the director to Richard Chance, the hot-blooded cop played by William Petersen in Friedkin’s cat and mouse neo-noir To Live and Die in L.A. In the film, a fearless federal agent obsessively purses the counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe) who killed his partner, endangering himself and others in the process.

In many ways, To Live and Die in L.A. epitomizes Friedkin’s interest in the thin line between the cop and the criminal. Chance’s drive to seek and destroy leads him to commit reckless acts. Acts that rival those of the very man he’s hunting. You know, like speeding the wrong way down a Los Angeles freeway during rush hour.

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I had always had a suspicion about how they did this, because “they’re driving into oncoming traffic!” has become a trope of car chases; that suspicion is confirmed in this piece. It’s worth reading though to find out how the chase in French Connection was done (hint: don’t do it like that).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s a good day to
order Social Warming, my new book.

In 2019, China suffered a dramatic pork shortage due to swine fever. A new preprint suggests that helped lead to Covid. CC-licensed photo by Robert Hest 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. As long as the pig’s happy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad?
• Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see?
• How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online?
• What can we do about it?
• Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?

Order Social Warming, my new book, and find answers – and more.

Instagram is ‘no longer a photo-sharing app,’ says its head • Engadget

Igor Bonifacic:

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Instagram doesn’t see itself as a platform where people go to share photos anymore. That’s the main takeaway from a series of recent comments made by the head of the company, Adam Mosseri. “We’re no longer a photo-sharing app or a square photo-sharing app,” Mosseri said in a video he posted to his social media accounts this week. According to Mosseri, the main reason for that is that people come to Instagram “to be entertained,” and it’s not the only app that offers that in what is a crowded marketplace.

“Let’s be honest, there’s some really serious competition right now,” Mosseri said. “TikTok is huge, YouTube is even bigger and there are a lot of other upstarts as well.” To stay competitive, Mosseri said Instagram has to embrace that aspect of itself, “and that means change.” One way the app will change is with Instagram handing out more recommendations. Mosseri referenced a test the company kicked off last week that’s seen it intersperse “Suggested Posts” in users’ feeds. He also said Instagram plans to embrace video more broadly, focusing on full-screen and immersive content.

In short, what Mosseri is describing is Instagram becoming more like TikTok. And that’s something we’ve already seen the company try to do with features like Reels.

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TikTok, meanwhile, is getting into YouTube-but-maybe-better territory by offering videos of up to three minutes for anyone. I wonder if that will work as well – a big part of the attraction around TikTok now is the brevity of videos. Longer videos might give the algorithm more to chew on. Or it might dissipate what made it great.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep using Instagram to share photos. Retro, I know.
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Notes on NFTs, the high-art trade, and money laundering • Amy Castor

Amy wrote a piece for Artnet about “how NFTs create new opportunities for bad guys to move money without attribution”, and these are some of her notes:

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• Disclaimer: I know of no conviction yet so I can’t name anyone, but if you look through a pile of NFT transactions, you’ll see stuff that looks very odd and worthy of investigation.

• A lot of NFTs are bought and sold for crazy amounts of money — generally in the form of crypto — and often, we have no idea who the buyers or the sellers are. It’s not clear whether the platforms facilitating these trades know either.

• Earlier this year, two CryptoPunk NFTs sold separately for $7.5 million each in crypto — Punk #7804 and Punk #3100. In both cases, the buyers were known only by their crypto wallet addresses.

• In February, an NFT of Nyan Cat, a cat cartoon with a Pop-tart body, sold for $600,000 — in crypto. Again, the buyer was only known by their wallet address. Those are just a few examples. There are many, many others.

• The most practical way to launder money with NFTs would be via what is called “trade-based money laundering” — deals that appear legit on the face but are meant to hide the flow of ill-gotten gains. All you need are two parties to make that happen.

• Let’s say, I need to receive $3 million worth of dirty crypto. I mint an NFT, establish its value by wash-trading (selling back and forth to myself a few times) and then sell it to my colleague. I then cash out at a banked exchange. If anyone asks where the money came from, I simply tell them, “I sold an NFT!”

• Because regulations haven’t caught up with NFTs, some of the NFT marketplaces are relaxed in their anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer (AML/KYC) practices.

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The suspicion that NFTs are becoming a convenient way to launder money is growing stronger and stronger.
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Google is moving away from APKs on the Play Store • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Google has announced a big change for developers who want to list their apps on Google Play that could have an impact on the Android app ecosystem. Right now, the standard format for app publishing is the APK, but starting in August, Google will require that new Play apps are published instead using the Android App Bundle.

On a Google page about Android App Bundle, the company touts many potential improvements with the new format, such as smaller app downloads for users. But the format has a catch: Android App Bundles are a format that only Google Play uses, which could complicate app redistribution.

The timing of Google’s announcement also comes just days after Microsoft announced Windows 11, which has the ability to let you sideload Android apps as APKs. Google’s switch to App Bundles may mean that there will be fewer apps available to run on Microsoft’s new operating system, though you’ll also be able to get Android apps on Windows 11 from the Amazon Appstore.

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Note that it says *new* apps, so this doesn’t completely pull the rug from under Microsoft’s plans. Now wait for the other shoe to drop, where upgrades to apps have to be bundles too. (Google says there’s [presently] “no change” here.)

But: the bundle format has been around since May 2018, and Google says there are a million apps using them – including “the majority of the top 1,000 apps on Google Play”. Might want to check that rug, Microsoft.
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Robinhood IPO filing shows power of the meme-stock boom • WSJ

Peter Rudegeair and Corrie Driebusch:

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Robinhood, which plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol HOOD, generated $522m of revenue in the first quarter, mostly from trading activity, more than quadruple its level from the first quarter of 2020. More than $4 out of every $5 Robinhood earned in first-quarter revenue stemmed from payments it received from high-speed trading firms to which it routed customers’ stock, option and cryptocurrency trades, a controversial practice known as payment for order flow.

The number of funded accounts at Robinhood swelled to 18 million at the end of March, more than double their number from a year earlier, as everyday investors signed up in droves to participate in rallies in meme stocks such as GameStop Corp. and cryptocurrencies like dogecoin.

Despite the increase in users and trading-based revenue, Robinhood reported a first-quarter loss of $1.4bn.

The first-quarter loss was largely due to a $1.5bn one-time charge, related to an emergency fundraising in late January at the height of the GameStop rally. The clearinghouse that processes and settles Robinhood’s trades asked the company to put up billions of dollars in extra collateral to cover potential losses on volatile trades, prompting Robinhood to restrict trading in certain highflying stocks until it could complete a sale of convertible notes.

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Over at MarketWatch, they point out (which weirdly the WSJ doesn’t) that Robinhood says Dogecoin trading is a “risk factor” for it; cryptocurrency trading made 17% of its revenue in Q1 of this year.
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How one pandemic led to another: Asfv, the disruption contributing to Sars-Cov-2 emergence in Wuhan[v1] • Preprints

Xia, Hughes, Robertson and Jiang in a non-peer-reviewed preprint:

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Abstract: The spillover of a virus from one host species to another requires both molecular and ecological risk factors to align. While extensive research both before and after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in 2019 implicates horseshoe bat as the significant reservoir genus for the new coronavirus, it remains unclear why it emerged at this time.

One massive disruption to human-animal contact in 2019 is linked to the on-going African swine fever virus (ASFV) pandemic. This began in Georgia in 2007 and was introduced to China in 2018. Pork is the major meat source in the Chinese diet. Severe fluctuations in the pork market prior to December 2019, may have increased the transmission of zoonotic pathogens, including severe acute respiratory syndrome–related coronaviruses, from wildlife to humans, wildlife to livestock and non-local animals to local animals. The major production and consumption regions for pork are geographically separated in China.

The dramatic shortage of pork following restrictions of pig movement and culling resulted in price increases, leading to alternative sources of meat and unusual animal and meat movements nationwide often involving wildlife and thus greatly increased opportunities for human-Sarbecovirus contacts. Pork prices were particularly high in southern provinces (Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Hubei), where wildlife is farmed on different scales and more frequently consumed. Shandong experienced the biggest losses in pork production (~1.7 million metric tons), which is also the largest mink farming province.

Hence, human exposure to SARS-CoV-2 from wildlife or infected animals are more likely to have taken place in 2019, when China was experiencing the worst effects of the ASFV pandemic.

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Remember this from April 2019 (“Chinese hog farms `panic’ as swine virus continues roiling herds“) and then November 2019 (“‘Not enough pork in the world’ to deal with China’s demand for meat“)? If you’re a determined Overspill reader (or its compiler) then of course. I had wondered if the pork shortage might be fingered as a problem. (Hughes is at the University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, as is Robertson. Xia and Jiang seem to be based in China.
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Could editing the genomes of bats prevent future pandemics? • Stat News

Erika Check Hayden:

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[Yaniv] Erlich and his co-author, immunologist Daniel Douek at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, now propose an additional measure: creating a gene drive to render wild horseshoe bats immune to the types of coronavirus infections that are thought to have triggered the SARS, MERS, and Covid-19 pandemics. They shared the proposal Wednesday on the Github publishing and code-sharing platform.

Though there is heated debate about whether the Covid-19 virus originated in a lab, most scientists say the virus is most likely to have originated in wild animals. There is strong evidence, for instance, that horseshoe bats carry the coronavirus that caused the SARS outbreak.

A gene drive is a technique for turbocharging evolution and spreading new traits throughout a species faster than they would spread through natural selection. It involves using a gene editing technology such as CRISPR to modify an organism’s genome so that it passes a new trait to its offspring and throughout the species.

The idea of making a gene drive in bats faces such enormous scientific, technical, social, and economic obstacles that scientists interviewed by STAT called it “folly,” “far-fetched,” and “concerning.” Among other objections, they worried about unintended consequences with so radically tampering with nature.

“We have other ways of preventing future Covid-19 outbreaks,” argued Natalie Kofler, a trained molecular biologist and bioethicist and founder of Editing Nature, a group focused on inclusive decision-making about genetic technologies.

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Among other problems, there are more than a hundred species of horseshoe bats alone, so this is one of those wonderful “first boil the ocean” propositions.
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How much water do you actually need a day?: Transcript | Podcasts • TED

Dr Jen Gunter:

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Look, I get this is a real record-scratch freeze frame moment for a lot of people – but we don’t just get the water we need from plain water. And if you have one of those days where you just drink coffee all morning, and you don’t feel great – maybe you’re a little headachy or a little jittery – it’s not because you’re dehydrated. Maybe you had a little too much coffee, or you had it on an empty stomach.

If you like drinking six glasses, eight glasses of water a day, and your doctor hasn’t advised against it, that’s probably fine! What I’m saying is that there’s nothing medical about this number. We get to make choices about what we put in our body, and this is one of those choices. If you think about it, just using common sense and putting the medicine aside… Does it seem realistic that we evolved needing to consume that much clean water every single day? In the span of human history, access to clean, plentiful drinking water is a relatively recent phenomenon.

And even today in many parts of the world, accessing clean drinking water isn’t as easy as walking into your kitchen and filling up a glass. It seems unlikely that our ancestors carried giant water bottles around with them at all times.

And yet the 8 glasses of water a day myth spread and spread and spread. But why is this myth so sticky? It turns out there’s a mix of factors, including a little bit of intrigue and one particular culprit that deserves a lot of the blame: the beverage industry.

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I was prompted to look this up by a friend on Twitter who was wondering why Kids These Days keep wandering around clutching water bottles. It’s because the soft drinks (which includes the bottled water) industry pushed the idea that people Aren’t Drinking Enough.
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The Xbox gift card fraud: inside a $10 million bitcoin virtual currency cheat • Bloomberg

Austin Carr:

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Volodymyr Kvashuk received the $15 code a few weeks before Christmas, in 2017, among a batch of 20 others worth $300 altogether. But the engineer, who went by Vova for short and was in his mid-20s, hadn’t paid for the Xbox gift cards himself, nor were they some early holiday present from relatives. Kvashuk had recently begun a full-time job at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., testing the company’s e-commerce infrastructure.

His team’s focus was to simulate purchases on Microsoft’s online store, looking for glitches in the payments system. This meant making lots of pretend purchases in the store. If Kvashuk added a Dell PC to his shopping cart, he’d use a faux credit card Microsoft had provided, complete the transaction, and document any errors. The system knew the purchase was fake and wouldn’t deliver the device to his doorstep. At least that was what was supposed to happen.

Then Kvashuk found a bug that would change his life, a flaw so stupidly obvious that he couldn’t bring himself to report it to his managers. He noticed that whenever he tested purchases of gift cards, the Microsoft Store dispensed real 5×5 codes. It dawned on him: He could generate virtually unlimited codes, all for free [because while Microsoft’s system wouldn’t send physical goods, it would send virtual ones]. A former senior engineer on Kvashuk’s team—who, like other sources in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being publicly associated with the wrongdoing that followed—says this was the Halo-age equivalent of a frontier bank leaving its vault unlocked. “Sooner or later, someone’s going to try to get away with taking $20,” the ex-Microsoft employee says. “When they don’t get caught, they figure, ‘All I need is six guys to empty out the safe one night when no other employees are around.’ ”

«

This rings a bell – in my (second) book Cyber Wars, I tell the story of how many years earlier another Microsoft tester, Andrew Plato, discovered that he could access all the credit cards in the Microsoft store using a specifically formed SQL query. The engineers told him “Nobody would think to do that.” Of course, they did: and so SQL injection became a thing. This is much the same: nobody would think to do that. Until someone does.
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All the right words on climate have already been said • Nieman Lab

Sarah Miller (who wrote the article about Florida included yesterday) got a call from an editor in the modern day:

»

we got around to the “I’d still love to hear any ideas from you” portion of the conversation. I said some really stupid stuff about masks, and “California,” nearly putting myself to sleep, and I’m sure her too. The only reason I was talking about masks and “California” was because I didn’t want to tell her that the only thing I thought about all day, every day, was how hot it was. I didn’t want to admit it to her or to myself.

“The story of yours I really loved,” she said, and I felt a pit form in my stomach, knowing what was coming, “was the one that you wrote about Miami. About the real estate market and the flooding. I love that story.” [Appeared in yesterday’s Overspill.]

“Thank you,” I said. The pit in my stomach swelled.

“I mean, it would be great to get you to write something about climate change.” She said some more nice things about my writing. “I mean, fire season is coming up.”

I don’t want to be nasty about this phone call. I feel bad writing about it because the editor will be seen as a villain, as shallow, as representing Media while I represent Integrity. That is not how it is.

But hearing her say that fire season was “coming up” — A) when fire season was already here, and had been for weeks, and B) in a tone of voice that was not quite “news peg!” but not exactly not “news peg!” — did not feel good to me.

Also, I wrote that Miami story more than two years ago. It seems almost hilarious to me now, but I actually wrote a story that was like “LOL Miami, they’re selling real estate in a town threatened by sea level rise” without realizing that I lived in and owned a home in a place that was equally climate-challenged. I knew this intellectually, but it hadn’t seeped in.

That Miami story was funny. I couldn’t write a funny story about climate change now to save my life. But the Miami story is everyone’s favorite. Everyone wants something like it, and it makes me feel sad for so many reasons, mostly because when I wrote it I was a much happier person and I miss her, she was a lot of fun, even if she was an idiot.

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As she points out: do we really have to keep saying this?
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How Rumsfeld deserves to be remembered • The Atlantic

George Packer calls Donald Rumsfeld “the worst defence secretary America has ever had”, and stamps the earth very solidly down:

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Rumsfeld was working in his office on the morning that a hijacked jet flew into the Pentagon. During the first minutes of terror, he displayed bravery and leadership. But within a few hours, he was already entertaining catastrophic ideas, according to notes taken by an aide: “best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].” And later: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” These fragments convey the whole of Rumsfeld: his decisiveness, his aggression, his faith in hard power, his contempt for procedure. In the end, it didn’t matter what the intelligence said. September 11 was a test of American will and a chance to show it.

Rumsfeld started being wrong within hours of the attacks and never stopped. He argued that the attacks proved the need for the missile-defense shield that he’d long advocated. He thought that the American war in Afghanistan meant the end of the Taliban. He thought that the new Afghan government didn’t need the U.S. to stick around for security and support. He thought that the United States should stiff the United Nations, brush off allies, and go it alone. He insisted that al-Qaeda couldn’t operate without a strongman like Saddam. He thought that all the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was wrong, except the dire reports that he’d ordered up himself. He reserved his greatest confidence for intelligence obtained through torture. He thought that the State Department and the CIA were full of timorous, ignorant bureaucrats. He thought that America could win wars with computerized weaponry and awesome displays of force.

He believed in regime change but not in nation building, and he thought that a few tens of thousands of troops would be enough to win in Iraq. He thought that the quick overthrow of Saddam’s regime meant mission accomplished. He responded to the looting of Baghdad by saying “Freedom’s untidy,” as if the chaos was just a giddy display of democracy—as if it would not devastate Iraq and become America’s problem, too.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Why can’t we just have a physical menu, rather than a QR code that points to a web address that shows a menu? CC-licensed photo by Alpha 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. Do not scan. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Eventually you’ll realise you should buy Social Warming, my latest book, about why social media drives us all a little mad – even if we don’t use it.

Amazon says the new FTC chair, Lina Khan, should recuse herself from investigations • The New York Times

David McCabe:

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Amazon demanded on Wednesday that Lina Khan, the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission and an avowed critic of the company, recuse herself from any antitrust investigation into the e-commerce giant.

The company argued in a 25-page petition to the FTC that Ms. Kahn could not be impartial in antitrust matters involving the company because she had been intensely critical of Amazon as a scholar and writer and because she had worked on the staff of a congressional investigation of the company.

“At a minimum, this record creates the appearance that the FTC, under Chair Khan’s leadership, would not be a neutral and impartial evaluator of the evidence developed in any antitrust investigation against Amazon or in deciding whether to bring enforcement actions against the company,” the company said in the filing.

Amazon said Ms. Khan should be recused from “at least all of the current antitrust investigations of Amazon of which the commission has notified Amazon.” The company is the subject of an FTC inquiry, as well as investigations by state attorneys general.

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The hilarious fact, as pointed out by monopolist critic Matt Stoller, is that the “demand” was written by Thomas Barnett. Who? The guy who ran antitrust for George W Bush from April 2004 to 2008, just the period when Amazon (and Google) were swallowing up smaller rivals.

But Amazon, never wanting to leave things to chance, also hired another ex-DOJ Antitrust person to help file the complaint. Can Khan complain that Amazon has a functional monopoly of ex-DOJ Antitrust leaders?
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Robinhood agrees to pay $70m to settle regulatory investigation • WSJ

Dave Michaels:

»

Robinhood now has 31 million customers, 18 million of whom have funded accounts, according to a settlement document made public Wednesday.

Finra alleged a series of failings by Robinhood, which agreed to a $57m fine and $12.6m in compensation for harmed investors. Many allegations involved problems with technology that automated the opening of new accounts or trading strategies and updated clients about their balances or borrowed funds.

The company opened 90,000 new accounts from 2016 to 2018 despite red flags signaling possible identity theft or other fraud, Finra said. Robinhood qualified thousands of other accounts to trade options even though the clients didn’t meet eligibility criteria, according to Finra.

One example cited by Finra: A new customer, who was 20 years old, was rejected for options trading after noting that he had little investing experience and a low risk tolerance. Three minutes later, the customer changed his risk appetite to “medium” and said he had three years of investing experience. Within seconds, Robinhood approved him for options, according to Finra’s settlement document.

In another example that turned into tragedy, a 20-year-old Robinhood customer, identified as Customer A, took his own life in June 2020 after seeing an account notice that he had a negative balance of $720,000. The customer was rattled by the notice because he thought he had turned off his ability to borrow funds from the brokerage to trade, according to the settlement document.

Robinhood also misinformed the customer about the value of his position; it was actually negative $365,530, or half what Robinhood’s system showed, the settlement states.

…Robinhood misled other traders who similarly believed they couldn’t use borrowed money, or margin, if they turned off that feature, Finra said. Clients who disabled margin could still wind up using borrowed money if they made certain types of options trades, the regulator said.

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Finra’s biggest-ever fine. Move fast and break the bank.
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Bring back menus, because QR codes are terrible • Slate

Christina Cauterucci:

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Before the pandemic, I’d shudder at the sight of a restaurant table full of people all staring at their phones. I was always happy not to be them or be sitting with them. I always kept the lively conversation flowing at my table. I had good boundaries between my on- and offline lives. But now, restaurants around the world have nonconsensually turned us all into the people I used to judge. I hate it. And it’s time for us to go back.

It all started when outdoor dining resumed after initial waves of mandated closures last spring. Wary of wayward coronaviruses lingering on physical menus, restaurants taped QR codes to their tables and outsourced the act of menu delivery to the diner and her smartphone. This might have made sense when it still seemed possible that the coronavirus was largely spreading through surface transmission. But we now know that the risk of infection via a contaminated surface is low. In tons of communities across the US, vaccination rates are high and COVID-19 case rates are low. People are attending indoor concerts, grinding at dance clubs, and heading back to the office.

And yet, even as we eat and slobber and sneeze in restaurants seated at full capacity, in many of those establishments, we’re still obliged to use our own smartphones to figure out what we want to eat. Why? Why should we be scared to go back to touching a communal piece of paper when we’re already breathing one another’s theoretically more dangerous air?

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Or not even a communal piece of paper – write it on a blackboard (or whiteboard). There is a puzzling attraction to QR codes.
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OpenStreetMap looks to relocate to EU due to Brexit limitations • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

OpenStreetMap, the Wikipedia-for-maps organisation that seeks to create a free and open-source map of the globe, is considering relocating to the EU, almost 20 years after it was founded in the UK by the British entrepreneur Steve Coast.

OpenStreetMap Foundation, which was formally registered in 2006, two years after the project began, is a limited company registered in England and Wales. Following Brexit, the organisation says the lack of agreement between the UK and EU could render its continued operation in Britain untenable.

“There is not one reason for moving, but a multitude of paper cuts, most of which have been triggered or amplified by Brexit,” Guillaume Rischard, the organisation’s treasurer, told members of the foundation in an email sent earlier this month.

One “important reason”, Rischard said, was the failure of the UK and EU to agree on mutual recognition of database rights. While both have an agreement to recognise copyright protections, that only covers work which is creative in nature.

Maps, as a simple factual representation of the world, are not covered by copyright in the same way, but until Brexit were covered by an EU-wide agreement that protected databases where there had been “a substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the data”. But since Brexit, any database made on or after 1 January 2021 in the UK will not be protected in the EU, and vice versa.

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The rotting internet is a collective hallucination • The Atlantic

Jonathan Zittrain:

»

This month, the best-selling author Elin Hilderbrand published a new novel. The novel, widely praised by critics, included a snippet of dialogue in which one character makes a wry joke to another about spending the summer in an attic on Nantucket, “like Anne Frank.” Some readers took to social media to criticize this moment between characters as anti-Semitic. The author sought to explain the character’s use of the analogy before offering an apology and saying that she had asked her publisher to remove the passage from digital versions of the book immediately.

There are sufficient technical and typographical alterations to ebooks after they’re published that a publisher itself might not even have a simple accounting of how often it, or one of its authors, has been importuned to alter what has already been published. Nearly 25 years ago I helped Wendy Seltzer start a site, now called Lumen, that tracks requests for elisions from institutions ranging from the University of California to the Internet Archive to Wikipedia, Twitter, and Google—often for claimed copyright infringements found by clicking through links published there. Lumen thus makes it possible to learn more about what’s missing or changed from, say, a Google web search, because of outside demands or requirements.

For example, thanks to the site’s record-keeping both of deletions and of the source and text of demands for removals, the law professor Eugene Volokh was able to identify a number of removal requests made with fraudulent documentation—nearly 200 out of 700 “court orders” submitted to Google that he reviewed turned out to have been apparently Photoshopped from whole cloth. The Texas attorney general has since sued a company for routinely submitting these falsified court orders to Google for the purpose of forcing content removals.

«

As Zittrain points out, the web is built on shifting sands, and that has consequences for what we think is knowledge: if what a judge cites in a ruling is no longer online, what does that mean for the ruling?
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A sleazy company hijacked my Amazon listing for Klein bottles • Kleinbottle

Clifford Stoll:

»

although I’ve sold Klein bottles for 25 years, I have never trademarked my business name, “Acme Klein Bottle”.  It’s called a “common-law trademark”.

  For the past 5 years, I’ve had a listing on Amazon, where I sold only large Klein bottles,  This listing received 199 five-star reviews and 2 four-star reviews.  No bad reviews at all. (I’m honored, of course).  My Amazon customers are mainly parents who buy Klein bottles for their kids around the holidays.

  Well, sometime in May, Amazon seller “Amvoom”, from Shenzen China, trademarked the word “Amvoom”.  On June 22nd, they used Amazon’s Brand Registry to re-brand my listing on Amazon (replacing my brand, “Acme Klein Bottle” with “Amvoom”)  They could do this because Amazon’s Brand Registry only respects issued trademarks.  In essence, they told Amazon the they owned the Klein bottle listing.  In turn, they are now in charge of that Klein bottle listing on Amazon. So instead of “Handmade Klein Bottle”, Amazon now lists “AMVOOM Handmade Klein Bottle”.

  Amvoom does not sell Klein bottles. Likely, they don’t know what one is.  Instead, they redirected my 199 reviews to their product (a black-head remover). They did so by adding a second “color option” for their black-head remover, which was just a pointer to my Amazon Klein bottle listing.  In turn, all my reviews show up on their black-head remover.  The ordinary color of their item costs $12.  The oddball color shows a photo of a Klein bottle and costs $75.  All the reviews are combined on their black-head remover listing, so both “colors” have five-star reviews.  Their main listing shows fiver-star reviews.  But if you read their reviews, you’ll see the black-head device has lots of reviews talking about Klein bottles and mathematics.

  To make their blackhead remover listing look legit, Amvoom then submitted several hundred orders over Amazon, and immediately cancelled each order.  These depleted my Klein bottle inventory on Amazon – even though nothing was paid for, and nothing was shipped.  In turn, this removed the “second color option” for their blackhead-remover, since Amazon felt that the Klein bottles were out of stock.  Result: their black-head remover listing got 199 positive reviews, and the Klein bottle did not show up as a “color choice” in the Amvoom black-head listing.

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Depending on your age, you’ll have zero, one or two questions. What’s a Klein bottle? (This.) Who’s Clifford Stoll? He’s famous for catching a hacker because he spotted a fractional discrepancy in the charges for a time-sharing computer – which tells you how long ago that was. (He also thought the internet was a fad. Ah well..) Now he’s highlighting a different kind of hacking. About time.
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Juul and the business of addiction • The Verge

An interview with Lauren Etter, who has written a book about Juul, a vape maker that rose and then, dramatically, fell:

»

[Juul] launched in 2015, ultimately, and just became the most popular e-cigarette on the market. They marketed it on social media, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter. They sent kind of traveling troupes of these nicotine Juul marketers that handed out free samples at parties, on yachts, in the Hamptons, at raves, and it just became extremely popular.

It became popular among 20-year-olds, and among teenagers as well, middle school and high school students. So that was the moment, as it became just a runaway success, that it attracted the attention of public health regulators, of the FDA, of members of Congress. It just became this huge issue, where Scott Gottlieb, the then-FDA commissioner, called it an epidemic of youth usage. So basically, the company found itself under this incredible scrutiny from every angle. And at the same time, the traditional tobacco industry had also been trying to innovate on cigarettes, their declining business. The cigarette had been in decline for decades. Everybody agreed that the business was only going to continue to decline as people realized the adverse health effects of smoking, and it was not as cool to smoke cigarettes anymore.

And so as big tobacco tries to innovate, they cannot out-innovate Silicon Valley. So at the end of the day, Altria, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, decides to invest in Juul. In my book, I write that was the moment the glass shattered for Juul. It just attracted so much scrutiny, because all of these years, the founders of Juul had been saying, “We are the anti-cigarette. We’re going to kill the cigarette. We’re going to kill the tobacco industry,” and suddenly they’re in bed with the tobacco industry. That really kind of put them on blast in a new way.

They were under health regulators’ scrutiny, and their valuation, which once stood at $38 billion, was just tumbling quarter after quarter after quarter. And now, there’s been a huge reorganization in the company. They brought in all these new executives, many from the tobacco industry, and they’re essentially fighting for their survival right now. Juul, like every other e-cigarette maker, has submitted an application to the FDA, and now the FDA has to determine whether or not it’s in the public health’s interest to allow this product to continue to be marketed.

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It’s not quite Bad Blood (about Theranos) but it certainly shows that the tobacco industry is the kiss of death.
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Heaven or high water • Popula

In 2019 Sarah Miller decided to see whether estate agents in Miami Beach would discuss how the sea level rise was going to affect property prices, and pretended to be a buyer:

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[The estate agent] gestured at the unusual rainy day, for this time of year, late March. “Usually at night, you will be looking at the best spectacle of a sunset here,” he said. He was framed by Biscayne Bay, and made me think of expensive butter sitting on a blue ceramic dish. I ooohed and ahhed over the view, quite genuinely, because if you don’t think about the fact that it’s filled with thousands of pounds of post-Hot Pilates ceviche poops, Biscayne Bay is breathtaking.

I asked how the flooding was.

“There are pump stations everywhere, and the roads were raised,” he said. “So that’s all been fixed.”

“Fixed,” I said. “Wow. Amazing.”

I asked how the hurricanes were.

He said that because the hurricanes came from the tropics, from the south and this was the west side of Miami Beach, they were not that bad in this neighborhood. “Oh, right,” I said, as if that made any sense.

I asked him if he liked it here. “I love it,” he said. “It is one of the most thriving cities in the country, it’s growing rapidly.” He pointed to a row of buildings in a neighborhood called Edgewater that were all just three years old. “That skyline was all built in the last three years.”

Wow, I said, just in the last three years . . . “They’re not worried about sea level rise?”

“It’s definitely something the city is trying to combat. They are fighting it, by raising everything. But so far, it hasn’t been an issue.”

I couldn’t wait to steal this line, slightly altered. “I am afraid of dying, sure, but so far, it hasn’t been an issue.”

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YouTube TV launches 4K and offline downloads today, but they don’t come cheap • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

YouTube TV is today revealing more details about two anticipated new features: 4K playback and offline downloads. As it turns out, the service will be bundling them together in a new add-on package it’s calling “4K Plus.” There’s no getting one without the other.

4K Plus is available starting today and will cost an extra $19.99 per month on top of the standard $64.99 YouTube TV subscription. That sounds awfully expensive, but at least there’s this: customers will receive a free one-month trial — and if you sign up early, 4K Plus will be discounted to $9.99 each month for the first year. That’s easier to swallow than $20, but you’ll eventually be shifted over to the full price once that initial promotion expires. So for the first year, you’re looking at a $75 monthly bill, and $85 if you keep 4K Plus after that. Add in taxes and fees and, well, ouch.

For now, offline downloads will likely be a bigger deal for many customers than 4K streaming. Outside of select sporting events, there’s still a dearth of 4K content on network and cable TV.

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That is super-expensive, especially given that there are tons of free YouTube download tools. YouTube is gradually turning into an American cable channel, the thing it was going to replace.
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He thought he could outfox the gig economy. He was wrong • WIRED

Lauren Smiley:

»

Jeffrey Fang, Doordash delivery guy, knows you judge his parenting skills, and he’ll join in your condemnation in a moment. He’ll explain that bringing his kids along on his Saturday night shift “made sense, until it didn’t,” and that in hindsight, he understands that it really, really didn’t. But right now, on the night of February 6, he’s not thinking clearly, and you’ll have to excuse him as he sprints pell-mell down a promenade of swank homes after the thief who just stole his phone.

He sees the thief dive into the back seat of a silver sedan, and as the car accelerates Fang keeps running alongside and grabs the passenger door handle—less DoorDash Dad than some kind of bespectacled Jason Bourne. The phone, you see, is his “moneymaking tool”; it’s how he feeds his family. But each stride is taking him farther from his unlocked Honda Odyssey minivan, parked illegally, engine humming, in a driveway where he was making a delivery, with precious cargo in the back seat.

His kids.

«

This (via John Naughton) is not a short read, but it will tell you everything you could ever need to know about life spent ducking and diving in the gig economy. It would look just as good in the New Yorker (a stablemate): a comprehensive, written-through piece about what life near the bottom of the sediment of American life is like.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An Israeli company is producing “industrial cultured” meat, but it might be a while before it can meet even modest demands. CC-licensed photo by Isriya Paireepairit 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. Unlocked down. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Intel delays new chip in first setback for new CEO Gelsinger’s turnaround effort • WSJ

Asa Fitch:

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Chip maker Intel is delaying production of one of its newest chips to improve performance, the first significant product setback under new Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger as he seeks to rebuild the company’s competitiveness.

Intel now is planning to start producing the next generation of central processing units for servers—the brains of those machines—in early 2022 after previously saying it would be ready late this year, Lisa Spelman, the company’s corporate vice president, who manages the server-chip business, said in a Tuesday blog post.

The additional time, Ms. Spelman wrote, would allow Intel to improve the chips’ performance, in particular around the highly prized metrics of data handling and artificial-intelligence processing. Production is now set to begin in next year’s first quarter and ramp up in the second quarter, she wrote.

The delay of the new chips is the first under Mr. Gelsinger, who became chief executive in February following major delays in chip-making advances under his predecessor, Bob Swan. Intel almost a year ago said the following generation of even more advanced chips with super-small transistors wouldn’t be ready until late next year, about a year later than initially expected. 

Mr. Gelsinger has vowed to make Intel more reliable in producing new chips. At his first shareholder meeting as the company’s CEO in May, he said Intel was aiming to deliver a “steady cadence of leadership products that our customers can depend upon.”

The server-chip market is one of the largest, fastest-growing and most competitive in chip-making. Intel generated $5.6bn in revenue from its data-center business in the first quarter, roughly a quarter of all sales.

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“Ramp up in the second quarter” probably means “volume production in the third quarter” and “appearing in machines that are sold in the fourth quarter”. Intel’s a long way behind the game in this, and AMD isn’t going away. Plus companies like Google, which uses a lot of server chips, might find it useful to have its own chip team which could develop ARM-based chips for its colossal number of servers. Oh, Google does have its own chip team working on ARM-based chips? How interesting. And Amazon..?
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Big iPads, Apple car changes, Amazon AR glasses: inside big tech labs • Bloomberg

Marg Gurman:

»

You’re reading Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter. Sign up here to get the inside scoop on the latest gadgets and product reviews in your inbox weekly.

This week: Apple explores larger iPads and reshuffles its car team, Amazon eyes augmented reality, and Peloton takes on the Apple Watch.

Hey everyone! Welcome to Power On, a weekly newsletter where I’m going to write about my passions—Apple, new devices and Silicon Valley secrets—with the occasional riff about my non-work obsession, the NBA. This is the inaugural edition, and be warned, I’m just getting over the Lakers playoffs loss.

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I had ignored this, but as John Gruber points out the newsletter format frees Gurman from the stilted language of formal Bloomberg articles. Instead, he can just write sentences like

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I’m told that Apple has engineers and designers exploring larger iPads that could hit stores a couple of years down the road at the earliest.

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Which is how it would appear in any publication that wasn’t obsessed with some bizarre faux objectivity. And Gurman is well connected, so the newsletter is good value.
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Walmart rolls out a cheaper insulin • Gizmodo

Shoshana Wodinsky:

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Insulin is expensive. Really expensive. Like hundreds-of-dollars per vial expensive. Expensive enough that some diabetes patients can’t afford their monthly dose. And now Walmart, of all companies, is stepping in to make the drug a bit more affordable.

The retailer announced on Tuesday that it would be rolling out a budget version of analog insulin under its ReliOn label to adults and children with a prescription for the drug. Per Walmart’s announcement, these private-label insulin vials will be available for about $73 each—and pre-filled FlexPen needles for about $86 each—at any Walmart pharmacy starting this week, with a wider rollout to Sam’s Club pharmacies planned for mid-July. Considering how vials can cost anywhere between $150 to nearly $400 a pop, this could provide some relief for Americans.

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This is a modern insulin (you can buy a cheap, less effective form for less). Still a ridiculous price, but less ridiculous than it was. Maybe those biohackers we heard about yesterday won’t have to bother after all.
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Exclusive: Apple making employees wear police-grade body cams in response to leaks • FrontPageTech.com

Corina Garcia:

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For the first time ever reported, Apple is making some of its employees wear what we were told were “police-grade” body cameras similar to the #1 law enforcement camera, the Axon Body 2. “Similar,” if not the same.

As a response to an ever-expanding Apple leak culture, and staying true to their brand, the company has taken this new dramatic step to ensure that its hardware trade secrets stay out of the hands of leakers like our very own, Jon Prosser.

I say “new,” but according to our sources, Apple has been rolling out this compliance to their teams for at least the last few weeks. To clarify, specific Apple teams only. Not all Apple employees are being made to wear the sophisticated tech.

This falls in line with the company’s latest stint to target well known Apple leakers like Kang, on the popular Chinese microblogging website Weibo, and even concept artists like Concept Creator, Jermaine. An exceptionally talented concept artist we’ve personally worked with in the past.

That’s great and all, except…Apple’s effort to arm its employees with police-grade body cams, effectively warning them about leaking…got leaked. We leaked it. This is that. The leaking of the warning to Apple employees not to leak.

«

But which employees, exactly? Security guards? (Which seems likely.) They don’t know, but it makes an arresting headline. Or, of course, it could be a planted story which they’re using to flush out a leaker.
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Hackers exploited 0-day, not 2018 bug, to mass-wipe My Book Live devices • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Last week’s mass-wiping of Western Digital My Book Live storage devices involved the exploitation of not just one vulnerability but also a second critical security bug that allowed hackers to remotely perform a factory reset without a password, an investigation shows.

The vulnerability is remarkable because it made it trivial to wipe what is likely petabytes of user data. More notable still was that, according to the vulnerable code itself, a Western Digital developer actively removed code that required a valid user password before allowing factory resets to proceed.

The undocumented vulnerability resided in a file aptly named system_factory_restore. It contains a PHP script that performs resets, allowing users to restore all default configurations and wipe all data stored on the devices.

Normally, and for good reason, factory resets require the person making the request to provide a user password. This authentication ensures that devices exposed to the Internet can only be reset by the legitimate owner and not by a malicious hacker.

As the following script shows, however, a Western Digital developer created five lines of code to password-protect the reset command. For unknown reasons, the authentication check was cancelled, or in developer parlance, it was commented out, as indicated by the double / character at the beginning of each line.

function post($urlPath, $queryParams = null, $ouputFormat = 'xml') {
// if(!authenticateAsOwner($queryParams))
// {
// header("HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized");
// return;
// }


“The vendor commenting out the authentication in the system restore endpoint really doesn’t make things look good for them,” HD Moore, a security expert and the CEO of network discovery platform Rumble, told Ars. “It’s like they intentionally enabled the bypass.”

«

It’s like they put test code used so they wouldn’t have to authenticate endlessly (more precisely, production code downgraded for test purposes) into production without having any regression tests, which doesn’t say anything good about WD’s internal systems.
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Where there’s a grille: the hidden portals to London’s underworld • The Guardian

Oliver Wainwright:

»

A gas lamp still flickers on the corner of Carting Lane in the City of Westminster, adding a touch of Dickensian charm to this sloping alleyway around the back of the Savoy Hotel. The street used to be nicknamed Farting Lane, not in reference to flatulent diners tumbling out of the five-star establishment, but because of what was powering the streetlamp: noxious gases emanating from the sewer system down below.

The Sewer Gas Destructor Lamp, to give the ingenious device its proper patented name, was invented by Birmingham engineer Joseph Webb in 1895, and it still serves the same purpose today. As a plaque explains, it burns off residual biogas from Joseph Bazalgette’s great Victorian sewer, which runs beneath the Victoria Embankment at the bottom of the lane. It is the last surviving sewer-powered streetlamp in London, but it is one of many such curious vents, shafts and funnels scattered across the city, servicing the capital’s underground workings in all manner of unlikely disguises, now brought together in a fascinating gazetteer, titled Inventive Vents.

“We were led to the topic by Eduardo Paolozzi,” says Judy Ovens, cofounder of Our Hut, the architectural education charity behind the project. “We had always admired his robotic metal sculpture in Pimlico, but never realised it was actually designed as a ventilation shaft for an underground car park.”

Paolozzi’s striking metallic totem pole set the team, and their army of volunteers, off on a subterranean treasure hunt. Listening for unusual hums emanating from statue plinths, looking out for wisps of steam rising from kiosk rooftops, and consulting engineers’ maps, they have charted a plethora of hidden portals to the secret worlds that rumble away below the streets of the capital, compiled using the Layers of London website.

«

Amazing archaeology that you can conduct right now in the modern world.
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Oklo planning nuclear micro-reactors that run off nuclear waste • CNBC

Catherine Clifford:

»

Oklo will build reactors “far smaller” than the ones TerraPower is building. TerraPower’s main nuclear reactor, the Natrium, will have a capacity of 345 megawatts of electrical energy (MWe), where the first Oklo reactor, called the Aurora, is expected to have a capacity of 1.5 MWe, making it a true micro-reactor. A 2019 report prepared by the Nuclear Energy Institute defined micro-reactors to be between one and 10 MWe. Other companies in the space include Elysium Industries, General Atomics, HolosGen, NuGen and X-energy, to name a few.

Oklo plans to own and operate these micro-reactors, Cochran said, and customers could include utility companies, industrial sites, large companies, and college and university campuses, DeWitt said.

“Today’s large reactors fit the bill to meet city-scale demand for clean electricity,” Jonathan Cobb, senior analyst at the World Nuclear Association, told CNBC. “But smaller reactors will be able to supply low-carbon electricity and heat to remote regions and other situations where gigawatt-scale capacities would be too much.”

Because of their small size, micro-reactors are faster to build than conventional reactors. “Less than a year to construct the powerhouse is a conservative estimate,” Cochran told CNBC.

«

Except.. they’re “fast reactors” which breed fuel from spent fuel, which can be considered a proliferation risk. However, I think this is more likely to succeed than our next offering…
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Inside Neeva, the ad-free, privacy-first search engine from ex-Googlers • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

about 30% of the roughly 60-person staff they’ve assembled at Neeva consists of ex-Googlers, including Hall-of-Famers such as Udi Manber (a former head of Google search) and Darin Fisher (one of the inventors of Chrome). They’ve also secured $77.5 million in funding, including investments from venture-capital titans Greylock and Sequoia.

At its highest level, Neeva represents a bet that the way Google monetizes search and other services through advertising—as it’s done for more than two decades to wildly profitable effect—has hampered its user experience, thereby opening up an opportunity. “I tell people that Neeva is as much a social experiment as it is a technological experiment,” says Ramaswamy, the company’s CEO. “It’s looking for the answer to the question, ‘If there was a high-quality product that clearly benefits you in multiple ways, would you pay for it as opposed to having it be free, supported by ads?’”

Whatever the answer to that question, Neeva’s creators understand what they’re getting into. “Sridhar and Vivek, with their depth of knowledge on everything from technology to what people actually need and do, are probably the only people in the world where I would go, ‘Okay, I’ll go on this journey with you, because you know how to go on this journey,’” says Greylock partner and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman.

(Which is not to say there aren’t other ambitious privacy-centric search engines on journeys at least somewhat similar to Neeva’s. DuckDuckGo has been on its own for 13 years; once a one-man operation, it now has 129 employees and $100m in annual revenue from ads that don’t involve tracking individual users. And Brave, the browser company founded by web pioneer Brendan Eich, is beta-testing its own privacy-first search engine and says free and for-pay versions will be available.)

«

McCracken can’t say it, of course, but zero chance any appreciable number of people will sign up for this. The idea that you might segment the market for search into premium, valuable payers and cheaper payers as Apple has for phones just doesn’t wash. How many months before they pivot into something that works with personal data?
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Future Meat Technologies launches world’s first industrial cultured meat production facility • PR Newswire

Future Meat Technologies:

»

 Future Meat Technologies, an industry-leading company developing innovative technology to produce cultured meat, has opened the world’s first industrial cultured meat facility. With the capability to produce 500 kilograms of cultured products a day, equivalent to 5,000 hamburgers, this facility makes scalable cell-based meat production a reality.

“This facility opening marks a huge step in Future Meat Technologies’ path to market, serving as a critical enabler to bring our products to shelves by 2022,” says Rom Kshuk, CEO of Future Meat Technologies. “Having a running industrial line accelerates key processes such as regulation and product development.”

Currently, the facility can produce cultured chicken, pork and lamb, without the use of animal serum or genetic modification (non-GMO) with the production of beef coming soon. Future Meat Technologies’ unique platform enables fast production cycles, about 20-times faster than traditional animal agriculture.  

“After demonstrating that cultured meat can reach cost parity faster than the market anticipated, this production facility is the real game-changer,” says Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientific officer of Future Meat Technologies. “This facility demonstrates our proprietary media rejuvenation technology in scale, allowing us to reach production densities 10 times higher than the industrial standard. Our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone, while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations.”

The facility further supports Future Meat Technologies’ larger efforts to create a more sustainable future. The company’s cruelty-free production process is expected to generate 80% less greenhouse emissions and use 99% less land and 96% less freshwater than traditional meat production.

«

OK, but that’s a drop in the ocean. McDonald’s sells about 6.5m burgers per day across 39,140 restaurants, or 1,660 burgers on average per franchise. As with everything technological, the question is: will it scale? Notice there’s no mention of price here either.
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Now on sale: Social Warming, my latest book.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A group of (American) biohackers reckon they can make insulin in quantity, cheaply. But can they really? CC-licensed photo by Sprogz 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. Hot in here? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why biologists like Carl Bergstrom are warning that social media is a risk to humanity • Vox

Shirin Ghaffary:

»

Social media has drastically restructured the way we communicate in an incredibly short period of time. We can discover, “Like,” click on, and share information faster than ever before, guided by algorithms most of us don’t quite understand.

And while some social scientists, journalists, and activists have been raising concerns about how this is affecting our democracy, mental health, and relationships, we haven’t seen biologists and ecologists weighing in as much.

That’s changed with a new paper published in the prestigious science journal PNAS earlier this month, titled “Stewardship of global collective behavior.”

Seventeen researchers who specialize in widely different fields, from climate science to philosophy, make the case that academics should treat the study of technology’s large-scale impact on society as a “crisis discipline.” A crisis discipline is a field in which scientists across different fields work quickly to address an urgent societal problem — like how conservation biology tries to protect endangered species or climate science research aims to stop global warming.

The paper argues that our lack of understanding about the collective behavioral effects of new technology is a danger to democracy and scientific progress. For example, the paper says that tech companies have “fumbled their way through the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, unable to stem the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation” that has hindered widespread acceptance of masks and vaccines. The authors warn that if left misunderstood and unchecked, we could see unintended consequences of new technology contributing to phenomena such as “election tampering, disease, violent extremism, famine, racism, and war.”

«

There’s an interview with Carl Bergstrom, who is a smart presence on Twitter. They’ve independently pointed to the same things that I do in Social Warming.

Or you can look at the latest XKCD.
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Good news: Google no longer requires publishers to use the AMP format. Bad news: what replaces it might be worse • The Register

Scott Gilbertson:

»

Programmers hate HTML. It’s messy, vague, imprecise, and user agents must deal with that, which is a huge pain for programmers. It’s a valid criticism in many ways, but it also misses the fact that these are exactly the qualities that have enabled millions of people to use HTML. It’s messy, vague, imprecise, and perfect for creating the web. What’s more, it is developed very slowly, by many people, representing many points of view, many needs. AMP is a set of programming guidelines shoved down your throat by Google.

The third problem with AMP is that it disrupts the web’s decentralised design. This is really an outgrowth of the two things, but important in its own right when we start considering Google AMP’s ostensible replacement, “Core Web Vitals.”

Decentralisation means that no one entity controls web content. With AMP, Google gets total control of the content. Google hosts it, and Google alone knows who visits it.

The final point is either ironic or, if you lean towards conspiracy, proof that Google knows exactly what it’s doing here – namely, locking up content where Google can control it and mine users for data. Are you ready for it? Google AMP pages aren’t any faster than regular HTML pages. Worse, they’re often slower. Nope, not kidding. When AMP pages are faster, it’s because Google is pre-loading them, which Google could do for any page on the web.

Still, getting a spot in the Top News carousel of Google News is a powerful carrot, and it worked. Nearly every major publisher on the web (including this one) publishes AMP versions of their pages.

Now AMP is no longer required of publishers, those of us shouting about how this is bad can just shut up now, right?

Unfortunately, there are problems with AMP’s replacement as well. And those problems go right back to what was wrong with AMP in the first place: Google is in charge of it.

«

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An announcement about the comment section • In the Pipeline: Science Magazine

Derek Lowe:

»

Not too many people come in blazing with ad hominem attacks about someone else’s opinions on mass spectrometry, cellular counterscreening assays, or the other sorts of things that have made up the bulk of the postings here.

The pandemic changed that. The readership here increased, but that’s not the main problem by itself. I’m sure that many people will drift off – or already have started drifting off – as this site stops becoming a daily stop for coronavirus news and commentary. Some will stay around, and I’m happy to have them. But – and you know where this is going – there have also been several commentators here who have for some time been abusing this site’s hospitality. I have mentioned to these people that they don’t have to be here, that starting constant wrangling arguments about vaccines, pandemic statistics, etc. in the comments section does not have to be a regular feature of their day. No one’s taken the hint. I’ve also been hoping that these folks would just go away on their own, as fewer and fewer coronavirus posts get written, but that’s not happening very smoothly, either. I will still be writing about the pandemic from time to time, naturally, which sets things off again. And even the posts that aren’t on that topic tend to get their comments sections diverted all too quickly.

So after much thought, here’s what’s going to happen. Longtime readers will know that I have kept a very light hand on the comments here over the years, but starting today I will be deleting whatever I feel are tendentious comments meant to keep the coronavirus arguments going. I’ve actually canned a good number of comments over the last few months that are full of outright misinformation, and I’m going to lower my cutoff for that stuff, too. Complaints about censorship, freedom of expression, and so on will be allowed to stay up on this post, but only this one. I’ll be deleting those as well if they show up in the comments to other posts, and after an interval the comments to this post will be closed as well. Update: my job will be easier if people refrain from responding to obvious troll comments before I can get to them.

To the people who have been abusing the system: you are of course free to have your own opinions, and you are free to express them on your own site or anywhere else that will have you, but this is a warning notice. Do what you like but don’t do it here.

«

As you’d expect. It’s Gresham’s Law applied to comments, as ever.
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SafeDollar ‘stablecoin’ drops to $0 following $248,000 DeFi exploit on Polygon

Liam Frost:

»

The price of SafeDollar (SDO), an algorithmic decentralized finance (DeFi) stablecoin based on the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain, has plummeted to literally zero as a result of what appears to be an exploit today.

While details are yet scarce, block explorer Polygonscan shows that 202,000 USDC and 46,000 USDT stablecoins were suddenly drained from SDO’s smart contract today—worth around $248,000 in total.

As a result, SafeDollar’s price—which was supposed to always be equal to $1 since it’s a stablecoin—has plummeted to zero, according to the protocol’s own website.

Stablecoins are a special type of cryptocurrency tokens that are pegged to certain fiat currencies, usually the US dollar. They are designed to always retain the value of their corresponding assets and—in theory—should always be tradeable or redeemable in a one-to-one ratio.

In SafeDollar’s case, the stablecoin uses a combination of “unique features of seigniorage, deflation protocol and synthetic assets” as its basis.

The attack was also confirmed in a Telegram channel called “SafeDollar Announcements” today, with developers urging users to stop all operations with SDO and ostensibly promising to come up with a compensation plan in the future.

“SafeDollar has been under attack. We have paused activities on SafeDollar and investigating the matter. IMPORTANT: PLEASE STOP ALL TRADING RELATED TO $SDO. We will announce the post-mortem after the investigation done with compensation plan for Liquidity Providers,” said the announcement.

Notably, this is not even the first time SDO was exploited. Just a week ago, SafeDollar developers published a “Postmortem Analysis” about an exploit that resulted in the loss of the protocol’s 9,959 SDS tokens—worth around $95,000 at the time.

«

Still, at least they can’t lose any more actual money through being exploited again. “Smart contracts” seem to be anything but.
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Biohackers figure out how to make insulin 98% cheaper • Freethink

Jack Berning on attempts to route around the US’s crazy pricing for insulin:

»

A group of dedicated biohackers believes that making insulin more accessible requires taking the monopoly away from the big three pharmaceutical companies that produce it. So they’ve started the Open Insulin Foundation, a non-profit with plans to develop the world’s first open-source insulin production model.

The team consists of dozens of volunteers led by founder Anthony DiFranco, a type I diabetic. They’re now able to produce the [genetically engineered] microorganisms needed for insulin with a bioreactor. They’re also working to develop equipment that can purify the proteins produced by the bioreactor.

With open-source hardware equivalent to proprietary bioreactors, the foundation hopes to give labs across the world access to the equipment needed to produce the insulin protein on a small scale.

“Very few people really have any concrete ideas about how to solve these problems,” says DiFranco. “At the level of the technical fundamentals, it’s clear that we can do this. And if we can, we must.”

But the process hasn’t been easy. For six years, DiFranco’s team has attempted to reverse-engineer the production of insulin with volunteer-led experiments at their community labs in cities like Oakland, Baltimore, and Sunnyvale, CA.

Today, they’re beginning to see hopeful signs of a major breakthrough — like getting an FDA-approved protocol for making injectables. The team estimates that costs will be 98% cheaper than big pharma, reaching prices as low as $5-15 per vial. The best part? They’re willing to give away their plans for how to make insulin for free.

«

Not really much use, unless someone has their own bioreactor, and that’s more likely to go wrong than right. It’s really not like brewing beer.

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Judge dismisses FTC and state antitrust complaints against Facebook • CNBC

Salvador Rodriguez:

»

The FTC sued the company last December, alongside attorneys general from 48 states, arguing that Facebook engaged engaged in a systematic strategy to eliminate threats to its monopoly, including the 2012 and 2014 acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, respectively, which the FTC previously cleared. 

However, the court ruled Monday said the FTC failed to prove its main contention, and the cornerstone of the case: That Facebook holds monopoly power in the US personal social networking market.

“Although the Court does not agree with all of Facebook’s contentions here, it ultimately concurs that the agency’s Complaint is legally insufficient and must therefore be dismissed,” reads the filing from US District Court for the District of Columbia. “The FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims – namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services.”

The court found the FTC did not provide enough detailed data to prove Facebook has market power in the loosely defined market for personal social networking services.

“The Complaint is undoubtedly light on specific factual allegations regarding consumer-switching preferences,” the court wrote. “These allegations – which do not even provide an estimated actual figure or range for Facebook’s market share at any point over the past ten years – ultimately fall short of plausibly establishing that Facebook holds market power.”

«

That really is a colossal failure on the FTC’s part. “Wait, I thought you were putting in the numbers in the introduction that would establish market dominance!” Could have just used the Pew Internet page on it. (69% of American adults use Facebook. Of those, 70% (or 48% of all adults) say they use it daily.

Possibly related: Facebook’s market capitalisation hit $1 trillion post-judgement.
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The Big Tech business model poses a threat to democracy • Global Witness

The team at Global Witness decided to see what they could do with political ads targeted across Northern Ireland’s flammable social divide:

»

We looked at the potential for stoking divisions and inciting violence along sectarian (Protestant/Catholic) lines in Northern Ireland. When we were devising these ads, tensions in Northern Ireland were increasing, making it a good context in which to test the extent to which Facebook would allow ads that are targeted in a polarising way. 

In fact, not long after Facebook accepted our ads, violence broke out on the streets with masked youths rioting and a bus hijacked and set on fire. We’re not suggesting that religiously-targeted ads contributed to these tensions; we’re demonstrating the harm that could be caused when political ads are targeted to narrow groups. This sort of material has the potential to further inflame tensions and lead to real-world violence, not just in Northern Ireland, but anywhere our differences can be exploited by those who wish to divide us. 

Facebook says that during its ad review process one of the things it checks is how an ad is targeted. Yet they allowed us to target inflammatory political ads across the sectarian divide by: 

• Targeting people in Northern Ireland that Facebook has profiled as having an interest in Protestantism
• Targeting people in Northern Ireland that Facebook has profiled as having an interest in the Catholic Church
• Targeting people living on the predominantly Catholic Falls Road side of the peace wall in west Belfast by using postcode targeting
• Targeting people living on the predominantly Protestant Shankill Road side of the peace wall in west Belfast by using postcode targeting

In the wrong hands, there’s a lot of damage that can be done by ads targeted in this kind of way – they’re perfect for inflaming tensions.

«

Again, the problem with Facebook is that it’s just not sensitive enough to the way its platform can be misused. Its argument for allowing political ads is that it lets small politicians compete with big ones. But in countries which limit election spending more seriously than the US, the limit is easily reached with standard media.
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Windows 11 will create heaps of needless trash • NBailey

Noah Bailey:

»

The latest announcements for Windows 11 have revealed that the next version of the Windows operating system will have very stringent hardware requirements. Some of them are, in my opinion, quite reasonable. For example, they’re finally dropping support for 32 bit X86 and legacy BIOS boot. These make sense, because almost every PC manufactured since 2011 has supported X64 and UEFI. It also sheds a substantial amount of technical debt and cruft, and simplifies the system slightly. Those are good things, and make sense from a technical perspective.

Even the very controversial TPM requirement could maybe make sense. If Microsoft truly believes that encrypting your drive is going to stop Moldovan teenagers from hitting your PC with ransomware, maybe a TPM is the solution. After all, security is all about feelings rather than safety. If “encryption at rest” makes consumers feel at ease, so be it.

Alas, the truly problematic requirement for Windows 11 is that it will create an unbelievable amount of electronic waste because of its arbitrary CPU specs.

A modest Intel Skylake laptop from 2016 meets all the core requirements. It is 64 bit, supports UEFI, and even contains a hardware TPM 2.0 module on board. Practically nothing has changed in five years when it comes to PCs and laptops, aside from power consumption and battery life. And if Microsoft gets their way, that machine is going straight in the trash.

«

It would be useful to see some sort of analysis of what proportion of PCs now in use will be able to run this. Though of course, they’ll still run Windows 10 just fine, and that will be supported with security patches etc until at least 2025.
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An algorithm that predicts deadly infections is often flawed • WIRED

Tom Simonite:

»

A complication of infection known as sepsis is the number one killer in US hospitals. So it’s not surprising that more than 100 health systems use an early warning system offered by Epic Systems, the dominant provider of US electronic health records. The system throws up alerts based on a proprietary formula tirelessly watching for signs of the condition in a patient’s test results.

But a new study using data from nearly 30,000 patients in University of Michigan hospitals suggests Epic’s system performs poorly. The authors say it missed two-thirds of sepsis cases, rarely found cases medical staff did not notice, and frequently issued false alarms.

Karandeep Singh, an assistant professor at University of Michigan who led the study, says the findings illustrate a broader problem with the proprietary algorithms increasingly used in health care. “They’re very widely used, and yet there’s very little published on these models,” Singh says. “To me that’s shocking.”

The study was published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. An Epic spokesperson disputed the study’s conclusions, saying the company’s system has “helped clinicians save thousands of lives.”

Epic’s is not the first widely used health algorithm to trigger concerns that technology supposed to improve health care is not delivering, or even actively harmful.

«

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The problem with the political wife is she knows you’re not Master of the Universe • Daily Mail Online

Sarah Vine (who is the wife of disappointed Tory leadership hopeful and current Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove):

»

[Samantha Cameron] made sure [PM and husband David] cooked, took care of the children, did his fair share. She never allowed the job to consume him, and she certainly never allowed it to consume her. And when she had had enough of living in the fishbowl, they left.

Yes, he resigned over Brexit but in truth the decision to leave No 10 had already been made. And it was, in large part, hers.

Of course, there are many who would argue that Cameron’s ability to switch off – his famous ‘chillaxing’ – made him a less effective politician, and I’m sure in some ways they would be right. But it also depends on what you want from a leader: someone who prioritises power at all costs – or someone who has a wider set of interests.

The other problem with top-level politics is that, inevitably, you start to believe your own hype.

Ministers are surrounded by people telling them how brilliant they are. Their departments treat them like feudal barons. Their every whim is treated as law. No one ever says No to them. They certainly don’t get asked to unload the dishwasher. And after a while, it changes them. It becomes increasingly difficult for anything to compete with the adrenaline of power.

How can anyone be expected to put the bins out when they’ve just got home from a day saving the world? Domestic life can seem dull and dispiriting by comparison. And so they begin to avoid it. So much easier to stay late or say Yes to a fundraiser, or show your support at a fellow MP’s drinks party.

Westminster is a place of myriad distractions for the politician seeking refuge from his or her home life.

«

I found this piece, and its analysis of how a divide grows between the non-political wife and the very political husband, insightful for what it tells us about Matt Hancock – who last Thursday told his wife of 15 years (and three children) he was leaving her. He forbade the children from using social media. I wonder if they’ll stick to that.
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You can order Social Warming, my new book.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In London’s Oxford Street, you can find a lot of shops selling American sweets. But why? CC-licensed photo by byronv2 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

You can order Social Warming, now in print! Also in ebook and audiobook formats.

The Chinese content farms behind Factory TikTok • Rest of World

Andrew Deck on the “factory” videos that are so popular on the viral video platform:

»

Across dozens of short-form video apps available in China, this type of labour content has become widely popular. Produced not only by factory workers, but also traditional craftsmen and agriculturalists, it usually caters to the curiosities of middle-class urbanites, who Wang argues are alienated from the labor that goes into their everyday purchases — whether a cosmetic cream, a pack of tissues, or a new pair of sneakers.  “We don’t know where [these things] come from, it is just presented to us as the perfect industrial product. But now we see the process, and because you see the human labor, it is no longer a cold product,” Wang said. “That is the reason it went viral among middle-class people who know nothing about industry.”

But when you visit the comment section of Factory TikTok, you won’t find messages from middle-class users in cities like Guangzhou — TikTok isn’t accessible in Chinese app stores. Instead, there are often messages from people who speak a wide array of different languages, like English, German, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, and Russian. The videos, set to trendy song clips, feel as if they’ve been manufactured to go viral in as many markets as possible. While many of the videos mimic the aesthetics used by amateur factory workers, some digging into their origins revealed that Factory TikTok doesn’t fit neatly into the same domestic social media trend in China. Instead, it’s part of a larger business enterprise.

Look closely at many of these clips, and hints emerge that corporate actors are hiding in plain sight. Some factories directly promote the goods they make, like the account run by a silicone factory, which links to an AliExpress page selling the fidget toys it produces. Other accounts publish content entirely unrelated to the products they list for sale. One went viral for a series of clips depicting a man injecting stuffed animals with polyester fiberfill, which were spun off into a subgenre of reaction videos and memes. The link in the account bio, however, briefly led to an e-commerce shop called Moda Island, which sells knockoff designer bags under a Swedish domain name. (The link has since disappeared.)

«

China’s hubbub often feels like the insistent background roar of the internet, insisting that if you aren’t keeping up, you’re falling behind.
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The facts – and gaps – on the origin of the coronavirus • FactCheck.org

Jessica McDonald:

»

Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist who studies viruses at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the lead author of the letter in Science calling for a more rigorous investigation, told us in an email that he found natural zoonosis and lab accident scenarios involving a researcher being infected with a “natural collected virus” or “experimenting on and possibly growing or modestly modifying a naturally collected virus” all plausible.

“I don’t think there is sufficient evidence to estimate relative probabilities for these scenarios,” he said.

But to many others, the existing data tilts strongly toward a natural spillover.

“[W]hile both lab and natural scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely — precedence, data and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative hypothesis based on conjecture,” Kristian G. Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, told the New York Times.

“There are still gaps that have to be filled, but I think the evidence we do have right now points to an animal-to-human scenario,” Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah who has studied coronaviruses for most of the last decade, told us.

We’ll run through some of the arguments of the lab leak hypothesis and explain why most scientists still suspect a natural origin.

«

This is really, really, really the best piece that I’ve read on the whole topic. If you’re trying to understand the warring (more than competing) hypotheses around this, then McDonald’s is the one to read. You can also read Zeynep Tufekci’s piece in the NY Times, but it’s slightly less informed than McDonald, who has the better contacts. Tufekci’s piece makes the important points about the need for better biosecurity. But that’s going to be the case no matter what.
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The inner life of the cell – protein packing [Narrated] [HD] • YouTube

David Franco:

»

Protein Packing strives to more accurately depict the molecular chaos in each and every cell, with proteins jittering around in what may seem like random motion. Proteins occupy roughly 40% of the cytoplasm, creating an environment that risks unintentional interaction and aggregation. Via diffusion and motor protein transport, these molecules are directed to sites where they are needed.

«

Included because there is a lot of talk about cells and proteins at the moment, of course, and has been for the past 18 months. But what is generally not appreciated is how crowded cells are. The idea that they’re big wastelands of nothing much turns out to be totally wrong. They’re incredibly crowded. This video gives an indication; for another, see this paper and just scroll to Figure 7, which gives a “here’s what it looks like” view of the protein packing in the cell. It’s like what the London Underground used to look like at peak rush hour.
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Collapsed building near Miami had serious concrete damage • The New York Times

Mike Baker, Anjali Singhvi and Patricia Mazzei:

»

Three years before the deadly collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium complex near Miami, a consultant found alarming evidence of “major structural damage” to the concrete slab below the pool deck and “abundant” cracking and crumbling of the columns, beams and walls of the parking garage under the 13-story building.

The engineer’s report helped shape plans for a multimillion-dollar repair project that was set to get underway soon — more than two and a half years after the building managers were warned — but the building suffered a catastrophic collapse in the middle of the night on Thursday, crushing sleeping residents in a massive heap of debris.

The complex’s management association had disclosed some of the problems in the wake of the collapse, but it was not until city officials released the 2018 report late Friday that the full nature of the concrete and rebar damage — most of it probably caused by persistent water leaks and years of exposure to the corrosive salt air along the South Florida coast — became chillingly apparent.

“Though some of this damage is minor, most of the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired in a timely fashion,” the consultant, Frank Morabito, wrote about damage near the base of the structure as part of his October 2018 report on the 40-year-old building in Surfside, Fla. He gave no indication that the structure was at risk of collapse, though he noted that the needed repairs would be aimed at “maintaining the structural integrity” of the building and its 136 units.

«

A lawyer for the condo residents says he can’t understand why repairs didn’t start at once. Two obvious answers: it would cost a lot of money while being very disruptive, and the report is written in the passive official-ish language that doesn’t transmit urgency at all. Reinforced concrete is always a problem: if it’s sitting in water, that will rust the reinforcing iron, but invisibly. It’s quite the metaphor for America’s crumbling infrastructure (for which a huge bill is struggling to get through the US Congress for lack of bipartisan backing, apparently).
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Microsoft’s Android app plan for Windows 11 is doomed • PC Mag

Sascha Segan:

»

In a perplexing swerve, the new Windows 11 is going to run Android apps out of the box, integrating Amazon’s Android app store into Microsoft’s onboard app store. I have been running Windows since 1998 and running Android since the T-Mobile G1, and this seems like a half-fast [half-assed? Ed.] plan doomed to fail.

There are reasons to run Android apps on Windows. Specifically, some popular Android messaging and social-media apps (such as TikTok) don’t have native Windows versions. It may smooth your work- or life-flow to be able to interact with all of these apps using a physical keyboard and a single device.

But Microsoft can’t get around Google’s absolute, crushing dominance of the Android app world in the US. Although Android is an “open” platform (unlike iOS), nearly every Android phone outside China comes preloaded with Google Play. That makes Google’s app store the default and often the only choice for most Android app developers.

I saw this when reviewing Amazon’s most recent line of Fire tablets. The Fire HD 10 productivity bundle got absolutely slated as app after app wasn’t available on the Amazon Appstore—Signal, Slack, Rome2Rio, Booking.com, Google Sheets, what have you. Those specific apps aren’t a big deal on Windows, which has its own apps or terrific browser-based versions of those services. But when something awesome comes to Android, it often doesn’t come to the Amazon Appstore. At all.

The best possible outcome of this is that the huge new audience of potential Windows users will revitalize the Amazon Appstore and lead app developers to put their products in there. That is a thing that could happen, sure. I wouldn’t put money on that bet.

«

Microsoft keeps trying to make mobile apps on Windows happen, and they keep not happening.
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Amazon and PetCo both invested in a $150 internet-connected cat feeder — one day it just stopped working • Business Insider

Becky Peterson:

»

Allen Sampsell knew something was up when his cats started to act out. Freya, a “chonker” born without a tail, and May, a younger tortoiseshell with all of her appendages, were hungry. Sampsell had no idea how many days or hours the duo had gone without eating.

“My cats very obviously kept acting like they weren’t getting fed,” said Sampsell, who works on an Air Force base near Omaha and travels frequently for his job.

Normally, such daily business as feeding the cats went off without a hitch. For the last few years, Sampsell had used the PetNet SmartFeeder, an $150 Internet of Things device which dropped a set amount of kibble into a feeding bowl based on a schedule set using a smartphone app.

But in spring 2020, the feeder started to go offline. Then PetNet asked for more money. In a letter to customers last May, the company said that anyone who didn’t pay a $30 annual subscription fee would no longer have a working cat feeder.

“I am not even sure if people actually fell for that,” said Sampsell, who opted against the subscription. “And then they folded up shop completely.”

«

This is much the same as the story with Wink, which abruptly pivoted in May 2020 from “smart home router interop” to “subscription for your smart home router interop”. It hasn’t issued a press release for more than four years, though it does at least seem to still be staggering along.
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Revealed: shocking scale of Twitter abuse targeting England at Euro 2020 • The Guardian

Caelainn Barr, Paul MacInnes, Niamh McIntyre and Pamela Duncan:

»

England’s footballers have been subjected to sustained abuse online during their matches at Euro 2020, an exclusive analysis by the Guardian can reveal.

A study of Twitter messages directed at and naming the England team during the three group stage matches identified more than 2,000 abusive messages, including scores of racist posts.

The research, conducted in association with the anti-racist organisation Hope Not Hate, illustrates the shocking levels of hatred, directed by hundreds of individuals at a time, at captain Harry Kane, forward Raheem Sterling, other England players and the manager, Gareth Southgate.

Across England’s three group games against Croatia, Scotland and the Czech Republic the Guardian identified 2,114 abusive tweets directed towards or naming the players and Southgate. This included 44 explicitly racist tweets, with messages using the N-word and monkey emojis directed at black players, and 58 that attacked players for their anti-racist actions, including taking the knee.

With parameters set only for the five hours around a match, there were also examples of antisemitic and ableist abuse, with nationalist messages and more insidious racial content also visible.

«

*whispers* Social warming, innit
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The world relies on one chip maker in Taiwan, leaving everyone vulnerable • WSJ

Yang Jie, Stephanie Yang and Asa Fitch:

»

As more technologies require chips of mind-boggling complexity, more are coming from this one company, on an island that’s a focal point of tensions between the U.S. and China, which claims Taiwan as its own.

Analysts say it will be difficult for other manufacturers to catch up in an industry that requires hefty capital investments. And TSMC can’t make enough chips to satisfy everyone—a fact that has become even clearer amid a global shortage, adding to the chaos of supply bottlenecks, higher prices for consumers and furloughed workers, especially in the auto industry.

The situation is similar in some ways to the world’s past reliance on Middle Eastern oil, with any instability on the island threatening to echo across industries. Companies in Taiwan, including smaller makers, generated about 65% of global revenues for outsourced chip manufacturing during the first quarter of this year, according to Taiwan-based semiconductor research firm TrendForce. TSMC generated 56% of the global revenues.

Being dependent on Taiwanese chips “poses a threat to the global economy,” research firm Capital Economics recently wrote.

TSMC, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, reported $17.6bn in profits last year on revenues of about $45.5bn.

Its technology is so advanced, Capital Economics said, that it now makes around 92% of the world’s most sophisticated chips, which have transistors that are less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Samsung Electronics Co. makes the rest. Most of the roughly 1.4 billion smartphone processors world-wide are made by TSMC.

It makes as much as 60% of the less-sophisticated microcontrollers that car makers need as their vehicles become more automated, according to IHS Markit, a consulting firm.

«

The comparison with reliance on oil is a good one – except this is even less diversified, and also at the mercy of another, potentially aggressive country. To continue the analogy, you need to set up oil wells in lots more countries, particularly in the west, and in a hurry.
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May 2017: The nine worst data visualizations ever created • Living Qlik

Aaron Couron:

»

Every year, the worst movies of the year coming out of Hollywood are “honored” with an award called the Razzie. In an industry that normally pats itself on the back at every turn, the Razzies are a nice way to recognize that not every film churned out of the Hollywood machine is worthy of praise.

In similar fashion, I thought it would be fun to award some of the worst data visualizations coming out of our collective BI industry. Although it is always fun to poke fun at data visualizations that might be lacking in usefulness, it is also an opportunity for us to learn so that we do not make the same mistakes in our own work.

«

OK, but I think that in fact all of those are outdone, in the worst possible way, by the visualisation used here by CNN. Look at it carefully. The worst thing is not, repeat not, the false y-axis, or the lack of attention to margin of error in the numbers. Look at it again, because you’ll howl when you spot what they’ve done to misrepresent the data here.

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Why is central London suddenly full of American sweetshops? • Time Out

Amelia Tait:

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‘We were the first people to have a sweetshop in Oxford Street,’ says Alan Wiggett, managing director of Kingdom of Sweets, from behind an imposing mahogany desk in the company’s Soho offices. Framed pictures of sweets line the walls – an unlit and oddly small neon sign reading ‘Welcome to the Kingdom!!!’ distinguishes an otherwise ordinary kitchen. ‘We’ve had people spend over £1,000 before,’ he says. ‘We’ve had to take a trolley up to their house for them.’

The legend of the Kingdom goes like this: 18 years ago, founder Chase Manders started importing American candy to sell on his pick ’n’ mix stand in a Barnsley shopping centre. Customers went wild for it. By 2012, his Oxford Street shop had opened. Then a further five across London. But, as life got sweeter, along came the spies. In 2018, Kingdom of Sweets employees started to notice people sneaking into their stores and taking photographs of the shelves.

‘They come into the shop and they go off and copy us,’ Wiggett says, adding that staff have had to ‘politely’ ask competitors to leave. Since then, Manders has gone from having the only specialist sweetshop on Oxford Street to being merely one of nine. Many copycats used to be souvenir shops. Before that, some housed perfume ‘auctioneers’ with permanent closing-down sales. Wiggett says it’s affected sales. ‘It’s not a competition,’ says Riya, the manager of American Candy World, which has been open a year and which has an 8,000-piece motorised London Eye in the window (it took a week to build). Standing behind his counter next to a gutted bureau de change, he says that every sweetshop on Oxford Street has enough customers walking past to mean that notions of competition are irrelevant. ‘If they’re passing this way,’ he says, ‘they’ll buy it.’

Perhaps competition is irrelevant when the prices are more gut-wrenching than a tub of pickle-flavoured Pringles. An online review for one Oxford Street shop laments ‘Overpriced! overpriced!! overpriced!!!’ – the reviewer posting a picture of a receipt showing they spent £37 on two bags of crisps, a 99g box of sweets, and a jar of peanut butter. Riya says prices are high because of import fees and says his average customer spends between £25 and £30 on six or seven items. Which raises another question: why are so many people prepared to spend so much money on American sweets, and why now?

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Beware, Apple is now targeting leakers! • Pocketnow

Prakhar Khanna:

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It is being reported that several leakers have received warnings from lawyers representing Apple. One of the tipsters, known as ‘Kang’, posted on their Weibo account that Apple recently commissioned a law firm to send admonitory letters to a number of leakers. As per the posts, the Apple letter purportedly cautioned leakers that they must not disclose information about unreleased Apple projects.

The letter goes on to say that these leaks mislead customers because “what is disclosed may not be accurate.” Further, the leaks might give Apple’s competitors valuable information. Apple purportedly grabbed screenshots of Kang’s Weibo as evidence. The account talked about problems he experienced with the iPhone, product release dates, and purchase suggestions for his followers.

As a result, Kang explained that since “I have never published undisclosed product pictures” or sold his information, Apple must take exception to “riddles and dreams” about its undisclosed projects. For context, a leaker known as “L0vetodream” has popularized leaks vaguely characterized as “dreams.” Thus, providing a fun mechanism to hint at Apple’s future plans without giving a lot of information.

“Dreaming will violate their confidentiality mechanism,” as per Kang. He said that under Apple’s logic “if I have a dream, Apple’s competitors will obtain effective information.”

«

Pretty sure those who receive these could just throw Apple’s letters in the bin. It’s not an offence to find stuff out, not to publish it. Of course it can be an offence to bribe (or blackmail?) an employee of the company to release information, in which case prosecute. But there’s no suggestion that the people who received this stuff did that. And if the information isn’t accurate, Apple can ignore it; or correct it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Just as a followup on last week’s item about Google calling someone a serial killer (wrongly), Terry points out that Google has done similar for a few photos: a little knowledge shows they’re wrong, but most people don’t have that.

Your smart TV wants to know whether you’re watching it. How are you going to respond? CC-licensed photo by rickremington 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 12 links for you. Is that enough? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad?
• Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see?
• How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online?
• What can we do about it?
• Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?

Order Social Warming, my new book, and find answers – and more.

After repeatedly promising not to, Facebook keeps recommending political groups to its users • The Markup

Corin Faife and Alfred Ng:

»

Four days after the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, a member of the “Not My President” Facebook group wrote in a post, “remember, our founding fathers were seen as terrorist [sic] and traitors.” 

A fellow group member commented, “I’ll fight for what’s right, this corruption has to be stopped immediately.” 

Three months later, Facebook recommended the group to at least three people, despite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated promise to permanently end political group recommendations on the social network specifically to stop amplifying divisive content. 

The group was one of hundreds of political groups the company recommended to its users in The Markup’s Citizen Browser project over the past five months, several of which promoted unfounded election fraud claims in their descriptions or through posts on their pages. 

Citizen Browser consists of a paid nationwide panel of Facebook users who automatically send us data from their Facebook feeds. 

In a four month period, from Feb. 1 to June 1, the 2,315 members of the Citizen Browser panel received hundreds of recommendations for groups that promoted political organizations (e.g., “Progressive Democrats of Nevada,” “Michigan Republicans”) or supported individual political figures (e.g., “Bernie Sanders for President 2020,” “Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz,” “Philly for Elizabeth Warren”). In total, just under one-third of all panelists received a recommendation to join at least one group in this category. 

«

Facebook was very sniffy about the Citizen Browser project, but it keeps turning up evidence that Facebook doesn’t do what it promises. (Just try a search on “Facebook ‘citizen browser’“.)
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Are the most influential websites peer-produced or price-incentivized? Organizing value in the digital economy • Alex Pazaitis, Vasilis Kostakis, 2021

»

The overwhelming majority of the most popular websites are owned by for-profit-maximization companies. One cannot argue against that. However, the extent to which they are organized around price-incentives is highly debatable. On one hand, paid professionals work for maintaining and improving these platforms. Moreover, paid professionals produce content that directly or indirectly contributes value to the platforms. In the currently dominant organizational reality, the price incentive is often considered as a feature that determines the design of our organizations. And, as was discussed, the design may qualify some behaviors over others.

On the other hand, one should consider the amount of value that unpaid users contribute to the most popular websites. The voluntary contribution is a form of peer production utilized by companies with the ultimate goal to maximize shareholder value. In addition, a considerable part of the vital infrastructure of the most popular websites is produced in CBPP, whereas price incentives, where present, are still considered peripheral. Finally, price-incentives alone can neither create nor guarantee the complex relations impelling the digital economy. As Bollier (2014: 175) reminds as, “the commons is . . . a sector of the economy (and life!) that generates value in ways that are often taken for granted.” Similarly, the contribution of CBPP in the so-called “digital economy” largely goes unnoticed at the level of scholarly and political discussion that can make a difference.

Measuring how much of website content is price-incentivized or peer-produced gets us already in the wrong direction. Any measurement is not neutral, and, in a market-driven economy, measure of value is only reflected in the exchange of one thing for another.

«

This is an analysis of the Carr-Benkler Wager (don’t worry, there’s a link below), made 15 years ago. That’s long enough ago for something to shake out. In my view, it’s actually a win for Benkler. But see what you think.
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August 2006: What is the Carr-Benkler wager? • The Guardian

Me, a callow youth back in August 2006:

»Though sounding like something out of higher maths it’s much simpler: a bet between two high-profile bloggers about whether in two years (or perhaps five) people will get paid for submitting content to sites like Digg and Flickr.

On the two sides: Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review; and Yochai Benkler, a professor of law at Yale University whose book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, suggests that new types of collaboration let people be more productive than profit-seeking ventures.

Carr, however, thinks the lure of money will prove far more effective in finding top content pickers.

Wrote Carr (at roughtype.com), “the reason ‘social media'”- such as Digg or Reddit – “has existed outside the price system up until now is that a market hadn’t yet emerged for this new kind of labor. We weren’t yet able to assign a value – in monetary terms – to what these workers were doing … We couldn’t see the talent for the crowd. Now, though, the amateurs are being sorted according to their individual skills, calculations as to the monetary value of those skills are starting to be made, and a market appears to be taking shape.”

Benkler then challenged Carr: “We could decide to appoint between one and three people who, on some date – let’s say two years from now, on August 1st 2008 – survey the web or blogosphere, and seek out the most influential sites in some major category: for example, relevance and filtration (like Digg); or visual images (like Flickr). And they will then decide whether they are peer production processes or whether they are price-incentivized systems … I predict the major systems will be primarily peer-based.”

«

Necessary context from the paper above, of course.
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Bad Apple* • The Pull Request

Antonio García Martínez (yes, him):

»

Trendy management philosophy’s love for “bringing your whole self to work,” and somehow conjoining the multitude of an individual’s identities—cultural, artistic, religious, political, sexual—with one’s professional persona is a deranged recipe for endless mayhem. Nobody actually brings their “whole self” to work; if you spoke to your colleagues as you do your partner after sex or your friends after the fifth pint, you’d be sacked from any job even faster than I was.

What’s perhaps most preposterous is that these reality checks need to be forcibly repeated to working adults in some of the cushiest and most prestigious companies in the world. In an absurd follow-on to my situation, not only did Apple employees petition their company to issue a statement about the Israel/Palestine situation—as if having a foreign policy position were germane to a public tech company—but they also petitioned to not have to go back to work inside an office.

If people getting paid over six-figures at a two-trillion-dollar company refuse to come into work at the spectacular billion-dollar headquarters where every luxury is provided, then those employees have lost all grasp on reality and have no right to petition anyone about anything.

This unholy trinity—the quasi-religion of wokeness, corporate ingestion of the corrosive social-media machinery and a deluded view of working life—is what bedevils the newest generation of American companies. Once you let the mob accrue influence internally, short of taking a hard stand managerially as Coinbase did, you have no option but concede to their demands and offer the mob the object of their desire (or rage) on a plate. Every company who goes down this path will be limping from crisis to crisis forever (as Google is).

«

Martinez isn’t exactly patient, nor a model of diplomacy. I note that he doesn’t describe his time at Apple (NDA’d, perhaps?) and talks about the generalities. He’s much more like the hard-charging people of Silicon Valley of the 1970s and 1980s. He thinks Steve Jobs “wouldn’t have lasted a day” in his own company now. Maybe not down in the ranks, but Jobs was pretty handy at firing people.

Hard to take the temperature, but I suspect the future is much more with people like Martinez, because they don’t care who they annoy: they just want to succeed.
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Google turned me into a serial killer • Hristo Georgiev

Hrito Georigev:

»

As I was scrolling through my inbox today, I stumbled upon an e-mail from a former colleague of mine who wanted to inform me that a Google search of my name yields a picture of me linked to a Wikipedia article about a serial killer who happens to have the same name as mine.

I quickly popped out my browser, opened Google and typed in my name. And indeed, my photo appeared over a description of a Bulgarian serial killer.

My first reaction was that somebody was trying to pull off some sort of an elaborate prank on me, but after opening the Wikipedia article itself, it turned out that there’s no photo of me there whatsoever.

It turns out that Google’s knowledge graph algorithm somehow falsely associated my photo with the Wikipedia article about the serial killer. Which is also surprisingly strange because my name isn’t special or unique at all; there are literally hundreds of other people with my name, and despite of all that, my personal photo ended up being associated with a serial killer. I can’t really explain to myself how this happened, but it’s weird. In any case, I am now in the process of reporting this Knowledge Graph bug to Google.

After sharing the news with some friends and getting a good laugh out of the whole situation, a short rumination on what had happened made me consider how this could have gone down a much darker path. Sure, after taking the time to read the Wikipedia article, one can easily figure out that I’m not a serial killer though one can never be so sure. However, the fact that an algorithm that’s used by billions of people can so easily bend information in such ways is truly terrifying.

«

But of course: Google isn’t about accuracy or truth. It’s about popularity (maybe he’s the most-linked Hrito Georigev? There can’t be that many).

Sure, it’s just an accident. How many others are there out there? We don’t know. Why don’t we know? Because nobody’s checking, except for the ones accused of being serial killers.
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Microsoft: list of features that are deprecated or removed in Windows 11 • MSPoweruser

Pradeep Viswav:

»

Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 11 OS comes with several new features and improvements. As you expect from a major OS update, Microsoft is also removing several features that were available in Windows 10. For example, Timeline is gone. Also, the Tablet mode feature. You can find the full list of features that are removed in Windows 11 below.

• Cortana will no longer be included in the first boot experience or pinned to the Taskbar
• Desktop wallpaper cannot be roamed to or from device when signed in with a Microsoft account
• Internet Explorer is disabled. Microsoft Edge is the recommended replacement and includes IE Mode which may be useful in certain scenarios
• Math Input Panel is removed. Math Recognizer will install on demand and includes the math input control and recognizer. Math inking in apps like OneNote are not impacted by this change
• News & Interests has evolved. New functionality has been added which can be found by clicking the Widgets icon on the Taskbar
• Quick Status from the Lockscreen and associated settings are removed
• S Mode is only available now for Windows 11 Home edition
• Snipping Tool continues to be available but the old design and functionality in the Windows 10 version has been replaced with those of the app previously known as Snip & Sketch
• Start is significantly changed in Windows 11…

«

So goodbye Cortana, essentially? And the cut-down “S Mode” doesn’t seem to have cut through. No Tablet mode? The 2010 attempt to get ahead of Apple is finally dead.
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Why is the Intellectual Dark Web suddenly hyping an unproven COVID treatment? • Vice

Anna Merlan:

»

Some time ago, a furious debate erupted across the United States: Do people have the right to promote, prescribe, and use an unproven drug for a serious illness? Many asked an attendant question: Was there a vast and sinister conspiracy to keep that drug’s stunning efficacy hidden from the American public? 

The product was called laetrile. It was derived from apricot pits, and throughout the 1970s it was championed by a small but extremely loud group of people as a suppressed and miraculous cancer cure. It was not, as it turned out, a cure at all: Laetrile, also known as “Vitamin B17,” showed little to no anti-cancer activity in a large National Cancer Institute study, and multiple studies also warned that taking too much of it could lead to cyanide poisoning. Still, thousands of Americans, including actor Steve McQueen, flocked to clinics in Mexico for treatment before the FDA declared the product illegal in 1980. Since then, it’s made several comebacks online, each time marked by a chorus of people claiming that its real effectiveness has been deliberately concealed by unscrupulous medical Powers that Be. 

Because everything old is always made exhaustingly new again, during the COVID-19 pandemic the same pattern pioneered by laetrile advocates has played out several times. The first anti-COVID drug to be held out as a secret miracle cure was hydroxychloroquine, boosted by world leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Now, increasingly, it’s the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, which can be used to treat some skin conditions and is widely used in veterinary medicine.

«

Merlan does this very neatly – putting it into the historical context. (Ivermectin is part of a number of studies, but some distance from approved.)
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Why we shouldn’t listen to crypto ‘experts’ • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

»

recently I’ve been struck by one increasingly common jibe, because it inadvertently undermines the supposedly altruistic aims of the bitcoin brigade: “Have Fun Staying Poor.”

This meme has become so common in cryptoland that a song has been written in its honour; you can even buy T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase. The taunt is directed at so-called “no-coiners” like me whenever we express scepticism. Whether or not our criticism is warranted is irrelevant. The thinking is that because the price is so obviously going to keep going up forever, those of us who don’t buy into it are going to be mired in poverty while those who invested get filthy rich.

If such a system sounds reminiscent of a Ponzi scheme, that’s because it is. Although some of the traditional characteristics — such as a head or central administrator or the existence of cash transfers — are lacking in bitcoin, others are not. Those who get in at the start must continuously draw in new believers to keep the whole thing going. Many of them market themselves as “crypto experts”, pushing the currencies as a solution to a host of financial and economic issues they often have no expertise in. As prominent bitcoiner Antony “Pomp” Pompliano unashamedly tweeted to his almost 1m followers recently, “Every bull market has to indoctrinate the new class of crypto enthusiasts”.

“Technically it doesn’t work quite like a Ponzi, but you get the same net result,” says Martin Walker, director of banking and finance at the Center For Evidence-Based Management. “The brilliance of the whole crypto scam is that you don’t actually have to generate any income to pay anyone, so you don’t run out of money because you’re making people believe in ‘number go up’.”

«

Her point, of course, is that they’re not “experts”; they’re just people who got into the pyramid scheme early and now need to unload in order to profit. As she notes, this is a zero-sum game: for someone to cash out, someone else has to put cash in.
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Are you still there? • ROUGH TYPE

Nicholas Carr:

»

Late Tuesday night, just as the Red Sox were beginning a top-of-the-eleventh rally against the Rays, my smart TV decided to ask me a question of deep ontological import:

Are you still there?

To establish my thereness (and thus be permitted to continue watching the game), I would need to “interact with the remote,” my TV informed me. I would need to respond to its signal with a signal of my own. At first, as I spent a harried few seconds finding the remote and interacting with it, I was annoyed by the interruption. But I quickly came to see it as endearing. Not because of the TV’s solicitude — the solicitude of a machine is just a gentle form of extortion — but because of the TV’s cluelessness. Though I was sitting just ten feet away from the set, peering intently into its screen, my smart TV couldn’t tell that I was watching it. It didn’t know where I was or what I was doing or even if I existed at all. That’s so cute.

I had found a gap in the surveillance system, but I knew it would soon be plugged. Media used to be happy to transmit signals in a human-readable format. But as soon as it was given the ability to collect signals, in a machine-readable format, media got curious. It wanted to know, and then it wanted to know everything, and then it wanted to know everything without having to ask. If a smart device asks you a question, you know it’s not working properly. Further optimization is required. And you know, too, that somebody is working on the problem.

«

Always a treat when Carr decides to blog.
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BuzzFeed valued at $1.5bn in deal to go public via special-purpose merger • The Guardian

Edward Helmore:

»

BuzzFeed, the news, digital media and lifestyle company, has announced plans to become a publicly traded company through a special purpose acquisition company (Spac) that could value the 15-year-old New York-based firm at $1.5bn.

The company, initially known for listicles and online quizzes, also announced plans to buy Complex Networks, a global youth network that engages with millennials and Gen Z, from phone giant Verizon and publisher Hearst for $300m.

BuzzFeed has been on an acquisitions spree over the past year, merging with HuffPost in November and following a consolidation trend in digital media startups.

It has has become a contender in the news business, this year winning a Pulitzer for a series on China’s Uyghur detention camps, while simultaneously building what it describes as “identity-driven” lifestyle brands and licensing consumer products including food, cookbooks, Tasty branded cookware and affiliate commerce.

BuzzFeed will join a number of companies this year that have followed the non-traditional Spac path, which does not require the participation of an underwriting financial institution or attract the same level of oversight as a traditional initial public offering.

«

It had looked as though Buzzfeed wasn’t going to make it over the finishing line (well, the IPO line) after drastic cuts and layoffs. But here it comes. The cash should make its initial venture capitalist backers happy, and it can bounce along as a media entity for the foreseeable future.
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Half the world owns a smartphone • Strategy Analytics

»

According to new research from Strategy Analytics, half the world’s entire population now owns a smartphone in June 2021. Some 4 billion people use a smartphone today. It has taken 27 years to reach this historic milestone.

Exhibit 1: Global Smartphone User Base: % of World Population(1) (Source: Strategy Analytics, Inc.)

Yiwen Wu, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, said, “We estimate the global smartphone user base has risen dramatically from just 30k people in 1994 to 1.00 billion in 2012, and a record 3.95 billion today in June 2021. With an estimated 7.90 billion people in total on the planet in June 2021, it means 50% of the whole world now owns a smartphone. It has taken 27 years to reach this historic milestone.”

Linda Sui, Senior Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “The world’s first modern smartphone, IBM Simon, was launched commercially in the United States way back in 1994. This was followed by other famous models, such as the Nokia 9110 Communicator in 1998 and Ericsson R380 for Europe in 2000. Apple iPhone popularized the smartphone in 2007, while Google Android democratized the smartphone with an affordable software platform from 2008.”

Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Half of humanity now owns a smartphone. The smartphone is the most successful computer of all time. Smartphones today are used by 4 billion people worldwide, from urban California to suburban China and rural Africa. Consumers and workers love the convenience, utility, and safety of having a connected computer in their pocket. Smartphones have become an essential daily tool. We predict 5 billion people will be using smartphones worldwide by 2030.”

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Notice how it all took off in 2010/2011: the iPhone 4 and multiple Android models, particularly the Samsung Galaxy S, first launched in 2010. Arguably, Apple lit the fuse, but Samsung provided the gunpowder.

And – once you get smartphones in that many people’s hands, social networks take off too.
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Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention • The Guardian

Katrine Marçal:

»

Advertisements for products applying the technology of the wheel to the suitcase can be found in British newspapers as early as the 1940s. These are not suitcases on wheels, exactly, but a gadget known as “the portable porter” – a wheeled device that can be strapped on to a suitcase. But it never really caught on.

In 1967, a Leicestershire woman wrote a sharply worded letter to her local newspaper complaining that a bus conductor had forced her to buy an additional ticket for her rolling suitcase. The conductor argued that “anything on wheels should be classed as a pushchair”. She wondered what he would have done if she had boarded the bus wearing roller-skates. Would she be charged as a passenger or as a pram?

The woman in the fur coat [pictured wheeling a suitcase on wheels in 1952, 20 years before the “official” invention of the wheeled suitcase] and the Leicestershire woman on the bus are the vital clues to this mystery. Suitcases with wheels existed decades before they were “invented” in 1972, but were considered niche products for women. And that a product for women could make life easier for men or completely disrupt the whole global luggage industry was not an idea the market was then ready to entertain.

Resistance to the rolling suitcase had everything to do with gender. Sadow, the “official” inventor, described how difficult it was to get any US department store chains to sell it: “At this time, there was this macho feeling. Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.”

Two assumptions about gender were at work here. The first was that no man would ever roll a suitcase because it was simply “unmanly” to do so. The second was about the mobility of women. There was nothing preventing a woman from rolling a suitcase – she had no masculinity to prove. But women didn’t travel alone, the industry assumed.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How much tuna – and which species – is there in a Subway tuna sandwich? PCR testing might tell us. CC-licensed photo by Like_the_Grand_Canyon 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. Hello, caller, what’s your query? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

It’s out today! Find a bookshop, or take the shortcut and order Social Warming, my just-published book. Scissor statements, polarisation, Myanmar, and much more – including suggestions for how to fix the problem.

Tech giants, fearful of proposals to curb them, blitz Washington with lobbying • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang, David McCabe and Kenneth P. Vogel:

»

In the days after lawmakers introduced legislation that could break the dominance of tech companies, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, called Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress to deliver a warning.

The antitrust bills were rushed, he said. They would crimp innovation. And they would hurt consumers by disrupting the services that power Apple’s lucrative iPhone, Mr. Cook cautioned at various points, according to five people with knowledge of the conversations.

The calls by Mr. Cook are part of a forceful and wide-ranging pushback by the tech industry since the proposals were announced this month. Executives, lobbyists, and more than a dozen think tanks and advocacy groups paid by tech companies have swarmed Capitol offices, called and emailed lawmakers and their staff members, and written letters arguing there will be dire consequences for the industry and the country if the ideas become law.

…Amazon’s top lobbyist, Brian Huseman, rarely speaks publicly about bills before there is a vote. But with the House Judiciary Committee expected to vote on the bills on Wednesday, he warned in a statement on Tuesday that the legislation “would have significant negative effects on the hundreds of thousands of American small- and medium-sized businesses that sell in our store and tens of millions of consumers who buy products from Amazon.”

Google’s senior vice president for global affairs, Kent Walker, has also made calls to lawmakers in recent days, and the company’s top lobbyist, Mark Isakowitz, has weighed in on how the bills would alter how people use the internet. “American consumers and small businesses would be shocked at how these bills would break many of their favorite services,” he said in a statement. A spokesman for Facebook, Christopher Sgro, said that antitrust laws “should promote competition and protect consumers, not punish successful American companies.”

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Obviously Pelosi’s office leaked all this; it’s part of the PR effort against the tech companies. The tech firms should be capable of better on the PR front, though possibly it’s going to happen behind closed doors, at lunches and meetings.
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Antitrust posturing • Benedict Evans

He’s been reading the US antitrust bills so you (or I) don’t have to:

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[the 2020 Congressional] report [from tech antitrust hearings] was also, to be charitable, very rushed, with great chunks of advocacy pasted in without any scrutiny, and with significant errors of fact every few pages. Perhaps the worst example of this was the claim that tech startup creation has ‘sharply declined’ in the last decade. This is an important claim, and if it was true we would obviously need broad and urgent intervention – but in fact, it was based on a data set that ended in 2011, which was both nine years out of data and just at the end of the financial crisis. People in tech agree on very little, but everyone would agree we’re in the hottest market for tech startup creation in history – any relevant data would tell you that tech startup creation has actually risen by three to four times in the last decade.

This report has now been followed by five proposed tech antitrust bills, published on Friday. Given the background, and the current US political environment, these are aggressive. However, like the report, they contain a mix of real concerns, good ideas, and some pretty questionable logic.

…Unfortunately, the ‘Ending Platform Monopolies’ law is impossibly broad. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft would be banned from doing anything on their platforms that anyone else might do, and from anything that might be a conflict of interest. They would not just be banned from favouring their own products – they’d be banned from having any products at all that they could theoretically favour.

This of course comes from a framing that ‘if you own a platform you can’t compete on it’ – Apple or Google should not have any products or features that compete with companies on their platforms. That sounds very clear – Elizabeth Warren made it a mantra. But what if I want to sell a camera app for your iPhone? OK, so Apple can’t include a camera app – or a clock, or an email app, or indeed a user interface or a file system. An Android phone has its own TCP/IP stack (in the 90s Windows did not, and you had to buy one), but other people would like to sell you that if it wasn’t there, so that’s a clear conflict of interest and has to go.

There’s a very basic misunderstanding at play here – you can’t ban a platform from having ‘any’ feature, service or product that someone else might want to make, because that describes literally every single thing that a platform does.

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It’s a hopeless mess, and the expectation is that three of the four main bill will die so a single main one can go through with bipartisan support. Sounds like they could kneecap all their companies in the process.
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Algorithm of harm: Facebook amplified Myanmar military propaganda following coup • Global Witness

»

After Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup on 1 February 2021, imprisoning the country’s democratically elected leaders, Facebook banned the armed forces from its platform. The company cited the military’s history of exceptionally severe human rights abuses and the clear risk of future military-initiated violence. But a month later, as soldiers massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians in the streets, we found that Facebook’s own page recommendation algorithm was amplifying content that violated many of its own policies on violence and misinformation.

In the lead up to the annual Armed Forces Day celebration on 27 March, the bloodiest day since the coup (see graph below), Facebook was prompting users to view and “like” pages containing posts that incited and threatened violence, pushed misinformation that could lead to physical harm, praised the military and glorified its abuses.

Offline that day, the military killed at least 100 people in 24 hours, including teenagers, with a source telling Reuters that soldiers were killing people “like birds or chickens”. A 13-year-old girl was shot dead inside her home. A 40-year-old father was burned alive on a heap of tyres. The bodies of the dead and injured were dragged away, while others were beaten on the streets.

What happens on Facebook matters everywhere, but in Myanmar that is doubly true. Almost half the country’s population is on Facebook and for many users the platform is synonymous with the internet. Mobile phones come pre-loaded with Facebook and many businesses do not have a website, only a Facebook page.

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This is so depressing. I devote a whole chapter of Social Warming to how the internet – really, just Facebook – came to Myanmar, and how many times people on the ground warned Facebook that it was having serious effects on existing ethnic tensions, in a country where people didn’t understand “Likes”. And still it goes on.
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Tim Berners-Lee defends auction of NFT representing web’s source code • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

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The creator of the world wide web announced his decision to create and sell the digital asset through Sotheby’s auction house last week. In the auction, which began on Wednesday and will run for one week, collectors will have the chance to bid on a bundle of items, including the 10,000 lines of the source code to the original web browser, a digital poster created by Berners-Lee representing the code, a letter from him, and an animated video showing the code being entered.

“This is totally aligned with the values of the web,” Berners-Lee told the Guardian. “The questions I’ve got, they said: ‘Oh, that doesn’t sound like the free and open web.’ Well, wait a minute, the web is just as free and just as open as it always was. The core codes and protocols on the web are royalty free, just as they always have been. I’m not selling the web – you won’t have to start paying money to follow links.

“I’m not even selling the source code. I’m selling a picture that I made, with a Python programme that I wrote myself, of what the source code would look like if it was stuck on the wall and signed by me.

“If they felt that me selling an NFT of a poster is inappropriate, then what about me selling a book? I do things like that, which involve money, but the free and open web is still free and open. And we do still, every now and again, have to fight to keep it free and open, fight for net neutrality and so on.”

…Although this sale is the first time Berners-Lee has openly embraced the cryptocurrency community, the underlying technology has much that appeals about it, he said. Berners-Lee has settled on similar solutions in his own project, Solid, which aims to decentralise the web. “The blockchain world is pretty separate from the web, except where they connect in different places. But one of the problems with the web’s design is that it uses it uses domain names, which are at core a centralised system.

“Solid and the blockchain both attract people who want sovereign identity, sovereign power as a person.

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Scientist finds early coronavirus sequences that had been mysteriously deleted • The New York Times

Carl Zimmer:

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The new analysis, released on Tuesday, bolsters earlier suggestions that a variety of coronaviruses may have been circulating in Wuhan before the initial outbreaks linked to animal and seafood markets in December 2019.

As the Biden administration investigates the contested origins of the virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, the study neither strengthens nor discounts the hypothesis that the pathogen leaked out of a famous Wuhan lab. But it does raise questions about why original sequences were deleted, and suggests that there may be more revelations to recover from the far corners of the internet.

“This is a great piece of sleuth work for sure, and it significantly advances efforts to understand the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study.

Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who wrote the new report, called the deletion of these sequences suspicious. It “seems likely that the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence,” he wrote in the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.

Dr. Bloom and Dr. Worobey belong to an outspoken group of scientists who have called for more research into how the pandemic began. In a letter published in May, they complained that there wasn’t enough information to determine whether it was more likely that a lab leak spread the coronavirus, or that it leapt to humans from contact with an infected animal outside of a lab.

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It is very clever work – Bloom spotted that though index links were gone, the data wasn’t removed from the cloud, and pulled back a set of SARS-Cov-2 sequences from a number of early patients. Yet the “variety of coronaviruses” points, to me at least, to a greater likelihood of a zoonotic (not lab) origin. It’s as though the virus was initially like a radio trying to tune into a faint station: the genome jumps all over. Then it suddenly stabilises on the properly infectious form. So why did China get the sequences deleted? At a guess, paranoia, and its continuing desire for control.
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John McAfee: Antivirus software entrepreneur found dead in Spanish prison cell • Sky News

Tom Gillespie:

»

Antivirus software entrepreneur John McAfee has been found dead in his prison cell after Spain’s National Court approved his extradition to the US, the Catalan justice department has said.

Prosecutors in the US state of Tennessee had charged the 75-year-old with evading taxes after allegedly failing to report income made from promoting cryptocurrencies while he did consultancy work.

The British-American businessman, who was born in Gloucestershire in the UK, was also charged with evading tax in relation to income from speaking engagements and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary.

In a statement obtained by Reuters news agency, the Catalan justice department said “everything points” to suicide.

Security personnel at the Brians 2 prison near Barcelona tried to revive McAfee before his death was confirmed by the jail’s medical team, a statement from the regional Catalan government said.

«

He lived about four or five lives. The entrepreneur part, the wild living. His Wikipedia entry is probably sufficient obituary for now.
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How Reddit turned its millions of users into a content moderation army • TechRadar

Joel Khalili:

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When it comes to content moderation, which has become an ever more high-profile problem in recent years, Reddit opts for a different approach compared to other large social platforms.

Unlike Facebook, for example, which outsources much of the work to moderation farms, Reddit relies in large part on its communities (or subreddits) to self-police. The efforts of volunteer moderators are guided by rules defined by each individual subreddit, but also a set of values authored and enforced by Reddit itself.

The company has come under criticism for this model, though, which some have interpreted as laissez-faire and lacking in accountability. But Chris Slowe, Reddit CTO, says this is a total mischaracterization.

“It may seem like a crazy thing to say about the internet today, but humans on average are actually pretty good. If you look at Reddit at scale, people are creative, funny, collaborative and derpy – all the things that make civilization work,” he told TechRadar Pro.

“Our underlying approach is that we want communities to set their own cultures, policies and philosophical systems. To make this model function, we need to provide tools and capabilities to deal with the [antisocial] minority.”

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The suggestion that you should let users police Facebook, rather than paid-for moderators, has been made quite a few times. Facebook disagrees.
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[headline omitted so Gmail doesn’t dump this in spam] • ESPNFC

»

The supporters of Young Boys Bern have not had too much to celebrate in the 19 years since their team last won the Swiss league title.

Long since eclipsed by the likes of FC Basel and Grasshoppers Zurich, the club from the Swiss capital has even got a reputation for enjoying its status as a perennial loser.

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Following yesterday’s headline about a moray eel, this story (from 2005) was offered by Matt F. I’m afraid you’ll have to go and read it yourself for the headline. But it’s worth your while.
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The big tuna sandwich mystery • The New York Times

Julia Carmel sent some tuna from Subway (which is being sued over a claim that its tuna isn’t tuna) to a lab for a PCR test:

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Finally, after more than a month of waiting, the lab results arrived.

“No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample and so we obtained no amplification products from the DNA,” the email read. “Therefore, we cannot identify the species.”

The spokesman from the lab offered a bit of analysis. “There’s two conclusions,” he said. “One, it’s so heavily processed that whatever we could pull out, we couldn’t make an identification. Or we got some and there’s just nothing there that’s tuna.” (Subway declined to comment on the lab results.)
To be fair, when Inside Edition sent samples from three Subway locations in Queens out for testing earlier this year, the lab found that the specimens were, indeed, tuna.

Even the plaintiffs [suing Subway, claiming it isn’t selling tuna] have softened their original claims. In a new filing from June, their complaints centered not on whether Subway’s tuna was tuna at all, but whether it was “100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna.”

With all testing, there are major caveats to consider. Once tuna has been cooked, its DNA becomes denatured — meaning that the fish’s characteristic properties have likely been destroyed, making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify.

All of the people I spoke with also questioned why Subway would swap out its tuna.

“I don’t think a sandwich place would intentionally mislabel,” Mr. Rudie from Catalina Offshore Products said. “They’re buying a can of tuna that says ‘tuna.’ If there’s any fraud in this case, it happened at the cannery.”

Peter Horn, the director of the Ending Illegal Fishing Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts, agreed that it would be difficult to place blame on Subway if this were the case.

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Fight over hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate ends with 153 workers out of a job • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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Houston Methodist hospital system had placed 178 employees on a two-week, unpaid suspension on June 7 for failing to meet the hospital system’s vaccination mandate, which it had set on April 1. The unpaid two-week suspension was essentially the employees’ last chance to get vaccinated before facing termination.

During that time, some of the workers “became compliant with the policy,” a hospital spokesperson told the Houston Chronicle Tuesday. But 153 did not and either quit during their suspension or were fired on Tuesday. Houston Methodist CEO Marc Boom had previously noted in a letter to employees that 27 of the 178 suspended workers had received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine going into the suspension.

The resignations and firings end weeks of public protest by the small group of workers who objected to the mandate, which was otherwise largely successful. According to numbers released by Boom, about 97% of the hospital’s nearly 26,000 employees are fully vaccinated, while about 2.4% received a valid exemption or were granted a deferral for pregnancy or other reasons.

Still, the minority fought back vigorously against the mandate. They staged protests outside hospital facilities, and 117 of the workers filed a lawsuit in federal court. The employees claimed that the mandate is unlawful and forced them to be “human subjects” in a clinical trial of an “unapproved drug.” Among their more startling claims, they alleged that the mandate violates the Nuremberg Code, a set of 10 ethics principles for conducting human trials written in response to Nazi atrocities. In making the claim, the hospital staff likened the vaccine requirement to horrifying medical experiments carried out in concentration camps during World War II.

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The judge’s ruling is pretty brutal (against them). Seems to me though that the staff owe a duty of care to the people in the hospital. It’s the same as the hospital demanding that they don’t juggle chainsaws on duty.
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Google faces antitrust probe in India in smart TV market • Tech In Asia

Kul Bhushan:

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The move comes after two lawyers in India filed a case against the US-based search giant last year.

According to the complainants, Google – in agreements it made with TV companies – bars these firms from developing their own operating systems (OS) based on “forked Android” code. The complainants allege that the rules set by Google restrict freedom of action for manufacturers of all smart mobile devices and TVs and not just devices on which Google’s Play Store or Android TV operating system (OS) is pre-installed.

Google, however, has denied the charges.

“The emerging smart TV sector in India is thriving due in part to Google’s free licensing model, and Android TV competes with numerous well-established TV OSs such as FireOS, Tizen, and WebOS. We are confident that our smart TV licensing practices are in compliance with all applicable competition laws,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

India’s smart TV market has grown exponentially in recent years. About 8 million smart TVs were sold in the country in 2019, out of which three in five smart TVs in the country run on the Android operating system, according to a Reuters report.

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Not sure why the smart TV makers wouldn’t be able to fork Android. OK, they wouldn’t have any Google services on them – just like happens in China – but they’d be able to offer what they want. And as the article says, there are plenty of competing TV OSs. But hey, it’s Antitrust Season everywhere.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might think that the sea animal capable of grabbing food from the land is a pizza pie, but in fact it’s… CC-licensed photo by Richard Ling 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. Scientifically approved. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Just one day to
preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book. After that, you’re just “buying” it.

Google faces EU antitrust probe of alleged ad-tech abuses • WSJ

Sam Schechner and Parmy Olson:

»

The European Union opened a formal antitrust investigation into allegations that Google abuses its leading role in the advertising-technology sector, the most wide-ranging case yet to look at that pillar of the tech giant’s business.

The European Commission, the EU’s top antitrust enforcer, said Tuesday that its investigation, which has been under way informally since at least 2019, will look at a broad array of allegedly anticompetitive business practices around the Alphabet unit’s brokering of advertisements and sharing of user data with advertisers across websites and mobile apps—one of the newest areas of antitrust scrutiny for the company.

Some of the EU’s investigation will cover similar ground to a case filed last year against Google by a group of U.S. states led by Texas. Similar areas include Google’s allegedly favoring its own ad-buying tools in the advertising auctions it runs.

But the EU probe will also cover complaints that haven’t yet been the subject of formal inquiries anywhere, including Google’s alleged exclusion of competitors from brokering ad buys on Google-owned video site YouTube.

…“Online advertising services are at the heart of how Google and publishers monetize their online services,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust chief. “We are concerned that Google has made it harder for rival online advertising services to compete in the so-called ad tech stack.”

…The EU said Tuesday that it estimated the overall online display advertising business in the EU to have totaled €20bn, equivalent to $23.8bn, in 2019, with a major role for Google as an intermediary.

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Antitrust. Antitrust everywhere.
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Malware hides inside Steam profile pictures: what you need to know • Make Use Of

Ankush Das:

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SteamHide is a form of malware that hides within Steam profile picture’s metadata, warns security company GDATA.

Technically, the PropertyTagICCProfile value of an image is changed to encrypt and hide the malware, which normally stores information to help printers detect the colors of an image.

This value is a part of the EXIF data that exists in an image to help you identify the camera used and other related information. The profile picture or the image is not the malware itself, but it is a container for the malware.

So, if you are using Steam or have downloaded or accessed an image from Steam, this does not affect your computer. That’s because the malware is inactive until it’s decrypted by a separate malware downloader.

The image or the profile picture helps in the distribution of malware to an infected computer without getting detected by any antivirus software.

The infected computer in question must have a downloader (a malicious file downloaded via email attachments or websites) which extracts the malware from the Steam profile image, which is publicly accessible. In other words, it downloads the malware by connecting to the image hosted on Steam platform.

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Quite clever: a sort of binary malware, where the individual pieces aren’t dangerous, but the combination is. And, crucially, can slip past antivirus – because it’s a form of steganography.
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When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray • The New York Times

That’s all. Just the headline. The reporter Sabrina Imbler wrote it as the “dek” (aka subheading) but the section editor Michael Roston determined it should be the headline. It deserves some sort of prize, standing alongside “Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious” in the all-time pantheon of headlines you can sing.
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Stewardship of global collective behavior • PNAS

Elke Weber, Joseph Bak-Coleman, Carl Bergstrom and 14 others:

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Here, we build on our understanding of disturbed complex systems to argue that human social dynamics cannot be expected to yield solutions to global issues or to promote human wellbeing without evidence-based policy and ethical stewardship.

The situation parallels challenges faced in conservation biology and climate science, where insufficiently regulated industries optimize profits while undermining the stability of ecological and earth systems. Such behavior created a need for urgent evidence-based policy in the absence of a complete understanding of the systems’ underlying dynamics (e.g., ecology and geosciences).

These features led Michael Soulé to describe conservation biology as the “crisis discipline” counterpoint to ecology—an analogy to the relationship between medicine and comparative physiology (20). Crisis disciplines are distinct from other areas of urgent, evidenced-based research in their need to consider the degradation of an entire complex system—without a complete description of the system’s dynamics. We feel that the study of human collective behavior must become the crisis discipline response to changes in our social dynamics.

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Delightful. As Adewale Adetugbo pointed out, they’ve written the peer-reviewed scientific-language version of Social Warming. Great minds… (well, theirs are, at least.)
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Brave Search beta now available in Brave browser, offering users the first independent privacy search/browser alternative to big tech • Brave Browser

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Starting today, online users have a new independent option for search which gives them unmatched privacy. Whether they are already Brave browser users, looking to expand their online privacy protection with the all-in-one, integrated Brave Search in the Brave browser, or users of other browsers looking for the best-in-breed privacy-preserving search engine, they can all use the newly released Brave Search beta that puts users first, and fully in control of their online experience. Brave Search is built on top of a completely independent index, and doesn’t track users, their searches, or their clicks.

Brave Search is available in beta release globally on all Brave browsers (desktop, Android, and iOS) as one of the search options alongside other search engines, and will become the default search in the Brave browser later this year. It is also available from any other browser at search.brave.com. 

«

According to Techcrunch,

»

the company acquired technology and developers who had previously worked on Cliqz, a European anti-tracking search-browser combo which closed down in May 2020 — building on a technology they’d started to develop, called Tailcat, to form the basis of the Brave-branded search engine.

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And Techcrunch also concludes that “The market for privacy consumer tech is growing.” Which has a lot of truth to it. Brave’s search looks OK; you’d really need some sort of continual comparison to see how it matches up against DuckDuckGo.
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Facebook and Google quietly bankroll a new tech policy battle • Gizmodo

Shoshana Wodinsky:

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A coalition of 13 different think tanks and advocacy groups penned an open letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday warning lawmakers about two major antitrust bills that lawmakers are set to vote on later this week. Instead of wrangling Big Tech, the letter says, these bills would “dramatically degrade” if not outright break the gizmos and gadgets we love using every day.

“We believe that voters want Congress to fix things that are broken—not break or ban things that they feel are working well,” the letter reads. “We strongly encourage you to reject these proposals.”

What that letter (naturally) leaves out, however, is how every org that signed this letter is, in some way, being funded by the same companies that would be subject to the provisions of the bills in question.

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Notably missing from the funders is Apple. Wonder if it is going to start some lobbying now.
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Iran seizes 7,000 cryptocurrency computer miners, largest haul to date • Reuters

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Iranian police have seized 7,000 computer miners at an illegal cryptocurrency farm, their largest haul to date of the energy-guzzling machines that have exacerbated power outages in Iran, state media reported on Tuesday.

In late May, Iran banned the mining of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin for nearly four months as part of efforts to reduce the incidence of power blackouts blamed by officials on surging electricity demand during the searingly hot and dry summer.

Tehran police chief General Hossein Rahimi said the 7,000 computer miners were seized in an abandoned factory in the west of the capital, the state news agency IRNA reported.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are created through a process known as mining, where powerful computers compete with each other to solve complex mathematical problems. The process is highly energy-intensive, often relying on electricity generated by fossil fuels, which are abundant in Iran.

According to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, around 4.5% of all bitcoin mining takes place in Iran, giving it hundreds of million dollars in revenue from cryptocurrencies that can be used to lessen the impact of US sanctions.

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Quite the dilemma: do the mining and the lights go out; stop the mining and you don’t get the asset that can be silently swapped for hard currency.
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Mathematicians welcome computer-assisted proof in ‘grand unification’ theory • Nature

Davide Castelvecchi:

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Mathematicians have long used computers to do numerical calculations or manipulate complex formulas. In some cases, they have proved major results by making computers do massive amounts of repetitive work — the most famous being a proof in the 1970s that any map can be coloured with just four different colours, and without filling any two adjacent countries with the same colour.

But systems known as proof assistants go deeper. The user enters statements into the system to teach it the definition of a mathematical concept — an object — based on simpler objects that the machine already knows about. A statement can also just refer to known objects, and the proof assistant will answer whether the fact is ‘obviously’ true or false based on its current knowledge. If the answer is not obvious, the user has to enter more details. Proof assistants thus force the user to lay out the logic of their arguments in a rigorous way, and they fill in simpler steps that human mathematicians had consciously or unconsciously skipped.

Once researchers have done the hard work of translating a set of mathematical concepts into a proof assistant, the program generates a library of computer code that can be built on by other researchers and used to define higher-level mathematical objects. In this way, proof assistants can help to verify mathematical proofs that would otherwise be time-consuming and difficult, perhaps even practically impossible, for a human to check.

Proof assistants have long had their fans, but this is the first time that they had a major role at the cutting edge of a field, says Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London who was part of a collaboration that checked Scholze and Clausen’s result. “The big remaining question was: can they handle complex mathematics?” says Buzzard. “We showed that they can.”

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This is a deep topic, but illustrative of the way that computers are becoming woven into the frontiers of everything. (If you don’t like it, then obviously you’ll say that the rot started with a computer proving the four-colour theorem in 1976. Which, honestly, still feels like cheating.)
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Key epidemiological drivers and impact of interventions in the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in England • Science Translational Medicine

Neil Ferguson, Anne Cori and 29 others:

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We fitted a model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in care homes and the community to regional surveillance data for England. Compared with other approaches, our model provides a synthesis of multiple surveillance data streams into a single coherent modelling framework allowing transmission and severity to be disentangled from features of the surveillance system. Of the control measures implemented, only national lockdown brought the reproduction number (Rteff) below 1 consistently; if introduced one week earlier it could have reduced deaths in the first wave from an estimated 48,600 to 25,600 (95% credible interval [95%CrI]: 15,900–38,400). The infection fatality ratio decreased from 1.00% (95%CrI: 0.85%–1.21%) to 0.79% (95%CrI: 0.63%–0.99%), suggesting improved clinical care.

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It’s the lockdown point that’s critical: one week earlier could have saved 23,000 lives through the knock-on effects of delayed or averted infection.

Of course this will be dismissed by lockdown sceptics because Neil Ferguson is a co-author. Such is the attitude of some of the public to science.

The other key point:

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The estimated cumulative proportion of the population ever infected with SARS-CoV-2 ranged from 7.6% (95% CrI: 5.4%–10.2%) in the South West to 22.3% (95% CrI: 19.4%–25.4%) in London

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“Herd immunity” by infection would have killed a colossal number of people.
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Apple Watch accessory maker Wristcam raises $25m • TechCrunch

Brian Heater:

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Other wearable makers have flirted with video and images on wrist-worn devices, but the feature is far from mainstream.

Industry leader Apple certainly doesn’t seem to be rushing into the idea, so Wristcam went and did it for them with the launch of a band sporting its own camera capable of shooting 4K images and 1080p video. The product launched late last year, following a successful crowdfunding campaign.

Now its makers are going a more traditional funding route, announcing a $25m raise led by Marker LLC. “We will use the funding to scale our team, Wristcam production, go to market, and R&D of our computer vision engine for wearables,” CEO Ari Roisman told TechCrunch.

Part of that funding involves effectively doubling the company’s headcount by early next year and helping deliver updates to some of the demands and concerns that have arisen since the product’s “public beta” launch in December.

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Pebble started as a crowdfunder on Kickstarter; this too. I’m not sure that the market for “cameras on your wrist for when you’re making video calls” is really that big, though. Yet the company says it has sold “thousands” of them, retailing at $299 each. Fine, but expanding that to tens of thousands is the hard part.
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From sitting cross-legged on the ground, can you get up without using your hands? That might predict your lifespan. CC-licensed photo by Michael Coghlan 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. What sort of riders exactly? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google executives see cracks in their company’s success • The New York Times

Daisuke Wakabayashi:

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a restive class of Google executives worry that the company is showing cracks. They say Google’s work force is increasingly outspoken. Personnel problems are spilling into the public. Decisive leadership and big ideas have given way to risk aversion and incrementalism. And some of those executives are leaving and letting everyone know exactly why.

“I keep getting asked why did I leave now? I think the better question is why did I stay for so long?” Noam Bardin, who joined Google in 2013 when the company acquired mapping service Waze, wrote in a blog post two weeks after leaving the company in February.
“The innovation challenges,” he wrote, “will only get worse as the risk tolerance will go down.”

Many of Google’s problems, current and recently departed executives said, stem from the leadership style of Sundar Pichai, the company’s affable, low-key chief executive.

Fifteen current and former Google executives, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering Google and Mr. Pichai, told The New York Times that Google was suffering from many of the pitfalls of a large, maturing company — a paralyzing bureaucracy, a bias toward inaction and a fixation on public perception.

The executives, some of whom regularly interacted with Mr. Pichai, said Google did not move quickly on key business and personnel moves because he chewed over decisions and delayed action. They said that Google continued to be rocked by workplace culture fights, and that Mr. Pichai’s attempts to lower the temperature had the opposite effect — allowing problems to fester while avoiding tough and sometimes unpopular positions.

A Google spokesman said internal surveys about Mr. Pichai’s leadership were positive.

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As I mentioned before, the restiveness within the company is both a symptom and a cause. This is going to be an uncomfortable few years for Google – US antitrust is looming, and it still can’t break out beyond being an advertising company.
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Google’s messaging mess: a timeline • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

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Here’s a breakdown of Google’s major messaging offerings over the years, with currently active services in bold:

Email: Gmail

Messaging services: Google Talk, Google Plus Huddle, Google Hangouts, Google Allo, Google Chat, plus innumerable chat features built into other Google products we won’t mention here

SMS/RCS services: Google Voice, Android Messages app with RCS chat integration

Video conferencing services: Google Talk, Google Voice, Google Plus Hangouts, Google Duo, Google Meet

Collaboration software: Google Wave, Google Plus circles, Google Docs chat, Google Chat
Within that mess of product names are two core issues: Google’s apparent love of launching new services and its inability to combine products under one umbrella.

Competitors like WhatsApp demonstrate what the opposite approach could be: a chat service tied to a user’s phone number that allows for video and voice, all from one app. Or there’s Apple’s iPhone approach, which ties email addresses and phone numbers to two services: iMessage for text and FaceTime for audio and video.

Google keeps falling into the same cycle, though, one that has repeated itself throughout the years. It’ll build out new services, integrating them into more areas of its product lineup, then try to wipe the slate clean, launch new services that (eventually) replace the old set, and start the cycle anew.

Here are the four eras of Google messaging so far…

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Amazing to have already had four such eras, and it’s no wonder nobody can understand them. If Google had to compete without being able to hang their messaging offerings off Gmail and Android, nobody would use them.
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You may not want to get your beauty tips from TikTok • The New York Times

Jessica Schiffer:

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“I always know when something is trending on TikTok because I’ll have an influx of patients coming in and asking me about the same thing,” said Dr. Niket Sonpal, a gastroenterologist in New York.

Most of the time, that “thing” is a beauty or wellness tip that’s gone viral on the video-sharing platform, without evidence that it actually works. The advice may be ineffective or outright dangerous, from drinking chlorophyll to induce weight loss to using sunscreen only in select areas to “naturally” contour your face.

“We talk about TikTok all the time in my office,” said Dr. Dendy Engelman, a dermatologist and cosmetic surgeon in New York, “and I think it might be worse than other platforms because people are really looking to create content with that wow factor, the thing that will go viral, even if it’s not grounded in science.”

It’s not surprising that the app that brought us the “Benadryl challenge” (taking large doses of the antihistamine to induce hallucinations) and “the Everclear test” (doing shots of the high-proof alcohol) is not a fount of doctor-approved beauty guidance. But many consumers throw reason and caution to the wind when faced with these trends, underscoring a growing subversion of authority in which an influencer’s word is replacing that of experts.
“It’s funny because patients are often so timid in our office about trying treatments,” Dr. Engelman said. “But when they see something done on Instagram from an 18-year-old influencer, they’re like, ‘Sure!’”

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It’s a microcosm of scientists’ experience in the past 18 months. “That wow factor, the thing that will go viral, even if it’s not grounded in science.”
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Spatial Audio • Lefsetz Letter

Bob Lefsetz (who often comes across as one of the grouchiest men in the music business):

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I fired up Apple Music last night on my iPad. There’s Zane Lowe’s dog and pony show linked to above, but there’s also 127 demo tracks, as in Apple is trotting these out to demonstrate the greatness of Spatial Audio. I pulled up ones I was familiar with.

Now I was listening on wired Sennheiser headphones, which retail for about $300, far better than what most punters are listening on, never mind the bass-heavy, distorting of the music Beats, talk about a marketing job.

And the tracks were, as I said, definitely different. Not radically different, but there was more space…

But then I started getting reviews e-mailed to me.

And just now I went back. Now I’m listening via my computer, with $700 Audeze headphones with a separate headphone amp. And what I’ve learned is…the Spatial Audio and stereo versions are not only different, the process affects the punch, the essence of the originals!

I compared Spatial Audio tracks to their HD equivalents on Amazon Music and I found exactly what one writer said: the vocal gets lost. Instead of being up front and in your face, it’s buried more in the mix.

Let’s start with Apple’s demo track, “What’s Going On.” In the stereo mix Marvin Gaye is up front, the band is backing him, in the Spatial Audio version, the band is surrounding him, on the fringe, background vocals popping up way up to the right, Marvin is just an element, not the essence, it’s a cornucopia of music, but it’s not the legendary track, it’s absolutely different, a sacrilege.

Same deal with the Doors’ “Riders On the Storm.” Pat Benatar’s “We Belong.”

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Every new audio format is always, always demonstrated using Riders On The Storm. It’s also pretty much always the kiss of death. I wonder how many people will be able to tell the different with spatial audio.
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Towing a Tesla at 70 mph replenishes battery at fast charger rates • Inside EVs

Andrei Nedelea:

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The fact that you can charge an electric vehicle by towing it in gear is common knowledge among those with knowledge of how EVs work – you’re basically just relying on regen to put juice back into the battery, using the motor as a generator. Many have attempted it as more of a gag and more often than not in order to make a YouTube video that will attract a lot of views; this latest attempt is no different.

We’re pretty sure very few people actually charged their EVs in this manner, even when they completely ran out of juice and stopped on the side of the road. Calling a tow truck seems like a safer bet than towing your dead EV behind another vehicle to charge it back up again…

Rich, the guy behind the Warped Perception YouTube channel, known for many crazy perception-warping videos about cars and engines, had his very own Tesla Model S towed behind another vehicle (a Mercedes-Benz E55 AMG, no less) at a constant 70 mph and drew several important conclusions.

Firstly, the vehicle did not display any error messages or any warnings that what was being done to it was harmful to the vehicle or unsafe in any way. It looked like it could take many more miles of what it was being subjected to without issue.

Secondly, while towing the Model S at 70 mph, the battery was being replenished at an accelerated rate. He had the car towed for some 25 miles, putting back electricity into the batter at a rate of 65 kW – not quite Supercharger speeds, not even V1 or V2 Superchargers that could muster up to 150 kW, but still pretty decent.

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So… if your electric car runs out of charge, all you need is for the tow truck to tow you quite fast and you’re good again?
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Can the sit-rise test really predict longevity? • The Washington Post

Erin Strout:

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The test requires you to lower yourself to the floor, crisscross style, without bracing yourself with your hands, knees, arms, or sides of your legs. If you can stand back up, again without the aid of those body parts, you’ve scored a perfect 10 (five points for sitting, five points for standing). You lose a point every time you support yourself with a forbidden joint or appendage.

The researchers tested 2,002 adults 51 to 80 years old, and then followed them until a participant died or until the study concluded, which was a median of 6.3 years. In that time, 159 people died — only two of whom had scored a perfect 10. Those who had the lowest score of zero to three points had a risk of death that was five to six times higher than those who scored eight to 10 points.

“It is well known that aerobic fitness is strongly related to survival, but our study also shows that maintaining high levels of body flexibility, muscle strength, power-to-body weight ratio and co-ordination are not only good for performing daily activities, but have a favourable influence on life expectancy,” Araújo said in a 2012 news release.

Sure, the test is a good measure of leg and core strength, as well as balance. Older adults who have such muscular strength and flexibility are less likely to fall. And falls are the leading cause of unintentional-injury-related deaths for people ages 65 and older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But what if you can’t do it? Are you doomed? Should you plan for an early demise? If so, a test of about a dozen 35 to 40-something friends at a recent dinner party revealed that more than half of us should probably get our affairs in order, pronto.

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I tried this, and apparently I died five years ago. Fine going down, pretty well stuffed coming back up. (Gets better with a bit of practice, but you need flexible hips.)
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Soviets once denied a deadly anthrax lab leak. US scientists backed the story • The New York Times

Anton Troianovski:

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“We all have a common interest in finding out if it was due to a laboratory accident,” Matthew Meselson, a Harvard biologist, said in an interview this month from Cambridge, Mass., referring to the coronavirus pandemic. “Maybe it was a kind of accident that our present guidelines don’t protect against adequately.”

Dr. Meselson, a biological warfare expert, moved into a spare bedroom in the home of a friend at the C.I.A. in 1980 to study classified intelligence suggesting that the Soviet anthrax outbreak could have been linked to a military facility nearby. Six years later, he wrote that the Soviet explanation of the epidemic’s natural origins was “plausible.” The evidence the Soviets provided was consistent, he said, with the theory that people had been stricken by intestinal anthrax that originated in contaminated bone meal used as animal feed.

Then, in 1992, after the Soviet Union collapsed, President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia acknowledged “our military development was the cause” of the anthrax outbreak.

Dr. Meselson and his wife, the medical anthropologist Jeanne Guillemin, came to Yekaterinburg with other American experts for a painstaking study. They documented how a northeasterly wind on April 2, 1979, must have scattered as little as a few milligrams of anthrax spores accidentally released from the factory across a narrow zone extending at least 30 miles downwind.

“You can concoct a completely crazy story and make it plausible by the way you design it,” Dr. Meselson said, explaining why the Soviets had succeeded in dispelling suspicions about a lab leak.

In Sverdlovsk, as Yekaterinburg was known in Soviet times, those suspicions appeared as soon as people started falling mysteriously ill, according to interviews this month with residents who remember those days.

Raisa Smirnova, then a 32-year-old worker at a ceramics factory nearby, says she had friends at the mysterious compound who used their special privileges to help her procure otherwise hard-to-find oranges and canned meat. She also heard that there was some sort of secret work on germs being done there, and local rumors would attribute occasional disease outbreaks to the lab.

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So there’s a point that authoritarian states tend to cover up their accidents, and that a plausible story will get backing from all over. This story has been known for ages, of course (it has its own thorough Wikipedia entry, and plenty of past writeups), but we’re now at the stage where anything that seems congruent with malfeasance will grab people’s interest.

Contrast that to the reasonable point I saw made on Twitter by a virologist the other day: given that Covid mostly looks like a cold or flu, might the reason why Covid-19 was first identified in Wuhan be that it’s a city, and where they have a lab capable of sequencing novel viruses? Trouble is, that doesn’t involve a conspiracy.
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One-million-litre biological weapon test sphere at Frederick, Maryland • Atlas Obscura

Tony Dunnell:

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Back when it was operational, “The 8-Ball” looked like something the Red Skull would build in a cliff-top Nazi fortress before Captain America came in and smashed it all. Test Sphere 527, as it was also known, was a 40-foot-diameter steel sphere with a one-inch-thick carbon steel hull and a one-million-litre total volume. Total weight: 131 tons.

For most of its operational existence, which stretched from 1951 to 1969, it was enclosed within a 60-foot cube-shaped building sheathed in metal. The sphere itself was gas tight and climate controlled, and the entire complex routinely rated on a slight negative pressure so that any leaks would only allow clean air to enter, rather than allowing contaminated air to escape.

The point of all this was for the aerobiological study of “agents highly pathogenic to man and animals,” including nasty airborne biological weapons. “Hot” biological bombs were detonated inside the sphere, and the pathogen-filled munitions were tested in various ways.

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Which is a totally astonishing thing to do. You’d need to be really, really confident about your one-inch metal sphere. Then they would hook volunteers up to it and get them to breathe the “infected” air. Happily, none died. (Thanks G for the link.)

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Canon uses AI cameras that only let smiling workers inside offices • PetaPixel

Michael Zhang:

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This may sound like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, but Canon has rolled out new AI cameras that use “smile recognition” technology to ensure that only happy employees are allowed into its offices.

Back in 2020, the China-based Canon subsidiary Canon Information Technology introduced an “intelligent IT solution” for corporate offices that includes 5 different functional modules, one of which is “smiley face access control.”

“In addition, based on the corporate culture of ‘moving and always being’, Canon has always advocated the concepts of ‘laughing’ and ‘big health’, and hopes to bring happiness and health to everyone in the post-epidemic era,” Canon wrote in a press release. “Therefore, in the […] intelligent IT solution, a new experience of smile recognition is specially incorporated. It is hoped that smiles can let everyone relax and get healthy, so as to create a more pleasant working atmosphere and improve efficiency.”

In a new report about tech workers in China being subjected to surveillance tech, Nikkei Asia writes that Canon Information Technology has deployed these AI cameras at its Beijing headquarters to only allow smiling employees to enter the offices or book conference rooms.

Some workers, however, are speaking out about the intrusiveness of such technology.

“So now the companies are not only manipulating our time, but also our emotions,” one worker wrote on Weibo (the popular Chinese microblogging service), according to the report.

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I guess it would create a unified working atmosphere where everyone hates the cameras.

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Open for business? The trouble with bringing down mainland China’s coronavirus travel barriers • South China Morning Post

Zhuang Pinghui and Simone McCarthy:

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When the coastal province of Fujian announced at the end of April it would cut the quarantine required for some Taiwanese visitors, authorities hoped the example could test the water.

The idea was to reduce the time in isolation from 14 days to just two as part of a pilot programme, but a week later, the plan was abandoned.

After months without incident, an outbreak of local cases of the coronavirus in Taiwan forced Fujian to put reopening on hold. The about-face highlighted the uncertainty and difficulties for the country as a whole to bring down the border barriers and restart international travel.

China’s great wall against transmission of the coronavirus from overseas had been in place since the early days of the pandemic.

For anybody trying to get into China, there are strict measures, including allowing only business travellers, and requirements for multiple negative Covid-19 tests and mandatory quarantines of between 14 and 21 days. 

The aim is to keep imported cases at bay while authorities press on with a vaccination drive at home to reach herd immunity, the point where enough people are inoculated against the disease that transmission becomes very limited.

A top World Health Organization (WHO) official estimated on Tuesday that at least 80% of the population would have to be vaccinated to significantly lower the chance that an imported coronavirus case could generate new cases or spawn a wider outbreak.

So far, 878.5 million doses have been administered in the country’s mass inoculation drive and China should reach its first phase target of vaccinating 40% of the population, or 560 million people, by June 30.

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It’s easy to have forgotten that China’s still very worried about further Covid outbreaks.
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Preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book. Comes out Thursday.

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