Here’s a theory – what if Apple didn’t replace its maddening remote because it made too many in the first place? CC-licensed photo by pablofalv on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Don’t lose them in the couch cushions. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Can Apple change ads? • Benedict Evans

After pointing out that Apple moved from dominating music, to dominating phones, to dominating App Store revenue, and found itself stymied at each turn:

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the obvious, cynical theory is that Apple decided to cripple third-party app install ads just at the point that it was poised to launch its own, and to weaken the broader smartphone ad model so that companies would be driven towards in-app purchase instead. (The even more cynical theory would be that Apple expects to lose a big chunk of App Store commission as a result of lawsuits and so plans to replace this with app install ads. I don’t actually believe this – amongst other things I think Apple believes it will win its Epic and Spotify cases.)

Much more interesting, though, is what happens if Apple opens up its cohort tracking and targeting, and says that apps, or Safari, can now serve anonymous, targeted, private ads without the publisher or developer knowing the targeting data. It could create an API to serve those ads in Safari and in apps, without the publisher knowing what the cohort was or even without knowing what the ad was. What if Apple offered that, and described it as a truly ‘private, personalised’ ad model, on a platform with at least 60% of US mobile traffic, and over a billion global users?

…The ad market is a mess, and now very unstable, and poised, perhaps, to move to a very different idea of what ‘privacy’ means and how it works. Apple has both the market power and the brand to launch a new privacy-based tracking and targeting ad model, and offer it on hundreds of millions of high-spending users’ devices.

On the other hand, this may be a case of what my old colleague Steven Sinofsky likes to call the ‘Dr Evil’ theory of company strategy. The press used to see five or ten things going on in different parts of Microsoft, imagine they were all linked together, and say “Aha! We have worked out their evil brilliant plan for world domination!” – and people at Microsoft would read the story and say “That’s a good idea! We should do that! – except we could never make it work.”

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Forecasting s-curves is hard • Constance Crozier

Crozier is a researcher at the University of Colorado’s engineering group:

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the reason that these curves have been back in the news, is the propagation of disease. In this case the exponential growth occurs when the virus is new, such that most people encountering it will not have developed immunity. The level-off occurs because the virus is no longer encountering people without immunity (either due to ‘herd immunity’ or isolation of those infected). The graph below shows the number of deaths in China from the SARS outbreak in 2003, again with a best-fit s-curve.

Deaths due to SARS in China [3]
S-curves have only three parameters, and so it is perhaps impressive that they fit a variety of systems so well. Broadly, the three parameters describe the initial growth rate, the level-off rate, and the value at which it levels-off. Therefore, if you can estimate these three numbers, then you have the trend curve. Many of us will have learnt in school that if there are three parameters to be found, you need three data points to define the function. This would suggest that you could perfectly predict the level-off point based on only three observations (spoiler: you can’t). 

In reality, while we can say that the overall trend of the data is likely to fit to some s-curve, the individual points will not all lie along it.

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There’s a lovely animation in the post which shows how difficult it is to fit an s-curve to the available data: is it going to be huge, tiny, quick, slow?
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Google unit DeepMind tried—and failed—to win AI autonomy from parent • WSJ

Parmy Olson:

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Senior managers at Google artificial-intelligence unit DeepMind have been negotiating for years with the parent company for more autonomy, seeking an independent legal structure for the sensitive research they do.

DeepMind told staff late last month that Google called off those talks, according to people familiar with the matter. The end of the long-running negotiations, which hasn’t previously been reported, is the latest example of how Google and other tech giants are trying to strengthen their control over the study and advancement of artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Google unveiled plans to double the size of its team studying the ethics of artificial intelligence and to consolidate that research.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has called the technology key to the company’s future, and parent Alphabet has invested billions of dollars in AI. The technology, which handles tasks once the exclusive domain of humans, making life more efficient at home and work, has raised complex questions about the growing influence of computer algorithms in a wide range of public and private life.

…DeepMind’s founders had sought, among other ideas, a legal structure used by nonprofit groups, reasoning that the powerful artificial intelligence they were researching shouldn’t be controlled by a single corporate entity, according to people familiar with those plans.

On a video call last month with DeepMind staff, co-founder Demis Hassabis said the unit’s effort to negotiate a more autonomous corporate structure was over, according to people familiar with the matter. He also said DeepMind’s AI research and its application would be reviewed by an ethics board staffed mostly by senior Google executives.

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Feels like this only begins to capture the tension that must exist between the parent and subsidiary. The firings in Google’s AI ethics unit can’t have made them comfortable either.
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Once tech’s favorite economist, now a thorn in its side • The New York Times

Steve Lohr:

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Paul Romer was once Silicon Valley’s favorite economist. The theory that helped him win a Nobel prize — that ideas are the turbocharged fuel of the modern economy — resonated deeply in the global capital of wealth-generating ideas. In the 1990s, Wired magazine called him “an economist for the technological age.” The Wall Street Journal said the tech industry treated him “like a rock star.”

Not anymore.

Today, Mr. Romer, 65, remains a believer in science and technology as engines of progress. But he has also become a fierce critic of the tech industry’s largest companies, saying that they stifle the flow of new ideas. He has championed new state taxes on the digital ads sold by companies like Facebook and Google, an idea that Maryland adopted this year.

And he is hard on economists, including himself, for long supplying the intellectual cover for hands-off policies and court rulings that have led to what he calls the “collapse of competition” in tech and other industries.

“Economists taught, ‘It’s the market. There’s nothing we can do,’” Mr. Romer said. “That’s really just so wrong.”

Mr. Romer’s current call for government activism, he said, reflects “a profound change in my thinking” in recent years. It also fits into a broader re-evaluation about the tech industry and government regulation among prominent economists.

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It sounds like neoliberalism is dying an inch at a time. Only a few miles to go. The idea of local taxing on ads seems like an obvious one; the surprise is that it’s not there. And the attitude to advertising is shifting subtly.
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Belarus accused of ‘hijacking’ Ryanair flight diverted to arrest blogger • The Guardian

Andrew Roth:

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Belarus has been accused of hijacking a European jetliner and engaging in an act of state terrorism when it forced a Ryanair flight to perform an emergency landing in Minsk after a bomb threat and arrested an opposition blogger critical of authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko.

Roman Protasevich, a former editor of the influential Telegram channels Nexta and Nexta Live, was detained by police after his flight was diverted to Minsk national airport. Minsk confirmed that Lukashenko ordered his military to scramble a Mig-29 fighter to escort the plane.

The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said the plane had been “hijacked” and accused Lukashenko of a “reprehensible act of state terrorism”. He said he would demand new sanctions against Belarus at a European Council meeting scheduled for Monday.

Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the UK foreign affairs select committee, said: “If aircraft can be forced to the ground … in order to punish the political opponents of tyrants, then journalists here in the UK, politicians anywhere in Europe will find it harder to speak out.”

“We are coordinating with our allies,” said Dominic Raab, the UK foreign secretary. “This outlandish action by Lukashenko will have serious implications.”

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By the time you read this there will doubtless be a lot more happening. I do hope this isn’t like the time when I linked to an article in The Guardian in late January 2020 about a strange new disease in China.
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After the storm • Hey World

David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder at Basecamp, where a third of the staff resigned at the end of a torrid week over the company’s policies about “discussing politics” (subsequently traced at its roots to a single longserving executive who posted lots of Breitbart links in the company Slack):

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It’s been three weeks since Jason and I announced the set of workplace policy changes that led to a public firestorm and a really difficult, stressful time for everyone at Basecamp.

Since then, we’ve been regrouping, hiring new colleagues, and continued operating our services without a hitch. We have a great team in place, and everyone has been helping out wherever needed.

We’ve also kept a watchful eye on the business. While there was a small uptick in cancelations for HEY during the first tumultuous week, they were more than offset by an increase in new customer signups for Basecamp. And now both products are growing like they were before that difficult week.

When you’re in the midst of a storm like we were, it’s easy to temporarily lose hope. To feel like it’ll never pass. But it usually does, and so it did at Basecamp.

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You rarely see the followup to these media storms, which is why this is useful to see. The open question, which we won’t know for months, is how all that affected the product.
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What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks • Columbia Journalism Review

John Bowers, Clare Stanton and Jonathan Zittrain:

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Our team of researchers at Harvard Law School has undertaken a project to gain insight into the extent and characteristics of journalistic linkrot and content drift. We examined hyperlinks in New York Times articles, starting with the launch of the Times website in 1996 up through mid-2019, developed on the basis of a data set provided to us by the Times. The substantial linkrot and content drift we found here reflect the inherent difficulties of long-term linking to pieces of a volatile Web. The Times in particular is a well-resourced standard-bearer for digital journalism, with a robust institutional archiving structure. Their interest in facing the challenge of linkrot indicates that it has yet to be understood or comprehensively addressed across the field.

The data set of links on which we built our analysis was assembled by Times software engineers who extracted URLs embedded in archival articles and packaged them with basic article metadata such as section and publication date. We measured linkrot by writing a script to visit each of the unique “deep” URLs in the data set and log HTTP response codes, redirects, and server timeouts. On the basis of this analysis, we labeled each link as being “rotted” (removed or unreachable) or “intact” (returning a valid page).

We found that of the 553,693 articles within the purview of our study––meaning they included URLs on nytimes.com––there were a total of 2,283,445 hyperlinks pointing to content outside of nytimes.com. Seventy-two% of those were “deep links” with a path to a specific page, such as example.com/article, which is where we focused our analysis (as opposed to simply example.com, which composed the rest of the data set).

Of these deep links, 25% of all links were completely inaccessible. Linkrot became more common over time: 6% of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43% of links from 2008 and 72% of links from 1998. 53% of all articles that contained deep links had at least one rotted link. 

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Check your financial privilege • Bitcoin Magazine

Alex Gladstein:

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While Western headlines focus on Coinbase going public, Tesla buying billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin and tech bros getting fabulously rich, there is a quiet revolution happening worldwide. Until now, governments and corporations have controlled the rules of money. That is changing.

To learn more, the author spoke to Bitcoin users in Sudan, Nigeria and Ethiopia, three countries with a combined population of 366 million, well in excess of the number of individuals living in the United States.

The three speak for millions whose lived experience is much closer to that of the average person on this planet. Gates, Munger and Buffett may not have recently dealt with conflict and violence, black markets, relentless inflation, political repression, and rampant corruption in their daily routine, but most do.

And yet, these Bitcoiners are more hopeful for the future than the doomers listed above. For them, Bitcoin is a protest, a lifeline and a way out.

Here are their stories.

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This has individuals’ stories from Nigeria, Sudan and Ethiopia. They’re definitely interesting; yet the visible weakness of each of their positions is that their governments could, and to some extent already do, shut down much of the trading. And they see bitcoin (mostly; though they use other coins too) as a currency, not a speculative asset in the way its boosters in the west seem to.
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Apple VP talks Apple TV 4K living room takeover, gaming and the future of the streaming platform • Mobile Syrup

Patrick O’Rourke interviews Tim Twerdahl, Apple’s vp of product marketing for home and audio:

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Q: Was there ever any thought to adding some sort of U1 AirTag-like technology in the 2nd-gen Siri Remote? I’m always losing the remote in my couch cushions and it seems like it would be a great idea. Did Apple not bother because the ‘Find My’ network is more designed for use outside of the home?

Twerdahl: We are super excited about AirTags and what we’re doing with U1, and part of that power is the Find My network and the fact that we can leverage a billion devices around the world to help you find stuff.

To your point, that is the most powerful out of the home. With the changes we’ve made to the Siri Remote — including making it a bit thicker so it won’t fall in your couch cushions as much — that need to have all these other network devices find it seems a little bit lower.

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I suspect that Apple has had this “new” remote in-house for years. But something or someone was blocking it being released. It’s so much more usable than what went before. Is it possible that, like the HomePod, Apple drastically overestimated demand for the Apple TV, made a ton of the dire remotes, and was left with surplus stock it refused to junk and waited to sell off?
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About lossless audio in Apple Music • Apple Support

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What you need to know about lossless in Apple Music

• Streaming lossless audio over a cellular or Wi-Fi network consumes significantly more data. And downloading lossless audio uses significantly more space on your device. Higher resolutions use more data than lower ones.
• AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and Beats wireless headphones use Apple AAC Bluetooth Codec to ensure excellent audio quality. However, Bluetooth connections aren’t lossless.
• To get a lossless version of music that you already downloaded from Apple Music, just delete the music and redownload it from the Apple Music catalog.

…Can I listen to lossless audio on my HomePod or HomePod mini?

• HomePod and HomePod mini currently use AAC to ensure excellent audio quality. Support for lossless is coming in a future software update.

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Totally, utterly pointless, especially on the Homepod mini, which has sound quality concomitant with its orange-sized volume to begin with. Lossless takes about 10 times more data, and you won’t be able to hear the difference.

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It’s Monday (somewhere): why not preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book?

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Ever wondered how those CD-Rs you burnt a few years back are faring? CC-licensed photo by Daniel Dreier 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. Twenty down, 31 to go. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Snap’s new Spectacles let you see the world in augmented reality • The Verge

Alex Heath:

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Snap’s new Spectacles glasses are its most ambitious yet. But there’s a big catch: you can’t buy them.

On Thursday, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel unveiled the company’s first true augmented reality glasses, technology that he and rivals like Facebook think will one day be as ubiquitous as mobile phones. A demo showed virtual butterflies fluttering over colourful plants and landing in Spiegel’s extended hand.

The new Spectacles have dual waveguide displays capable of superimposing AR effects made with Snapchat’s software tools. The frame features four built-in microphones, two stereo speakers, and a built-in touchpad. Front-facing cameras help the glasses detect objects and surfaces you’re looking at so that graphics more naturally interact with the world around you.

These Spectacles, however, aren’t ready for the mass market. Unlike past models, Snap isn’t selling them. Instead, it’s giving them directly to an undisclosed number of AR effects creators through an application program online. (Another indication they aren’t ready for everyday use: the battery only lasts 30 minutes.)

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They look appalling. Snap has been driving a ton of publicity for these, giving interviews with anyone who will listen. Such as the FT:

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“Nobody else is doing this right now, in the way that we are and in the form factor that we are,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times, adding: “I don’t think people expect us to be this far along. Every other product out there is like a helmet.”

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I’m not sure Magic Leap (remember them?) would be too impressed by that suggestion. Ugly for sure, but not a helmet. Snap keeps trying, and keeps missing. AR spectacles: tech’s real unicorn.
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The particular psychology of destroying a planet • The New Yorker

Bill McKibben:

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What kind of thinking goes into adopting a tobacco-industry strategy to protect a business model as you wreck the climate system? (And it’s not just Exxon—here’s an analysis of how Big Meat is playing the same climate tricks.)

No one, of course, can peer inside the heads of oil-company executives or those of their enablers in the legal, financial, and political worlds. But there’s an interesting explanation in a new book from the British psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe. “Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis” states its argument in its subtitle: “Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare.”

Weintrobe writes that people’s psyches are divided into caring and uncaring parts, and the conflict between them “is at the heart of great literature down the ages, and all major religions.” The uncaring part wants to put ourselves first; it’s the narcissistic corners of the brain that persuade each of us that we are uniquely important and deserving, and make us want to except ourselves from the rules that society or morality set so that we can have what we want. “Most people’s caring self is strong enough to hold their inner exception in check,” she notes, but, troublingly, “ours is the Golden Age of Exceptionalism.”

Neoliberalism—especially the ideas of people such as Ayn Rand, enshrined in public policy by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—“crossed a Rubicon in the 1980s” and neoliberals “have been steadily consolidating their power ever since.”

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Apple has ‘lost interest in TV’ claims top analyst • Digital TV Europe

Jonathan Easton:

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Speaking at Freeview’s Out Of the Box event, top analyst Benedict Evans said that “ownership of content has no strategic value to tech companies,” and specifically said that “Apple has lost interest in TV.”

The analyst said that “it is important to remember what the tech players are trying to achieve by investing in video” and suggested that the device-agnostic nature of streaming services is antithetical to the strategy of companies like Apple and Google.

He added that “For tech players, the TV as a device is just another user endpoint like a smart door lock.”

Evans questioned how important the Apple TV+ SVOD business is to the iPhone maker, posing the hypothetical “Does Tim Cook get daily updates on content deals that Apple has done?”

The analyst said that Amazon, while being a prolific device maker, is a different case as it “has this big subscription business” that it needs to maintain and grow, and that the company “looks for things with no marginal cost that they can bundle onto Prime subscriptions.”

One way for Amazon to boost Prime is via the addition of content for Prime Video, with the company reportedly eyeing a US$9bn purchase of MGM. Evans suggested that the purchase of MGM would be a way for Amazon to go from a “secondary-tier” streaming service to a “top-tier” SVOD capable of truly rivalling the likes of Netflix.

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I’d have thought Cook would have been told when TV+ secured the Tom Hanks film last year, or that audience response was positive enough to justify a second season of Ted Lasso. But Apple isn’t a content producer in the same way as Netflix.
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The CDs you burned are going bad: here’s what you need to do • How To Geek

Ben Edwards:

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If you used a computer between 1997 and 2005, you probably burned valuable data to at least one recordable CD (CD-R) or DVD-R. Unfortunately, these have a limited lifespan, and many have already become unreadable. That’s why it’s important to back up your recordable discs before it’s too late—here’s how to do it.

CD-Rs and DVD-Rs store data on a layer of dye that is melted by the laser when the data is written. This dye layer isn’t completely stable and can chemically break down over time, causing data loss. Also, the reflective layer on the top of the disc can oxidize, making the data difficult to read.

As a result, many CD-R and DVD-Rs burned in the late ’90s and early ’00s are now unreadable in modern optical disc drives. And for those that remain, the clock is ticking.

Estimates on the lifespan of CD- and DVD-Rs vary wildly, from between two and 100 years. In 2004, the U.S. Library of Congress sponsored a study that estimated the shelf life of recordable discs available at that time. It simulated the aging of CD- and DVD-Rs stored in perfect environmental conditions (that is, a room temperature of 50% humidity with no sunlight, and no rough handling).

The study concluded that most recordable discs stored in ideal conditions would last at least 30 years, but the results varied wildly by brand. However, it also stated that “discs exposed to more severe conditions of temperature and humidity would be expected to experience a shorter life.”

So, if you store your CD- or DVD-Rs in a hot attic, you might find a higher portion of them have gone bad.

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I’m thinking of all the CD-Rs that I burnt, and I’m worried that I’ve no longer got a disk drive that can read CD-Rs. Seriously: does the average user have any need for their 15-plus-year-old CD-Rs?
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Apple previews powerful software updates designed for people with disabilities • Apple

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To support users with limited mobility, Apple is introducing a revolutionary new accessibility feature for Apple Watch. AssistiveTouch for watchOS allows users with upper body limb differences to enjoy the benefits of Apple Watch without ever having to touch the display or controls. Using built-in motion sensors like the gyroscope and accelerometer, along with the optical heart rate sensor and on-device machine learning, Apple Watch can detect subtle differences in muscle movement and tendon activity, which lets users navigate a cursor on the display through a series of hand gestures, like a pinch or a clench. AssistiveTouch on Apple Watch enables customers who have limb differences to more easily answer incoming calls, control an onscreen motion pointer, and access Notification Center, Control Center, and more.

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When I’d only read the headlines and before I’d watched the video, I was very “suuure” about this. Then you watch the video: this lets you control your Watch using your fist (clench twice – a neat echo of the double-click from the first Macintosh) or pinching (like the iPhone). In effect, it adds a mouse pointer to the Watch – but you don’t have a mouse. It’s very, very clever. So follow the link and watch the video.
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Citizen app falsely accuses man of starting California brush fire • Gizmodo

Dharna Noor:

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California’s wildfire season is already underway (well, it may never have actually stopped), and state investigators are looking into what ignited a 1,325-acre brush fire that’s currently burning through Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades and Topanga Canyon neighborhoods.

They believe an arsonist may have started the blaze and currently have two suspects detained for questioning. But that’s not before users of the Citizen app led to someone being detained without sufficient evidence. Citizen is a phone app that sends users real-time, location-based safety alerts when crimes and other potentially dangerous events happen in their area. On Sunday, the app sent Los Angeles users a photograph of a man purportedly suspected of starting the fire, along with the promise of a cash reward for providing information.

“Citizen is offering a $30,000 reward to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of the arson suspect,” the notification said. Cerise Castle, a journalist following along as broadcasters on the app talked about the fire, tweeted that they were “repeating unsubstantiated ‘tips’ as facts and asking people to ‘hunt this guy down’. One of the tips just played out in air as being a lie.”

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Citizen then retracted the posting, saying “it was a ‘mistake’ to have posted the photo, which came from a tipster, without ‘formal’ coordination with authorities.”

Reminiscent in its way of the way that Reddit users “found” the Boston Marathon bomber in 2013. Same mistakes, over and over. (The “Citizen” app was previously called “Vigilante”.)
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Apple wants users to trust iOS, but it doesn’t trust iOS users • The Verge

Adi Robertson on the testimony of Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering:

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Epic Games sued Apple to force its hand, saying that if an open model is good enough for macOS, Apple’s claims about iOS ring hollow. On the stand yesterday, Federighi tried to resolve this problem by portraying iPhones and Macs as dramatically different devices — and in the process, threw macOS under the bus.

Federighi outlined three main differences between iOS and macOS. The first is scale. Far more people use iPhones than Macs, and the more users a platform gets, the more enticing that audience becomes to malware developers. Federighi argued iOS users are also much more casual about downloading software, giving attackers better odds of luring them into a download. “iOS users are just accustomed to getting apps all the time,” he said, citing Apple’s old catchphrase: “There’s an app for that.”

The second difference is data sensitivity. “iPhones are very attractive targets. They are very personal devices that are with you all the time. They have some of your most personal information — of course your contacts, your photos, but also other things,” he said. Mobile devices put a camera, microphone, and GPS tracker in your pocket. “All of these things make access or control of these devices potentially incredibly valuable to an attacker.”

That may undersell private interactions with Macs; Epic’s counsel Yonatan Even noted that many telemedicine calls and other virtual interactions happen on desktop. Still, it’s fair to say phones have become many people’s all-purpose digital lockboxes.

The third difference is more conceptual. Federighi basically says iOS users need to be more protected because the Mac is a specialist tool for people who know how to navigate the complexities of a powerful system, while the iPhone and iPad are — literally — for babies.

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Semiconductor shortage enters ‘danger zone’ as lead times rise • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

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The semiconductor shortage affecting much of the world’s chip production is still worsening, in at least some markets. The average lead time for chip deliveries increased to 17 weeks in April, up from 16 weeks in March. Just before the beginning of the pandemic began, average lead time was running around 12 weeks.

“All major product categories up considerably,” Susquehanna analyst Chris Rolland wrote in a recent investment note. “These were some of the largest increases since we started tracking the data.” Bloomberg notes that Susquehanna referred to this as a “danger zone” for chips as the risk of buyers engaging in behavior that magnifies the impact of the crisis increases.

Auto manufacturers have signaled they expect to lose out on $110 billion in potential sales this year, due to a shortage of parts. The problem with these types of shortfalls is that they encourage behavior like hoarding. A company that can’t ship a $50,000 final product due to a shortage of $5 parts has every reason on Earth to hoard and stockpile said parts, whether they actually need them or not.

…Hoarding now could make the long-term economic hangover worse by depressing demand during what would otherwise have been a rebound. Other factors mentioned include the impact of an ongoing drought on Taiwan, where the annual monsoon rainy season has yet to begin, and the spike in COVID-19 cases on the island, but these are recent developments. Component lead times have risen for four straight months.

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Relaunching verification and what’s next • Twitter blog

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The blue badge is one of the ways we help people distinguish the authenticity of accounts that are of high public interest. It gives people on Twitter more context about who they’re having conversations with so they can determine if it’s trustworthy, which our research has shown leads to healthier, more informed conversations. 

With today’s application launch, we’re also introducing new guidelines for verified accounts on Twitter. These verification guidelines are intended to encourage healthy conversations for the betterment of the Twitter community overall. They follow the philosophy to lead by example, Tweet others how they want to be Tweeted, and serve the public conversation authentically, respectfully, and with consideration. As always, all accounts, including verified accounts, must follow the Twitter Rules. And as we previously shared, verified accounts that repeatedly violate the Twitter Rules are subject to have the blue badge removed.

To qualify for verification, you must fit the criteria of one of the six categories listed below:
• Government
• Companies, brands and organizations
• News organizations and journalists
• Entertainment
• Sports and gaming
• Activists, organizers, and other influential individuals.

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Apparently parody accounts can’t get verified. Ted Lasso is verified. Ergo, Ted Lasso is real. Twitter logic.
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Freenode IRC staff quit after new owner “seizes” control of network • Boing Boing

Rob Beschizza:

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Staff at the freenode IRC network have resigned en-masse after control of it passed to what one described as a “narcissistic Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire.” Resignation letters piled up from Fuchs, Ed Kellett, Emīls Piņķis, Jessica Sophie Porter and others, capping weeks of drama in the FOSS world’s biggest chatbox.

Aaron Jones details the sequence of events and concludes that “a hostile entity is now in operational control over the network, and is in posession of your data.” Another resignee, Svante Bengtson, puts it succinctly:

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During the past few months in general, and last weeks in particular, it has become increasingly clear that the owners of the holding company freenode Ltd have been planning a hostile takeover of the freenode network. That takeover is now about to happen, and I cannot in good faith volunteer for this “new” freenode. freenode Ltd’s current owners’ values do not align with the values freenode the network was founded on and operated under up until now.

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Yet another. Marco d’Itri, puts it in still-blunter terms:

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To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly “sold” the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much that we can do about it without some of us risking financial ruin.

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Important in the world of open source software: 80,000 users on 40,000 channels, 26 years old.
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Preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How much is everyone looking forward to getting back to commuting? Not very much, apparently. CC-licensed photo by Brian Sawyer 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. Nearly essential. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Still a little time to
preorder Social Warming, out June 24.

Apple asks court to rule iOS is not an ‘essential facility’ • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

»

After two and a half weeks in court, Apple is taking aim at one of the central elements of Epic’s antitrust case. In a filing Tuesday night, Apple asked the court to dismiss one of the 10 counts alleged in the initial complaint, arguing Epic had failed to establish any evidence for the charge that Apple had violated the essential facilities doctrine by failing to provide access to software distribution tools on iOS.

“At trial, Epic adduced no proof in support of this claim,” Apple’s filing reads. “On the contrary, Epic’s principal expert expressly disclaimed any opinion on essential facility, and (in response to a direct question from the Court) rejected the notion that iOS should be treated as a public utility. The Court should enter judgment for Apple on this claim.”

Filed as a motion for partial findings, Apple is pushing to split off the essential facilities charge from the other nine charges made in Epic’s initial complaint. In essence, Apple believes it can win a quick victory on this specific point. That won’t settle the case entirely since the other nine charges still require a ruling, but it would be an unexpected and embarrassing loss for Epic.

…The essential facilities doctrine is a long-standing element of antitrust law that prevents dominant firms from using bottleneck services to box out competitors. In a foundational example from 1912, a railroad consortium prevented competitors from offering passage to and from St. Louis by denying access to switching yards around the city. The Supreme Court ruled that the arrangement was an illegal restraint of trade, establishing that companies must provide reasonable use of facilities that are essential for competitors.

In its complaint, Epic argues that app distribution on iOS is the same kind of bottleneck, charging that Apple has used its control over the iOS platform to prevent Epic and other competitors from offering competing app stores.

…But Apple is now countering that Epic has reasonable access to iOS through the App Store itself — and that iOS customers are plainly not essential to the operation of its business since the company has been broadly successful without them.

«

Another win surely in the offing for Apple’s lawyers here, but the extent to which the workings (and money!) of the App Store have been laid bare, along with all the embarrassing emails. Epic has had to bear that too, but not quite so badly.
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Google AMP is dead! AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search • Plausible Analytics

Marko Saric:

»

Google is rolling out a significant change as a part of their page experience ranking algorithm in June 2021.

From the release of the Core Web Vitals and the page experience algorithm, there is no longer any preferential treatment for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in Google’s search results, Top Stories carousel and the Google News. Google will even remove the AMP badge icon from the search results.

You can now safely ignore Google AMP when building a more diverse and more exciting web without any artificial restrictions set by the adtech giant.

Here’s what Google had to say:

»

The Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.

We’re also bringing similar updates to the Google News app, a key destination for users around the world to get a comprehensive view of the important news of the day. As part of the page experience update, we’re expanding the usage of non-AMP content to power the core experience on news.google.com and in the Google News app.

Additionally, we will no longer show the AMP badge icon to indicate AMP content

«

«

That’s a surprise. Pushback from publishers? Wary of antitrust?
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Commuting is psychological torture • Welcome to Hell World

Luke O’Neil:

»

So how has not having to commute every day changed people’s lives this year and in the recent past? Here’s some of what people told me below. Responses have been lightly edited or condensed. There are a lot of them so you know maybe you don’t have to read them all but who cares.

• No one’s stopping anyone who works from home from going out and riding in circles on the subway for 30 minutes before they go back to their desk.

• I save roughly $100 a month now. I have time in the morning to take my dog for a long walk every day. I have time in the evening to cook dinner. Commuting is psychological torture and my physical and mental health is significantly better without it.

• The three hours I spent commuting is now an extra hour of sleep, 30 minutes of exercise, two meals with my family, and 30 minutes of more actual work. I’m happier, healthier, and a better employee, but these effing vampires want me to be in the office more for some reason.

• Any unpaid commute is wage theft.

• When my wife and I were both commuting into the city we spent over $650 on monthly passes for trains that were on time 80% of the time if we were lucky. I doubt I’ll ever take a city job again.

• I love to drive 30 minutes to stare at a different computer.

«

And plenty more where that came from. People really don’t like commuting.
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Google just fixed the worst thing about dealing with hacked passwords • BGR

Chris Smith:

»

Chrome’s password manager already checks saved passwords against lists of compromised credentials to determine whether hackers have obtained access to any of your online accounts. Whenever it finds a breached account, it notifies users to change their password, and this is where the tedious process begins.

But you have to navigate to the app or service in question, and manually change the password to something else that’s unique and strong, and then update the password in your password manager apps, Chrome included. The process isn’t difficult, but it’s tedious enough for some people to postpone changing the password to later and then forget about doing it.

Google announced at I/O 2021 a feature that only Google would be able to pull off. Google can automatically change the password of a breached account, performing the same steps above automatically on supported sites. All you need to do is tap a button when Google tells you an account was breached. That’s the new “Change password” option from the Assistant.

“When you tap the button, Chrome will not only navigate to the site but also go through the entire process of changing your password,” Google explains in a blog post. Users can still get involved in the process or do it manually from the start. But Google Assistant simplifies all that.

«

When it arrives, that’s going to be a terrific feature. (iOS is currently telling me that a gazillion passwords have been exposed in a breach. But: 2FA.)
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Amazon partners with Tile to take on Apple AirTags • CNBC

Jon Fortt and Fahiemah Al-Ali:

»

Amazon announced Friday that it is partnering with Tile, a company that makes trackers for lost items, and Level, which makes smart locks, to use those devices to enhance its tracking network based on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology.

The strength and number of devices on a given tracking network is key to its accuracy. That’s part of the reason why many think Apple’s tracking network will be so strong since it relies on more than 1 billion iPhones, iPads and Macs to help with lost item tracking.

Tile has also been vocal against Apple’s entry into the lost-item tracking space, recently telling Congress that it and other app developers are “afraid” of Apple’s policies for third-party apps and hardware accessories.

Amazon’s partnership will allow it beef up its tracking network, called Sidewalk, by letting Tile and Level devices tap into the Bluetooth networks created by millions of its Echo products. Tile will start working with Amazon’s network beginning June 14.

…Sidewalk rolled out late last year and is billed as a free network sharing service throughout neighborhoods that uses Echo devices as “bridges” to share a small fraction of a users’ low-bandwidth Wi-Fi with devices like Echo devices and Ring cameras.

…Amazon said Sidewalk will also strengthen Tile’s existing in-home finding experience with Alexa. Customers can say, “Alexa, find my keys” and their Tile tracker will start ringing from a coat pocket or from under the bed signaling where to find their lost item.

«

Don’t know why Amazon doesn’t just buy Tile. Perhaps because that would spoil Tile’s complaint to Congress that it’s the small guy getting beaten up by big Apple.
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Insider Q&A: Sophie Zhang, Facebook whistleblower

Barbara Ortutay talks to the woman who was looking at election malfeasance and interference inside Facebook – in her spare time:

»

Q: How did you get into the work you did?

A: When I joined the company I was, like many people, deeply affected by Russia 2016. And I decided to start looking for overlap between inauthentic activity and political targets. And I started finding many results in many places, particularly what we call the global South, in Honduras, Brazil, India.

Honduras got my attention because it had a very large amount (of inauthentic behavior) compared to the others. This was very unsophisticated activity we are talking about. Literal bots. And then I realized that this was essentially a troll farm being run quite openly by an employee of the president of Honduras. And that seemed extraordinarily awful.

Q: Then what did you do?

A: I talked about it internally. Essentially everyone agreed that it was bad. No one wants to be defending this sort of activity, but people couldn’t agree on whose job it was to deal with it.

I was trying desperately to find anyone who cared. I talked with my manager and their manager. I talked to the threat intelligence team. I talked with many integrity teams. It took almost a year for anything to happen.

Q: You’ve said there is a priority list of countries. What happens to countries that aren’t on that list?

A: It’s not a hard and fast rule. Facebook does takedowns in small countries, too. But most of these takedowns are reactive, by which I mean they come from outside groups — tips from opposition groups, tips from NGOs, reporter investigations, reports from the CIA, etc. What happened in this case was that no one outside the company was complaining.

«

Classic big company behaviour: it’s totally internally focussed unless driven by something external, and responsibilities dribble around if they aren’t part of the mission forced from the top.
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US small towns take on energy-guzzling bitcoin miners • Reuters Foundation

Avi Asher-Schapiro:

»

In mid-April, nearly 150 local environmentalists marched to the gates of Greenidge Generation, a bitcoin mining facility in upstate New York, in a last-ditch effort to block its expansion.

Their objection: that the creation of the cryptocurrency, an energy-intensive process in which computers compete to solve mathematical puzzles, may harm efforts to limit global warming.

Three days later, the planning board in the small town of Torrey voted 4-1 to allow Greenidge Generation to more than double the number of machines it has mining bitcoin.

“Everything we want to do to fight climate change could be erased,” Yvonne Taylor, one of the march’s leaders, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

…In 2018, Plattsburgh, New York, imposed a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining, after it became the city’s top power consumer.

And earlier this month, lawmakers introduced a proposal to suspend cryptocurrency mining operations for three years throughout New York state, as it carries out a review of the industry’s environmental impact.

Officials also recently took steps to limit that impact in Missoula County, Montana, where operations take advantage of cheap electricity from a local hydropower plant.

“At a certain point, this industry was using about a third of all of the county’s electricity,” said Diana Maneta, the county’s sustainability officer.

«

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Climate change meant Hurricane Sandy caused $8bn more damage • New Scientist

Karina Shah:

»

Rising sea levels, linked to climate change, are known to worsen the effects of coastal storms by intensifying storm surges and increasing floods. Benjamin Strauss at Climate Central in New Jersey and his colleagues have now estimated the economic costs of human-induced sea level rise on Hurricane Sandy [in late 2012].

The team focused on the damage in the US, using a flood model that simulated the actual water levels during Hurricane Sandy on the US east coast. The group then compared this with the simulation of how much damage there would have been without human-induced sea level rise – estimated as 10.5cm in total between 1900 and 2012.

There was a difference of $8.1bn in damages between the real costs to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and costs for scenarios without human-induced sea level rise. However, this could have been as high as $14bn using higher estimates for human-induced sea level rise.

“Climate change is already harming us a lot more than we may realise,” says Strauss. “Most, if not all, coastal floods around the world today, and especially for the last half century, have been made worse.”

The team’s model also estimates that between 40,000 and 131,000 more people in the US were exposed to flooding than would have been the case in the absence of human-induced sea level rise. This equates to approximately 36,000 housing units.

«

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Everything we didn’t see at Google I/O • Android Authority

Eric Zeman:

»

The Google I/O keynote has come and gone and was chock full of exciting news.

Among the announcements, we learned about a fresh design for Android 12, with upgrades to your privacy, and about Google’s new partnership with Samsung to revitalize Wear OS. We also saw how Google Photos would surface old memories and take better photos of people of color.

While there was plenty to love during the Google I/O keynote, there was also plenty left out of the presentation. Here’s a look at what Google didn’t show us — nor even talk about! — during its I/O keynote.

«

Stadia, Chrome and Chrome OS, Pixel Buds, the Pixel itself, Android tablets, and the in-house Whitechapel chip that will drive the phone. You wouldn’t really expect them to talk about hardware, so the phones, earphones and chip wouldn’t come up. But tablets and Stadia – nothing new happening there.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Popular belief says that the second-cheapest wine in a restaurant is the worst value. Turns out that’s wrong. CC-licensed photo by Wendy House 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. No corkage. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Try this one weird trick Russian hackers hate • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

In Russia, for example, authorities there generally will not initiate a cybercrime investigation against one of their own unless a company or individual within the country’s borders files an official complaint as a victim. Ensuring that no affiliates can produce victims in their own countries is the easiest way for these criminals to stay off the radar of domestic law enforcement agencies.

…DarkSide, like a great many other malware strains, has a hard-coded do-not-install list of countries which are the principal members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) — former Soviet satellites that mostly have favorable relations with the Kremlin. [A full list of CIS countries is included in the article.]

Simply put, countless malware strains will check for the presence of one of these languages on the system, and if they’re detected the malware will exit and fail to install.

(Side note. Many security experts have pointed to connections between the DarkSide and REvil (a.k.a. “Sodinokibi”) ransomware groups. REvil was previously known as GandCrab, and one of the many things GandCrab had in common with REvil was that both programs barred affiliates from infecting victims in Syria. As we can see from the chart above, Syria is also exempted from infections by DarkSide ransomware. And DarkSide itself proved their connection to REvil this past week when it announced it was closing up shop after its servers and bitcoin funds were seized.)

Will installing one of these languages keep your Windows computer safe from all malware? Absolutely not. There is plenty of malware that doesn’t care where in the world you are. And there is no substitute for adopting a defense-in-depth posture, and avoiding risky behaviors online.

But is there really a downside to taking this simple, free, prophylactic approach? None that I can see, other than perhaps a sinking feeling of capitulation. The worst that could happen is that you accidentally toggle the language settings and all your menu options are in Russian.

«

Hoping that this will get an empirical test by some security companies, because it would be even cheaper than backups. No doubt the next step will be that add-on Russian language packs sold in English will have a trojan in them, which installs ransomware.
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Google I/O 2021: the biggest announcements • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Google just finished its live Google I/O 2021 keynote, where the company unveiled a huge number of announcements, including a new look coming to Android, a bunch of features coming to its Google Workspace productivity suite, and even a new AI that talked as if it were Pluto.

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn followed the whole thing in real time right here on our live blog. But if you just want to get caught up on the biggest news from the show, read on for our recap.

«

Plenty of bits and bobs (some quite a way off). Notable things: Android 12 will let you prevent individual apps having access to the mic and camera; Wear OS has (as predicted) pulled in Samsung, which is giving up on Tizen, and there will be a Fitbit smartwatch running Wear OS.
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This is why hardly anyone buys Google’s Pixel phones • WIRED UK

Adam Speight:

»

If you don’t recall seeing a Pixel advert on TV, or think it’s a rarity, the breakdown of Google’s ad spend explains this. Google spent just £14m on TV ad spend in the [UK since 2016] while Apple spent £75m and Samsung shelled out a whopping £124m. Samsung is spending more than three times as much on just its TV campaigns than Google’s entire Pixel ad spend in the UK.

Google isn’t short on resource, so this begs the question, why isn’t it spending more to get the Pixel out there? This question was being posed way back in 2016, with Wharton University publishing an article titled “Why Google’s Pixel is more about strategy than smartphones.” Professor of management David Hsu stated: “The main business of Google is enabling their advertising revenue model. Hardware is always going to pale in comparison.”

Also, in 2016, both Hsu and assistant professor of business economics and public policy Michael Sinkinson suggested the Pixel range should’ve been priced more aggressively. Since then, the “a” series of Pixels and Pixel 5 have done just that, yet not much else has changed. In the same article, Gerald Faulhauber, professor emeritus of business economics and public policy, argued Pixel would likely be around for “a couple of years and go away”. You’d forgive Faulhauber for thinking this, given Google’s track record, but the company is sticking at it.

Google’s Pixel marketing plan has demonstrated there’s plenty of room for it to invest more. But Counterpoint Research’s Neil Shah thinks Google may be stuck between a rock and a hard place. “Google is in a Catch-22 situation with its hardware strategy. Google’s DNA is cloud, software and AI – it’s not hardware. Also, building your own hardware and competing with your partners, especially Samsung or Chinese vendors, is not healthy in long run.” This argument was made before the launch of the Pixel though, whether vendors would be happy about the company behind Android making its own phone, but Google pushed on.

«

Even if the next Pixel is based on Google’s own chips, that’s not what matters: it takes huge investment not just in advertising, but also in getting carriers to adopt them and push them to customers. Samsung and Apple have done huge amounts of work on that. Google, rather less.
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All fossil fuel exploration needs to end this year, IEA says • Ars Technica

Tim de Chant:

»

To limit global warming to 1.5˚C by the end of the century, the world has to deploy clean technologies en masse while slashing investment in new oil, gas, and coal supplies, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency.

Getting to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 will require a historic deployment of widespread renewable power, electric vehicles, and new technologies, many of which are only now in the prototype stage. To get a jump-start, we’ll need to double our investments in clean technologies to $4 trillion by the end of the decade.

“The pathway to net zero by 2050 is narrow but still achievable if governments act now,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a tweet. Most of the reductions in CO2 emissions through 2030 will come from technologies already on the market. But in 2050, almost half will come from technologies that are still in development.

“Big leaps in innovation are needed by 2030 to get these technologies ready in time,” Birol added.

The report comes as we’re unlikely to hit net zero by 2050.

«

“Unlikely” is putting it mildly. Without some amazing technology that pulls carbon (dioxide) out of the atmosphere, there’s no way of hitting that target or of limiting temperatures.
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Clubhouse Users in America • Edison Research

»

According to a new study from Edison Research entitled “Clubhouse Users in America,” 15% of social media users 18+ say they have ever used Clubhouse, the invitation-only audio-based social networking platform that debuted last year. Data for this first look at Clubhouse users is from Edison Research’s weekly social media tracking service, The Social Habit, which provides ongoing behavior and usage data for all major social media platforms.

Although Clubhouse has a relatively small number of users compared to other social media networking services, it has garnered significant attention due to its premise of shared audio spaces and the exclusive nature of its invitation-only membership. Clubhouse Users in America found that the percentage of social media users who use Clubhouse remained relatively flat over the survey period (Feb 2021 – Apr 2021) and that time spent using the service declined in April. However, those that do use the service use it often, with 44% of Clubhouse users saying they use the service at least once per day, and 28% saying they use it at least once per week.

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Two-thirds male, 59% are white, 56% aged 18-34. That might sound promising, but it’s down there with Gab and Parler in the “have you ever used” category. If the Android version doesn’t kickstart things then it’s going to slide out of view. The iPhone user base seems played out, if usage declined in April.
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Delivery text scams: the nasty new fraud wave sweeping the UK • The Guardian

Hilary Osborne:

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Scams making use of delivery firms’ names are not new, but the online shopping boom – and confusion over new fees that have come in since the Brexit transition period ended on 31 December – have given fraudsters a bigger pool of potential victims to phish in. Previous incarnations – which have involved cards put through letterboxes asking recipients to phone premium-rate numbers, as well as texts – tended to happen around Christmas, when people expected parcels from friends and, in more recent years, online deliveries.

With lockdown, we have all become mail-order shoppers, meaning more chance of a spam text landing with someone who is expecting a parcel. Action Fraud, the UK’s national reporting centre for these types of crimes, wasn’t able to give figures across the delivery industry, but says that between June 2020 and January 2021 it received 2,867 crime reports mentioning DPD, and that victims reported losing £3.4m over the same period. In December, the equivalent of 533 fake DPD emails a day were sent on to the suspicious email reporting service, which was launched last year.

When the Guardian asked readers if they had fallen victim to the scam, it received more than 120 responses in five days. Some were from people who had been taken in by the text and the website, and put in their details before smelling a rat. Others had got as far as pressing enter before they realised something was amiss. Others had been caught out completely.

«

This is the consequence of the requirement that the UK government can tap phones. I wonder when that fact will start to seep into the public consciousness.
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Apple may build 40-core ARM-based Mac Pro, plans 10-core MacBook Pro • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

»

Bloomberg reports that Apple is prepping multiple new M-class variants for different markets. We don’t know how Apple is branding the CPUs, but we’ve heard “M2” floated recently. Supposedly, we’ll see a new round of MacBook Pro systems, “followed by a revamped MacBook Air, a new low-end MacBook Pro, and an all-new Mac Pro workstation.” There are also reports of a revamped Mac mini and a larger iMac system, both with a CPU intended to greatly outperform the current M1.

…The MacBook Pro is said to be getting a new eight-core CPU with six high-performance CPU cores and just two high-efficiency cores. That’s an interesting switch, given that the high-efficiency cores on the M1 are partly responsible for why the system reportedly feels so responsive. Many background workloads are handled by the low-power IceStorm cores, freeing the FireStorm cores to immediately update the GUI or respond to user input. An improved neural engine, up to 64GB of onboard RAM, and additional Thunderbolt ports are all promised for the new hardware.

It’s the new Mac Pro, however, that really sounds like a game-changer. This system may not appear until next year, but it’s said to be based on the Jade 2C-Die and Jade 4C-Die, with either 20 or 40 CPU cores.

«

The new MacBook Pros do sound like fun. Honestly all I’m waiting for is the bigger screen – the 16in. If there were an M1 portable with that screen size, I think I’d be happy.

The timing of Bloomberg’s story suggests that these could be announced at WWDC. That would be good. (I didn’t use Bloomberg’s story, but instead a writeup of it, is because I can’t bear the tortured language Mark Gurman is obliged to use – “expected to debut as soon as early this summer, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter”. Just call them “sources” and have done with it.)
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Chia coin spurs HDD shortage: prices up, high capacities sell out • Tom’s Hardware

Anton Shilov:

»

The number of hard drives sold each year has declined recently due to the migration of consumer PCs to SSDs, and also demand for higher-capacity HDDs by exascale datacenters. As a result, HDD makers no longer produce as many drives as they used to six or seven years ago (they have even adjusted production capacities to cut costs). Also, wholesalers and retailers no longer carry as many HDDs in reserve. Consequently, when demand for HDDs spikes, retailers sell out quickly, and prices increase as dealers come into play.

This is apparently what happened to the prices of HDDs in recent weeks as many popular models got $100, $200, or even $300 more expensive than they were just a few days ago. There are various reasons why the demand for hard drives is increasing. Still, considering how fast space allocated to the Chia network is growing (from 1 exabyte to 6 exabytes in about two weeks), we have every reason to believe that Chia cryptocurrency farming is a major factor that affects HDD availability and pricing in the channel and retail. Chia ‘farmers’ use all types of drives (mostly high-capacity models, though), so it is getting increasingly hard to buy a high-capacity HDD.

«

Good grief, it’s like mad obsessions taking over everything. The final stage will surely be a cryptocurrency based on paperclips.
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Deepfake dubs could help translate film and TV without losing an actor’s original performance • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

We often think of deepfakes as manipulating the entire image of a person or scene, but Flawless’ technology focuses on just a single element: the mouth. Customers feed the company’s software with video from a film or TV show along with dubbed dialogue recorded by humans. Flawless’ machine learning models then create new lip movements that match the translated speech and paste them automatically onto the actor’s head.

“When someone’s watching this dubbed footage, they’re not jolted out of the performance by a jarring word or a mistimed mouth movement,” Flawless’ co-founder Nick Lynes tells The Verge. “It’s all about retaining the performance and retaining the original style.”

Flawless Demo – www.flawlessai.com from Flawless on Vimeo.

The results — despite the company’s name — aren’t 100% flawless, but they are pretty good. You can see and hear how they look in the demo reel above, which features a French dub of the classic 1992 legal drama A Few Good Men, starring Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. We asked a native French speaker what they made of the footage, and they said it was off in a few places but still a lot smoother than traditional dubbing.

«

At last, a positive use for deepfakes.
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Is the second-cheapest wine a ripoff? Economics v psychology in product-line pricing • Wine Economics

David de Meza and Vikram Pathania:

»

Restaurateurs are believed to overprice the second-cheapest wine to exploit naïve diners embarrassed to choose the cheapest option. This paper investigates which view is correct.

We find that the mark-up on the second cheapest wine is significantly below that on the four next more expensive wines. It is an urban myth that the second-cheapest wine is an especially bad buy. Percentage mark-ups are highest on mid-range wines.

This is consistent with the profit-maximising pricing of a vertically differentiated product line with no behavioral elements, although other factors may contribute to the price pattern.

«

Someone I knew who ran a restaurant in London’s Battersea told me years ago that the cost of the first glass of wine of a bottle covered its cost to him. Everything after that was profit. (Which doesn’t disprove this research at all, of course. It’s just something to be aware of, I guess.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book.

for years, CAPTCHAs have fed Google’s AI systems with valuable data – but now Cloudflare has a quicker alternative. CC-licensed photo by Becky Stern 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. No squiggly text. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA proposal would end AI’s source of free labor • Quartz

Nicolás Rivero:

»

Are you a human? If so, chances are you’ve filled out countless CAPTCHAs, the all-too-frequent tests internet users have to take to prove their humanity by identifying garbled text, fuzzy numbers, or images of traffic lights.

The tests serve the crucial function of differentiating genuine human web users from malign bots attempting to hack or spam a website. But they’re also annoying and time-consuming. Web infrastructure company Cloudflare estimates humanity collectively spends 500 years of labor each day on CAPTCHAs. In a May 13 blog post, the company declared its intention to “get rid of CAPTCHAs completely” through alternatives that wouldn’t require people to complete arbitrary tasks.

These alternatives aren’t entirely new. Identity verification firm Yubico has been selling flash drives that web users can use to prove their humanity since 2008, and Google launched a “No CAPTCHA” technique in 2014 that can confirm some web users’ humanity just by monitoring how they interact with webpages. Cloudflare stopped using Google’s CAPTCHA service last year after the search giant began charging for it, which eventually led to Cloudflare’s recent commitment to reinventing the CAPTCHA.

Alternative solutions, however, will prove very disruptive for the other, less public purpose of CAPTCHA tests: they’re a massive source of free labour for AI developers. Killing the CAPTCHA would derail the gravy train that has provided cheap advances in the field of machine vision for the past decade.

«

Though as the story makes more clear, CAPTCHAs have been a massive source of free labour for *Google’s* AI developers. Not anyone else. Facebook doesn’t use them. Cloudflare’s solution, for now, is a hardware key. (Its reasons for hating CAPTCHAs – particularly their implicit cultural imperialism – are worth reading.)
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Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps? • BBC News

Christopher Giles and Jack Goodman:

»

Why is Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world, blurry on Google Maps?

…on Google Earth, the most widely used image platform, the most recent imagery for Gaza is of low resolution and therefore blurry. “The most recent Google Earth image is from 2016 and looks like trash. I zoomed in on some random rural area of Syria and it has had 20+ images taken since that time, in very high resolution,” tweeted Aric Toler, a journalist for Bellingcat.

…Until last year, the US government restricted the quality of satellite images that American companies were permitted to provide on a commercial basis. The Kyl-Bingaman Amendment (KBA) had been introduced in 1997 to address Israeli security concerns.

Although the ruling only referred to Israel, it was also applied the restriction to images of the Palestinian territories. The KBA limited image quality so that an object the size of a car was just about visible as a highly blurred image, but anything smaller would be very difficult to identify.

“We [Israel] would always prefer to be photographed at the lowest resolution possible”, said Amnon Harari, head of space programmes at Israel’s Defence Ministry last year, reported by Reuters. “It’s always preferable to be seen blurred, rather than precisely.”

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They’re being updated, but it could take a while.
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Censorship, surveillance and profits: a hard bargain for Apple in China • The New York Times

Jack Nicas, Raymond Zhong and Daisuke Wakabayashi:

»

The Chinese government regularly demands data from Chinese companies, often for law-enforcement investigations. Chinese law requires the companies to comply.

US law has long prohibited American companies from turning over data to Chinese law enforcement. But Apple and the Chinese government have made an unusual arrangement to get around American laws.

In China, Apple has ceded legal ownership of its customers’ data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, or GCBD, a company owned by the government of Guizhou Province, whose capital is Guiyang. Apple recently required its Chinese customers to accept new iCloud terms and conditions that list GCBD as the service provider and Apple as “an additional party.” Apple told customers the change was to “improve iCloud services in China mainland and comply with Chinese regulations.”

The terms and conditions included a new provision that does not appear in other countries: “Apple and GCBD will have access to all data that you store on this service” and can share that data “between each other under applicable law.”

Under the new setup, Chinese authorities ask GCBD — not Apple — for Apple customers’ data, Apple said. Apple believes that gives it a legal shield from American law, according to a person who helped create the arrangement. GCBD declined to answer questions about its Apple partnership.

«

OK, China is an authoritarian government. Its citizens live under an authoritarian regime. Question is, does Apple’s presence there help the government? If not (and I’d say it doesn’t), does using Apple’s products help dissidents evade the regime? (Probably not – they don’t need to crack the phone if they can crack your head.) Google withdrew because the state was hacking its product to target opponents. There’s no evidence that Apple’s been subverted in the same way. This long piece essentially reiterates what we’ve known for a long time: there’s no perfect way to interact with China. It always involves moral compromise. Even *not* interacting means you’re not helping.
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AirPods Max and AirPods Pro don’t support Apple Music Lossless, Apple confirms • T3

Matthew Bolton:

»

Apple has announced that it’s adding ‘Lossless’ and ‘Hi-Resolution Lossless’ streaming options to Apple Music in June 2021 for no extra charge, as well as offering Dolby Atmos ‘Spatial Audio’ 3D music, too.

In Apple’s new terminology, ‘Lossless’ is CD quality, from 16-bit 44.1kHz playback up to 24-bit 48kHz, while ‘Hi-Res Lossless’ delivers up to 24-bit 192kHz. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means – it means music comes in larger files with much less compression, meaning more realistic results, provided you’ve got good enough equipment to actually hear the difference.

Apple has confirmed to T3 that this equipment, sadly, does not include AirPods Pro or AirPods Max. Both of Apple’s elite headphone models only use the Bluetooth AAC codec when connected to an iPhone, which means they can’t receive the full quality of the Apple Music ‘Lossless’ files, which will be encoded as ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) files.

What both of these devices will be able to receive is the new Dolby Atmos ‘Spatial Audio’ versions of songs, which will add more of a surrounding 3D effect in tracks. These aren’t the only headphones that support this feature – anything powered by Apple’s H1 or W1 wireless chips will, and that includes (deep breath): AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, BeatsX, Beats Solo3 Wireless, Beats Studio3, Powerbeats3 Wireless, Beats Flex, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Solo Pro.

«

The AirPods Max won’t even do lossless over the Lightning charging cable (which is an option for playing audio). A firmware update might fix that, but you’d expect that “group working on audio hardware” and “group working on audio software” might talk to each other about future plans? Taken with the hiring and then firing of Antonio García Martinez, it feels like the gaps in Apple’s internal culture are showing. (Side note: Amazon is also making lossless available on Amazon Music, also for free.)
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How Substack soap operas change the media business • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

»

Normal people—with regular lives and real jobs—have soap operas and reality shows. People who are Extremely Online have Substack.

Over the past few months, the PR travails of the newsletter start-up have become a reliable source of media gossip. Jude Doyle is leaving! Grace Lavery has joined! Oh man, Matt Yglesias shouldn’t have taken that advance; he’d have made far more money purely from subscriptions!

Perhaps those names don’t mean anything to you. Why should they? Doyle has 43,000 Twitter followers, a fan base 20 times smaller than that of the Sarcastic Mars Rover parody account. Lavery is an English professor, an expert on Japanese Victoriana, and one-third of a Brooklyn throuple that also includes Daniel Lavery, who has a Substack named after William Shatner. (Together, the Laverys have received $555,000 in advances from the platform.) Yglesias was an old-school blogger, then co-founded Vox, and has now returned to his independent roots.

But for a certain subset of the American elite—a group of people who are concentrated in journalism, academia, and related fields; who are likely to be active on Twitter; and who have strong opinions on the 1619 Project and the ACLU’s Chase Strangio—following the lives of these people is what they do instead of watching General Hospital or The Bachelor. Many of the authors now showing up on Substack are known for fighting with journalists at other outlets, and one another. By supporting their newsletters, readers get endless feuds, dramatic exits, high-profile guest stars, ambitious crossover events, and compelling villains. Yes, Substack is selling soap operas to people who think they’re above soap operas.

«

Lewis does have her own Substack, but it’s free (and funny), and she doesn’t mess around with internet beefs. Though of course she does comment, when linking to this article in her most recent one, that “You will be pleased to know that everyone I lightly ribbed in this piece responded with the self-deprecating humour and good nature for which they are famed.” 😂
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Google I/O 2021 preview: Google resurrects Wear OS and Android tablets? • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo, on Google’s event which starts today, Tuesday:

»

The biggest sign that Google is bringing Wear OS back to the land of the living is a widely reported rumor that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 will run Wear OS instead of Tizen. Plugged-in Samsung leaker Ice Universe called the transition back in February, kicking off this batch of rumors. The latest report from the Korean site MT says Samsung wants to switch to Wear OS due to difficulty in getting developers to create Tizen apps. XDA Developers found references to a “Merlot Wear OS” device in a Samsung Wi-Fi driver, indicating the company is at least experimenting with Wear OS internally. Samsung has been kicking around the idea of returning to Wear OS for some time, though, but the company has yet to pull the trigger.

Samsung adopting Wear would solve a lot of problems. Samsung makes its own smartwatch chips, so the platform could finally stop relying on Qualcomm for smartwatch SoCs. Qualcomm has smothered Wear OS with a lack of significant chip upgrades, which greatly contributed to the current situation. Samsung is also a top-tier hardware manufacturer, so it can push the smartwatch form factor forward with whatever parts it wants. The fashion brands that occupy the Wear OS market right now (like Fossil) can really only source existing parts.

There’s also that $2.1bn acquisition of Fitbit, which Google closed in January. There have been some product launches since then, but we’ve yet to see what the Googlification of Fitbit looks like.

…The next long-dead Android form factor that has been suddenly active lately is the Android tablet. Google’s tablet interfaces for Android probably peaked around Android 3 or 4.0 when tablets first came out. Since then, the company has consistently removed and scaled back tablet interfaces. Google’s hardware division also hasn’t made an Android tablet for years, with the last release being the Pixel C in 2015.

Google’s lack of interest in tablets seems to be changing, though. Google surprised us all earlier this month with the announcement of “Entertainment Space” for tablets, a media aggregation UI that will appear as a home screen panel, replacing the usual Google Discover feed on the left side.

«

Pretty sure that Android tablets are not going to become A Thing, at least in terms of third-party apps. Same problem as Samsung/Tizen: no traction.
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Ransomware’s dangerous new trick is double-encrypting your data • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

»

Double-encryption attacks have happened before, usually stemming from two separate ransomware gangs compromising the same victim at the same time. But antivirus company Emsisoft says it is aware of dozens of incidents in which the same actor or group intentionally layers two types of ransomware on top of each other.

“The groups are constantly trying to work out which strategies are best, which net them the most money for the least amount of effort,” says Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow. “So in this approach you have a single actor deploying two types of ransomware. The victim decrypts their data and discovers it’s not actually decrypted at all.”

Some victims get two ransom notes at once, Callow says, meaning that the hackers want their victims to know about the double-encryption attack. In other cases, though, victims only see one ransom note and only find out about the second layer of encryption after they’ve paid to eliminate the first.

“Even in a standard single-encryption ransomware case, recovery is often an absolute nightmare,” Callow says. “But we are seeing this double-encryption tactic often enough that we feel it’s something organizations should be aware of when considering their response.”

 Emsisoft has identified two distinct tactics. In the first, hackers encrypt data with ransomware A and then re-encrypt that data with ransomware B. The other path involves what Emsisoft calls a “side-by-side encryption” attack, in which attacks encrypt some of an organization’s systems with ransomware A and others with ransomware B. In that case, data is only encrypted once, but a victim would need both decryption keys to unlock everything.

«

This seems like a strategic mistake by the ransomware types: if there’s a possibility that you might get double-crossed even if you pay, then people will be less likely to pay.
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The app that lets you pay to control another person’s life • BBC News

Will Smale:

»

How would you feel about being able to pay to control multiple aspects of another person’s life? A new app is offering you the chance to do just that.

When writer Brandon Wong recently couldn’t decide what takeaway to order one evening, he asked his followers on social media app NewNew to choose for him.

Those that wanted to get involved in the 24-year-old’s dinner dilemma paid $5 (£3.50) to vote in a poll, and the majority verdict was that he should go for Korean food, so that was what he bought.

“I couldn’t decide between Chinese or Korean, so it was very helpful,” says Mr Wong, who lives in Edmonton, Canada. “I have also used NewNew polls to decide what clothes I should wear that day, and lots of other personal stuff.

“I joined back in March, and I post [polls] three or four times a week. I’ve now had more than 1,700 total votes.”

NewNew is the brainchild of Los Angeles-based entrepreneur Courtne Smith. The app, which is still in its “beta” or pre-full release stage, describes itself as “a human stock market where you buy shares in the lives of real people, in order to control their decisions and watch the outcome”.

«

This feels more like the setup for a Philip K Dick short story, in which the writer then discovers that he is actually an android who really is being controlled by humans. (That’s essentially his story The Electric Ant.) But no, it’s Silicon Valley.
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Bill Gates left Microsoft board amid probe into prior relationship with staffer • WSJ

Emily Glazer, Justin Baer, Khadeeja Safdar and Aaron Tilley:

»

Microsoft Corp. board members decided that Bill Gates needed to step down from its board in 2020 as they pursued an investigation into the billionaire’s prior romantic relationship with a female Microsoft employee that was deemed inappropriate, people familiar with the matter said.

Members of the board tasked with the matter hired a law firm to conduct an investigation in late 2019 after a Microsoft engineer alleged in a letter that she had a sexual relationship over years with Mr. Gates, the people said.

During the probe, some board members decided it was no longer suitable for Mr. Gates to sit as a director at the software company he started and led for decades, the people said. Mr. Gates resigned before the board’s investigation was completed and before the full board could make a formal decision on the matter, another person familiar with the matter said.

…A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates said, “There was an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably.” She said his “decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter. In fact, he had expressed an interest in spending more time on his philanthropy starting several years earlier.”

Mr. Gates resigned from the Microsoft board on March 13, 2020, three months after he had been re-elected to his seat.

«

That he wasn’t a delightful person to work for – yelling and screaming at subordinates (ie pretty much everyone) – was already known; but there’s a darker, or perhaps seamier, side coming out now. Melinda seems to have been very unhappy about Bill seeing Jeffrey Epstein. There’s more to come on that.
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In Mahle’s contact-free electric motor, power reaches the rotor wirelessly • IEEE Spectrum

Philip Ross:

»

Designs that put copper windings in the rotor have to transmit electricity to a moving target, and the point of contact—the slip ring—is subject to wear and tear.

Mahle, a German auto parts company, unveiled a motor that’s free of both rare earths and of physical contact. Power is beamed into the rotor wirelessly, through induction, by a coil carrying alternating current. This induces a current in the receiving electrode, inside the rotor, which energizes the copper windings there to produce an electromagnetic field.

That means there’s practically nothing that can wear out. “There are no contacts to transmit electricity, no abrasion, no dust formation, no mechanical wear,” Martin Berger, Mahle’s head of research, said Wednesday, in an online press conference. “Also I have to say, if one must service a non-magnetized rotor, it’s not difficult to exchange the rotor.” 

It may seem strange to try to minimize wear and tear in electric motors, seeing as they are already famed for their simplicity and durability. Unlike internal-combustion engines, electric motors have practically no moving parts, and they are fairly easy to take apart and put back together. Perhaps Mahle’s engineers got the idea from their longstanding work in wireless charging technology. Maybe the contact-free rotor design provides advantages beyond mere durability. 

Berger says the new motor combines the best points of several motor designs, for instance by offering good efficiency at both low and high torque. Overall, the company asserts, the motor achieves at least 95% efficiency in typical EV use and tops 96% efficiency at many operating points. A release from Mahle says that no EV except for Formula E racing cars has done better.

«

The absence of rare earths means no (or less) reliance on China. Commercial production perhaps two or three years away.
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Is Roblox a game, or an “experience”? According to Apple, it’s the latter – conveniently for its lawsuit with Epic Games. CC-licensed photo by Jay Cross on Flickr.

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NHS tracing app ‘prevented thousands of deaths’ • BBC News

»

“On average, each confirmed case who consented to notification of their contacts through the app prevented one new case,” the paper claims.

The research has been accepted for publication by the journal Nature.

Some of the researchers were themselves involved in the creation of the NHS contact-tracing app, and had previously released some of the estimates.

But the inclusion in Nature means the paper has now been peer-reviewed by other academics. It has been made available as a preview of papers due for publication.

The paper covers the time between the app’s launch on 24 September last year until the end of 2020. It was “used regularly” by 16.5 million people – about 28% of the UK population, the research says.

It works by using a smartphone’s sensors to measure how close a user is – and for how long – to other app users. If one of those people tests positive for coronavirus, the app can issue an alert telling those who have been in close contact to self-isolate. It sent about 1.7 million “exposure notifications” after 560,000 app users tested positive, the research paper said.

«

The app is separate from (but parallel to) Test and Trace, which tries to find people who have been in contact with people who definitely test positive. The researchers reckoned that on average, for both systems, only about 6% of people who were alerted then tested positive; and on average each person who consented to receive alerts stopped one case. Averages, though: there will have been a lot of variation in those numbers.
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Just 12 people are behind most vaccine hoaxes on social media, research shows • NPR

Shannon Bond:

»

Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

“The ‘Disinformation Dozen’ produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which identified the accounts.

Now the vaccine rollout is reaching a critical stage in which most adults who want the vaccine have gotten it, but many others are holding out, these 12 influential social media users stand to have an outsize impact on the outcome.

After this story published on Thursday, Facebook said it had taken down more of the accounts run by these 12 individuals.

These figures are well-known to both researchers and the social networks. They include anti-vaccine activists, alternative health entrepreneurs and physicians. Some of them run multiple accounts across the different platforms. They often promote “natural health.” Some even sell supplements and books.

«

The CCDH also did a followup on the “dozen”. It’s taken Facebook quite a while to get around to taking accounts down: the first report dates back to March, and the sequel to April.
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Confronting disinformation spreaders on Twitter only makes it worse, MIT scientists say • Vice

Matthew Gault:

»

Of all the reply guy species, the most pernicious is the correction guy. You’ve seen him before, perhaps you’ve even been him. When someone (often a celebrity or politician) tweets bad science or a provable political lie, the correction guy is there to respond with the correct information. According to a new study conducted by researchers at MIT, being corrected online just makes the original posters more toxic and obnoxious.

Basically, the new thinking is that correcting fake news, disinformation, and horrible tweets at all is bad and makes everything worse. This is a “perverse downstream consequence for debunking,” and is the exact title of MIT research published in the ‘2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.’ The core takeaway is that “being corrected by another user for posting false political news increases subsequent sharing of low quality, partisan, and toxic content.”

The MIT researchers’ work is actually a continuation of their study into the effects of social media. This recent experiment started because the team had previously discovered something interesting about how people behave online. “In a recent paper published in Nature, we found that a simple accuracy nudge—asking people to judge the accuracy of a random headline—improved the quality of the news they shared afterward (by shifting their attention towards the concept of accuracy),” David Rand, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper told Motherboard in an email.

«

This doesn’t seem to offer many ways to get correct information to places where it would be useful. Add it to the previous link, and our only hope is for the platforms to take them off.
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Google says everything at Stadia is fine, as the water reaches their noses • Kotaku

Zack Zwiezen:

»

according to Google, a company famous for shutting down services, everything is fine. They added a search bar and Resident Evil 7 to the service. Nothing to worry about!

This reassurance that Google Stadia is “alive and well” comes from an interview with Stadia’s Developer Marketing Lead Nate Ahearn on GameIndustry.biz. During the interview, as he assured us that all was well, I got the distinct feeling that all at Google Stadia isn’t well at all, and that the company is mostly rearranging chairs on a sinking Titanic, while pointing towards anything to distract folks from the rapidly rising water levels. And the fact that this ship doesn’t have many people on it.

When asked what Google Stadia was doing that proves it’s actually “alive and well” Ahearn pointed to all the games being added to the service. “We’re well on our way to over 100 new games launching on Stadia in 2021,” explained Ahearn, “And we’re continuing to make Stadia a great place to play games on devices you already own.” When pushed by GI.Biz to give a real answer, Ahearn offered more jargon and gibberish instead, saying Google is, “focused on delivering value for our partners and on behalf of our players.”

«

Though Google has been careful not to say how many players there are. Or whether the number is going up or down. A report in February suggested that it has missed its user target by hundreds of thousands of users (ouch), with the implication that was a significant compared to the target.
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Ransomware gangs disrupted by response to Colonial Pipeline hack • Reuters

Joseph Menn:

»

Multiple ransomware groups claimed they were shutting down or scaling back operations on Friday as the US government ramped up pressure while tech companies, cryptocurrency exchanges and others worried about getting caught in the crossfire.

DarkSide, the Russian-speaking gang blamed by the FBI for a hacking attack that led to a six-day fuel pipeline shutdown, said it was going out of business after losing access to some of its servers.

Another major criminal gang said it would forbid encryption attacks on critical infrastructure, and forums where such gangs recruit partners said they were banning ads related to ransomware, analysts said.

US President Joe Biden repeatedly warned the gangs and major host country Russia about consequences for a ransomware attack that prompted Colonial Pipeline to shut down the main supply line to the East Coast. That line was resuming full operation, but many pumps remain empty at stations in some states after days of panic buying.

Investigators said DarkSide provided the encryption software that a criminal affiliate used to render Colonial’s internal files inaccessible. It planned to split any ransom to recover that data with the affiliate, who the investigators have identified as another Russian criminal.

DarkSide claimed that some of its money had been transferred to new electronic wallets, though rivals and some US experts warned the group could be using the uproar as an excuse to cash out. Ransomware gangs commonly change names and membership.

«

I suspect that all that will happen is that, as he suggests, the gang will find a new name. The security company Elliptic looked at where the money paid as a ransom by Colonial went, and reckons it has received $17.5m since March. At that sort of pay rate, you’re either going to cash out forever, or just keep going.
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Apple said Roblox developers don’t make games, and now Roblox agrees • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

»

Roblox has used the term “experience” in place of “game” before, and CEO David Baszucki called Roblox a “metaverse” rather than a gaming platform last year. But this change happened days after a legal fight over whether Roblox experiences are games — and by extension, whether Roblox itself should be allowed on the iOS App Store.

The Epic v. Apple antitrust trial has produced a weeks-long, frequently hilarious debate over the definition of a video game. Epic wants to prove that its shooter Fortnite is a “metaverse” rather than a game, pushing the trial’s scope to cover Apple’s entire App Store instead of just games. Apple wants to prove that Epic is an almost purely game-related company and that the App Store maintains consistent, user-friendly policies distinguishing “apps” from “games.” It also wants to defend a ban on “stores within a store” on iOS.

Roblox blurs the line between a large social game and a game engine or sales platform. Users don’t enter a single virtual world like Second Life; they launch individual experiences created by users. Developers can sell items within those experiences, and there are full-fledged game studios that build with Roblox instead of, say, the Unity or Unreal engines. But all of this activity happens within a single Roblox app, instead of as a series of separately packaged games.

Apple has apparently worried about this fuzziness. In a 2017 email, Apple marketing head Trystan Kosmynka said he was “surprised” that Roblox (which he referred to as “Roboblox”) had been approved for the App Store. The email chain indicates that App Store reviewers raised concerns in 2014, but Roblox was approved without ever resolving the issues. Epic brought the decision up again in court, hoping to cast doubt on Apple’s App Store review process.

«

This is heading for angels-on-a-pin territory, which of course is exactly where Epic wants to leave Apple: with a legacy of annoyed developers and a hairsplitting approach to what is and what, precisely, isn’t, a “game”. Epic’s going to lose, but wants to leave Apple with a Pyrrhic victory.
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‘Twitter Blue’ is the company’s upcoming subscription service – 9to5Mac

José Adorno:

»

Twitter has been working on its subscription service for a while now. Today, researcher Jane Manchun Wong said the service is going to be called Twitter Blue and, as for now, is priced at $2.99/month.

Twitter Blue will feature a new function called ‘Collections’ which will let users save and organize their favorite tweets into collections to easily find them later. Alongside this feature, Twitter will also bundle the ‘Undo Tweet’ function to its premium service.

This feature looks a lot like Gmail’s “undo send” button. The app just waits a few seconds before actually sending the message, so this could be what Twitter is planning to launch. As Wong shows, the company is working on the ability to adjust the duration of the undo Tweet timer from 5 seconds to up to 30 seconds.

Alongside these two features, Twitter could bundle Scroll with Twitter Blue. Last week, the company announced it acquired the subscription platform for users who don’t want to read content with ads but still support publishers to bring in more revenue than with traditional ads on a page.

Another paid-function from Twitter Blue could come from Revue, another service the company bough in January that helps people to publish newsletters on social media.

«

This has to be the limpest subscription offering ever. You can get zero ads by using a third-party app, which also has the benefit of offering reverse chronological rather than algorithmic ordering. You can “undo tweet” by two methods: 1) pause and have a think before you hit send *and* 2) delete your tweet after sending it. As for newsletters, well, it’s not as though they’ve got that market to themselves.
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On the hypocrites at Apple who fired Antonio Garcia-Martinez • TK News

Matt Taibbi:

»

I’m biased, because I know Antonio Garcia-Martinez and something like the same thing once happened to me, but the decision by Apple to bend to a posse of internal complainers and fire him over a passage in a five-year-old book is ridiculous hypocrisy. Hypocrisy by the complainers, and defamatory cowardice by the bosses — about right for the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style era of timorous conformity and duncecap monoculture the woke mobs at these places are trying to build as their new Jerusalem.

…After trying the writer’s life, Antonio went back to work for Apple. A few crucial points. One, he was recruited. Apple reached out to him, not the other way around. He sold his house in Washington State for the job and terminated his media work as part of what he expected would be a long-term commitment to Apple. In the hiring process they asked a slew of questions and checked with numerous references, including about Chaos Monkeys. The company was fully aware of the book and its contents. It was a bestseller for a month, and an NPR book of the year.

…I’m a fan of Dr. Dre’s music and have been since the N.W.A. days. It’s not any of my business if he wants to make $3bn selling Beats by Dre to Apple, earning himself a place on the board [he’s not on the board – CA] in the process. But if 2,000 Apple employees are going to insist that they feel literally unsafe working alongside a man who wrote a love letter to a woman who towers over him in heels, I’d like to hear their take on serving under, and massively profiting from a partnership with, the author of such classics as “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and “Lyrical Gangbang,” who is also the subject of such articles as “Here’s What’s Missing from Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up.”

…Maybe the signatories to the Apple letter can have a Chaos Monkeys book-burning outside the Chinese facility where iPhone glass is made — keep those Uighur workers warm! Or they can have one in Dublin, to celebrate the €13bn tax bill a court recently ruled Apple didn’t have to pay.

«

Martinez tweeted about this on Friday. He’s pretty angry. As to Taibbi’s question of why the staff don’t complain about Dr Dre or Irish tax bills or the Uighurs: they don’t affect internal working conditions.
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Disinformation in the UK May elections • Valent Newsletter

“Hamish”:

»

Our monitoring of the May 6 local elections in the UK uncovered what is likely to be the first time a US-style, social media powered, alt right campaign has unseated an elected official from a major British political party. Our investigation found content behind this campaign getting attention from far-right groups across the country. 

Sean Fielding was council leader in Oldham and accused by a network of social media pages of covering up sexual abuse and a conspiracy to undermine the white communities of Oldham. His primary accuser is Raja Miah MBE, a former CEO of two now closed Oldham schools who runs a website called Recusant Nine detailing these accusations against Fielding and the wider Labour establishment in Oldham. Miah’s pages link to the Proud of Oldham and Saddleworth (POS) party and vice versa, and it was Mark Wilkinson, affiliated to POS who unseated Fielding last week by 200 votes. 

At first glance this may not feel new; Oldham has seen successful independent council candidates before, and Labour lost ground in many Brexit supporting places like this. But what is striking about Fielding’s defeat is the interplay of tech platforms, race-fuelled accusations of child abuse, and crowd-sourced funding.

«

There’s also a version of this story in the Sunday Times (subscription). Nobody seems quite able to pin down whether Fielding’s loss was specifically caused by misinformation on Facebook – the vote totals involved are really quite low, around 1,500 – or just random pertubations in how people voted. This is the other problem with figuring out what the effects are: it’s really hard to get voters to tell you.
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Nuclear reactions at Chernobyl are spiking in an inaccessible chamber • New Scientist

Matthew Sparkes:

»

Scientists monitoring the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine have seen a surge in fission reactions in an inaccessible chamber within the complex. They are now investigating whether the problem will stabilise or require a dangerous and difficult intervention to prevent a runaway nuclear reaction.

The explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 brought down walls and sealed off many rooms and corridors. Tonnes of fissile material from the interior of a reactor were strewn throughout the facility and the heat it generated melted sand from the reactor walls with concrete and steel to form lava-like and intensely radioactive substances that oozed into lower floors.

One chamber, known as subreactor room 305/2, is thought to contain large amounts of this material, but it is inaccessible and hasn’t been seen by human or robotic eyes since the disaster.

Now, researchers have seen a spike in neutron emissions from the room, with levels increasing around 40% since the start of 2016. This points to a growing nuclear fission reaction, so researchers are trying to determine if this surge will fizzle out, as previous spikes in other parts of the ruins have done, or whether they will need to find a way to access the room and intervene.

Neil Hyatt at the University of Sheffield, UK, who studies nuclear waste disposal, likens the situation to “embers in a barbecue pit” and says “it’s a reminder to us that it’s not a problem solved, it’s a problem stabilised”.

«

One suggestion is that a new cover is drying the plant – removing the water that absorbs neutrons and slows down fission. Let’s hope Ukraine’s disaster plans are up to date.
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Don’t worry, still time to preorder Social Warming, out on June 24 (August in the US).

Why can’t phone networks stamp out spoofing? Because it would reveal which lines are subject to government tapping. CC-licensed photo by garann on Flickr.

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‘Misogynistic’ Apple hire is out hours after employees call for investigation • The Verge

Zoe Schiffer:

»

Antonio García Martínez is no longer working at Apple hours after employees circulated a petition calling for an investigation into his hiring. Martínez, a former Facebook product manager on the ad targeting team, authored a controversial book about Silicon Valley where he expressed misogynistic views on women.

“We are deeply concerned about the recent hiring of Antonio García Martínez,” employees wrote in the petition. “His misogynistic statements in his autobiography — such as ‘Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit’ (further quoted below this letter) — directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity.”

More than 2,000 employees signed the petition before it was published by The Verge.

Shortly after the petition began circulating internally at Apple, Martínez’s Slack account was deactivated. The ad platforms team was called into an emergency meeting where it was confirmed Martínez would no longer be working at the company.

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Well, that escalated quickly. Martinez was hardly anyone’s idea of a gladhander, but he did get results. Perhaps it says something about the companies involved that he lasted two years at Facebook and roughly as many days (ok, maybe weeks) at Apple. Or maybe it’s because he wrote the book in the middle which made his views clear.

That’s not quite all, though. Jean-Louis Gassée, Que Dieu Préserve, asks how he got hired when the coming culture clash was out there for everyone to see. “How come he got hired, vetted? You know the one cockroach theory. How many such bad hiring decisions?”

The “one cockroach” theory, if you didn’t know it (I didn’t), is that when you see one cockroach you should realise there are a ton more of them too, just out of sight. So how many people who aren’t actually a good cultural fit have been hired at Apple, over what period? And what effect will that have, in time?
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Fact-checking Modi’s post-truth India • Rest of World

Sonia Faleiro:

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Misinformation is a challenge globally, but in India, it’s practically baked into the ruling party’s communications. And while the platforms that are host to this misinformation, like Facebook and Twitter, have made attempts to curtail it, it hasn’t been enough to stem the tide. The average Indian media consumer is inundated with misinformation from the time they open the day’s paper to when they lie in bed scrolling on their smartphones at night, so much so that if they don’t make the effort to seek out facts for themselves, they risk responding to a fictional reality. 

It’s why two engineers, Zubair, 38, and his colleague Pratik Sinha, 39, banded together in 2016 to form Alt News, which debunks false information with meticulous documentation. But while their profile has risen in recent years, they still find themselves playing whack-a-mole in a country increasingly hostile to the truth.

Alt News is based in Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat. Before the pandemic forced its team to stay home, 12 full-time staffers worked out of its office, located in a quiet residential lane. Now, back home in the southern city of Bangalore, Zubair, a charismatic extrovert, manages fact-checking assignments as well, in part, Alt News’s massive social media following — more than 1.3 million across its multiple platforms, including Zubair and Sinha’s own followings. 

Every day, Zubair pores over his smartphone, scanning social media accounts that he knows exist only to pump out misinformation. He also monitors Alt News’s WhatsApp number, where people are encouraged to send images and videos. Usually, there will be requests to verify gossip about Indian movie stars, and now, as the country reels from the impact of a second Covid wave, bogus home remedies are doing the rounds. 

But what makes the Indian media ecosystem unique, Zubair told me, is that much of the misinformation is focused on religious minorities, particularly Muslims, India’s largest such minority. “Typically,” he said, “it’s a Muslim doing something”: images from Egypt misrepresented as Ramadan gatherings in India at the height of the pandemic, scenes from Bangladesh misleadingly shared as anti-Hindu violence.

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An economist’s tips on making email work for you • Tim Harford

He’s sorted data, now he’s sorting your inbox:

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First: use the tools that many email programs offer. If you want to send an email to a large group while ensuring that only you receive the replies, don’t type “PLEASE DO NOT REPLY ALL”. Make it impossible to do so by putting the group in BCC. If someone else fails to follow this rule and your inbox fills up with witty but irrelevant banter from colleagues, try “mute”. Use “schedule send” to ensure your email arrives during office hours, no matter when you send it. This is a kindness, but also trains your colleagues not to expect instant responses.

Second: be the change you want to see in the world. Try announcing that you are “moving Julia to BCC” as a way of politely excusing her from further duties in a group email. Dabble with changing the subject line: “Arrangements for AGM 8 July” ceases to be a good subject if the AGM has been moved to July 7. If your entire email is that the 4pm meeting has been postponed by 15 minutes, then I recommend a subject line “The 4pm meeting has been postponed by 15 minutes //” rather than “URGENT PLEASE READ”.

Why act like this? Because it makes you a more pleasant person to work with. Because people will notice, and they may learn. Just as people acquire appalling habits from each other, such as sending repeated invitations to the same Zoom URL (or is it the same?), they also follow good examples.
My third piece of advice is the most fundamental: clarify and decide. A hundred emails a day is a lot if you leave half of them sitting in your inbox. Keep that up and in a month you’ll have 1,500. Give it a year and you’ll be begging to be allowed to declare email bankruptcy, post the keys through the letterbox and walk away. The solution is to be sharper about your decisions. If no action is needed then delete or archive. Most archived email is easy to find again.

If action is needed, and it is brief and obvious, do it immediately. Otherwise, archive the email and note the project in a task manager such as Trello, Remember the Milk or even a simple text file.

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Next in this series should be “how to choose a task manager” followed by “why the best way to empty your task manager is to email the tasks to yourself”.
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Emotion recognition: can AI detect human feelings from a face? • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia:

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For most of the past year, students at True Light College, a secondary school for girls in Kowloon, Hong Kong, have been attending classes from home. But unlike most children around the world forced into home-schooling during the pandemic, the students at True Light are being watched as they sit at their desks. Unblinking eyes scrutinise each child’s facial expressions through their computer’s cameras.

The “eyes” belong to a piece of software called 4 Little Trees, an artificial intelligence program that claims it can read the children’s emotions as they learn. The program’s goal is to help teachers make distance learning more interactive and personalised, by responding to an individual student’s reactions in real time.

The 4 Little Trees algorithm works by measuring micro-movements of muscles on the girls’ faces, and attempts to identify emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear. The company says the algorithms generate detailed reports regarding each student’s emotional state for teachers, and can also gauge motivation and focus. It alerts students to “get their attention back when they are off track”.

Its founder, a former teacher, Vicky Lim, says it reads the children’s feelings correctly about 85% of the time. The popularity of the software has exploded during the pandemic, with the number of schools using 4 Little Trees in Hong Kong growing from 34 to 83 over the past year, according to Lim.

4 Little Trees uses one of a family of new algorithms that its creators claim can recognise human emotion and state of mind, such as tiredness, stress and anxiety, through the analysis of facial expression, micro-gestures, eye tracking and voice tones.

The technology is a natural evolution of facial recognition systems, which identify individuals but is far more invasive — it claims not just to understand how someone is feeling in the moment, but also to decode their intentions and predict their personality, based on fleeting expressions.

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You can also try out a version the FT knocked up for you. (Requires camera access for ig.ft.com. Turns out I’m quite the poker face.)
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The problem with legal intercept and backdoors • Baby is 60

Tim Panton:

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There’s a thing that seems to be missed in the debate about encryption. We know exactly what happens if you enforce government sanctioned access to mass communications. We have watched it in the stagnation of the telcos.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but the Legal Intercept (LI) requirements stifle innovation. I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve been in where I’ve been told that a proposed network topology change or customer experience improvement wasn’t possible because of LI. Having the government as a big and legally mandated cash cow slowed innovation to a crawl and hugely reduced the incentives for doing what is best for your other customers.

There is an even more insidious impact. LI enables and facilitates telephone fraud.

The problem is that the telephone system has to be constructed in such a way that legal interception isn’t detectable by the customers who are intercepted. This means that as a telco you can never, by law, offer your customers accurate callerID. If you did, they would be able to tell the difference between a normal call and one with the infamous ‘Man in the Middle’.

So next time you get a call from ‘windows support desk’ trying to defraud you, remember that this could have been engineered out of our phone system years ago but for legal intercept. This is a real societal and economic cost to LI that is often ignored in this debate.

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This is from 2016, but you can bet that it’s still completely the case today. On Thursday I listened to a telephone executive swallow his way through a grilling on a consumer radio program where he repeatedly dodged explaining why spoofing hasn’t been designed out of the phone system. This is why. But of course he couldn’t explain that LI is why, because the phone networks can’t admit that LI happens. I do wonder how the US networks are doing this, given that LI happens there too (I think).
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Michael Lewis: ‘We were incentivised to have a bad pandemic response’ • The Guardian

Andrew Anthony reviews Michael Lewis’s new book The Premonition, and talks to him as well:

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If Dean and Mecher are the good guys, there are no shortage of baddies. Chief among these, perhaps surprisingly, is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, better known as the CDC. It’s an American federal institution with an international reputation. As Lewis himself admits, he’d always thought of the CDC as “one of the places in the government that America can be proud of”. This, he adds, is because he didn’t know what they were doing.

In the book, they are mostly not doing very much and a lot of their energy seems to go into preventing others from doing anything either. Back in the 1970s, the then head of the CDC, David Sencer, called for nationwide vaccination after a swine flu outbreak. Two hundred million doses of vaccine were ordered and 45m administered, only for the outbreak not to materialise. Sencer was blamed for overreacting and sacked. Henceforth, the CDC tended to err on the side of cautious inaction. “I think the CDC had virtues but it was not battlefield command. It had become a place where the generals had no experience fighting a war,” says Lewis.

He is impressed by what the Biden administration has achieved in a short time. “I feel like there’s an intelligent entity all of a sudden,” he says. Nor is he in any doubt how ill-suited Trump was to being the man in charge during a pandemic.

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I think Michael Lewis’s next book should investigate how Michael Lewis is able to write so many amazing books that capture the zeitgeist. I would read that one too. (I’m currently reading The Premonition.)
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Robinhood’s big gamble • The New Yorker

Sheelah Kolhatkar:

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The app features whimsical illustrations, swipe navigation, and a St. Patrick’s Day color scheme; all were developed by the company’s creative director, Zane Bevan, one of Robinhood’s earliest employees. Like many of his colleagues, Bevan knew little about finance when he joined Robinhood. He told me that a year and a half ago the design team had updated the app to a primary-green shade from a teal color. “We wanted it to feel kind of honest and true,” he said. He and the rest of the team found the interfaces of other financial-services companies dense and intimidating. They instead took inspiration from weather, news, and fitness apps that required no prior knowledge to operate.

Natasha Dow Schüll, the author of “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas” and a professor in the media, culture, and communication department at N.Y.U., told me that little about Robinhood, or about many other popular mobile-phone applications, is novel. Clever engineers simply repurposed many of the design features of slot machines, which were developed over decades. Green, the color of luck and of money, is found throughout Las Vegas, and Schüll said that the physical design of casinos is also mirrored in Robinhood’s pursuit of a “frictionless” user experience. Even the ability to trade partial shares seemed to Schüll to fit into a trend of “nano monetization,” which also includes multiline video slot machines that run on pennies, and online-poker Web sites that offer players the option of betting a dollar or less on multiple tables simultaneously. One of Robinhood’s most popular features is the “free stock,” which is offered when a new user signs up. Until April, the stock appeared as an onscreen lottery ticket that you scratched off, revealing a share of a company you had likely never heard of.

Adam Alter is a professor of marketing at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, and the author of “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.” He told me, “In a case of a company like Robinhood, it’s not enough for them to have users on the site. You actually have to get them to hit the Buy or Sell button.” He went on, “You’ve got to make that feel like it’s inconsequential. You’ve got to lower all the barriers resistant people might have to making financial decisions, so that you don’t even think about the money at all.”

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Most of the first half of the article is about the history of Robinhood, but it gets a lot more forensic from this point onward.
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Colonial Pipeline paid hackers nearly $5m in ransom • Bloomberg

William Turton , Michael Riley , and Jennifer Jacobs:

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Colonial Pipeline Co. paid nearly $5m to Eastern European hackers on Friday, contradicting reports earlier this week that the company had no intention of paying an extortion fee to help restore the country’s largest fuel pipeline, according to two people familiar with the transaction.

The company paid the hefty ransom in difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency within hours after the attack, underscoring the immense pressure faced by the Georgia-based operator to get gasoline and jet fuel flowing again to major cities along the Eastern Seaboard, those people said. A third person familiar with the situation said U.S. government officials are aware that Colonial made the payment.

Once they received the payment, the hackers provided the operator with a decrypting tool to restore its disabled computer network. The tool was so slow that the company continued using its own backups to help restore the system, one of the people familiar with the company’s efforts said.

…[CEO of digital forensics firm LIFARS, Ondrej] Krehel said a $5m ransom for a pipeline was “very low.” “Ransom is usually around $25 million to $35 million for such a company. I think the threat actor realized they stepped on the wrong company and triggered a massive government response,” he said.

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After Musk bitcoin U-turn, which coins are more climate friendly? • Al Jazeera

Ben Piven:

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After months of cheerleading for Bitcoin, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told his 54.3 million Twitter followers on Wednesday that the electric vehicle maker is hitting the brakes on allowing customers to use Bitcoin as payment.

“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk wrote on Wednesday.

Yet Bitcoin is far from the only environmental villain in the crypto space. There are plenty of other tokens that also rely on energy-sucking proof of work (PoW) consensus mechanisms to validate transactions and mint new coins.

PoW requires a decentralised network of mining rigs – sometimes made up of thousands of computers labouring in unison – to solve complex math problems in a race to verify transactions to win new Bitcoins.

Not all virtual coins use PoW, but all of the most energy-consumptive do.

Many experts say proof of stake can offer the crypto sector a dramatically greener future. The biggest coins using that consensus mechanism — which relies on larger coin owners to validate blockchain transactions — are Binance Coin, Cardano, Polkadot, Stellar and Solana.

Others hope a third consensus mechanism, proof of space, could be greener still. It relies on hard-drive storage rather than processing power. Chia coin is marketed as a cryptocurrency with an ecological “farming” method, though environmentalists say the e-waste issue is a problem.

Al Jazeera asked Alex de Vries, a Dutch crypto sustainability expert who runs the site Digiconomist, for his best estimates using the annual carbon footprint of PoW coins measured in terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity consumption.

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TL;DR: they’re all pretty rubbish: using the equivalent energy to country A, or country B, or country C. It’s all a boondoggle, and I still wonder what is needed to make the house of cards collapse, Big Short-style.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Peloton brand has huge customer loyalty, but it’s priced beyond most peoples’ reach. Is technology exacerbating economic splits? CC-licensed photo by Tony Webster on Flickr.

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

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

Here’s the news: I’ll be narrating the audio version of Social Warming, my forthcoming book, published in the UK on 24 June (August in the US). Also available in print.

Living in the future is a class issue • Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At

Ed Z:

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Peloton and Tonal are both sold out for months, meaning that anyone putting down these thousands of dollars must be able to part with that money, but also be able to part with it for several months with no value add, or take on the debt necessary to complete the purchase. And if they don’t use it after taking on that debt, selling it on is both burdensome and difficult in and of itself, especially with Tonal. The common defense of these products is that they are cheaper than a gym membership, which makes sense until you recognize the upfront cost and the total lack of utility of these connected devices without a subscription. There is the opportunity to get more value out of them if you spent a similar amount on going to the gym (if you use them as such, they are significantly cheaper than a personal trainer), but with a significantly higher up front financial burden and a mandatory monthly fee.

This isn’t new – it’s always been the case that early adopters are privileged, because they can afford more things and can also afford for said things to not be as good, and thus upgrade to better things when they come along. New, exciting and futuristic tech is always expensive, then over time becomes cheaper as companies begin to work out ways to strip out features or use cheaper materials, or said materials somehow become cheaper. Then again, there’re also companies like Peloton that raised prices so that people would think the bike was better.

Hero – while significantly cheaper – still requires a $50-100 downpayment on the device and a $30-a-month subscription to physically organize and dispense your pills. Hero (or something like Hero) should be in the hands of every senior, as approximately 125,000 deaths and 10% of hospitalizations are caused by a lack of nonadherence to medicine (this article is from 2017, but I can’t imagine things have improved). But it isn’t – it’s a tech-enabled, WiFi-powered $30-a-month per person device (as you can’t use one device for two people’s medicines). While yes, you could use reminders and other things, having taken care of two elderly people and their litany of medicines, it is both extremely taxing and a matter of life and death to get medicines right.

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As he points out, the feeling is that the current trajectory of technology (or at least, the technology we’re seeing come out of Silicon Valley) is towards things that satisfy people with plenty of money. Which means the gap in quality of living widens all the time. Where’s the democratising force?
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Apple employees circulate petition demanding investigation into ‘misogynistic’ new hire • The Verge

Zoe Schiffer, Casey Newton and Elizabeth Lopatto:

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A group of Apple employees has written a petition asking for an investigation into the hiring of Antonio García Martínez — a former Facebook product manager and author of the book Chaos Monkeys.

In the petition, the employees expressed concern about García Martínez’s views on women and people of color. His hiring “calls into question parts of our system of inclusion at Apple, including hiring panels, background checks, and our process to ensure our existing culture of inclusion is strong enough to withstand individuals who don’t share our inclusive values,” they write.

García Martínez, who has also written for Wired, was the product manager for Facebook’s ad targeting team from 2011 to 2013. Most of the things the Apple employees have expressed concern about come from Chaos Monkeys itself. (The book is dedicated to “all my enemies.”) The autobiography traces García Martínez going from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. García Martínez has described the book as “total Hunter S. Thompson/Gonzo mode.” The employees, in the petition, view it differently: they say it’s racist and sexist.

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This has the potential to go abruptly very badly for Apple. Martinez has never been shy about expressing his opinions, or his opinion of other people’s opinions. He may be a terrific hire in terms of what he can do for the company’s advertising push, but he’s probably not even had his orientation day and things are blowing up. And Apple, like Google, is discovering the levels of dissent in its ranks.
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App Store stopped over $1.5bn in suspect transactions in 2020 • Apple Newsroom

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In 2020 alone, Apple’s combination of sophisticated technology and human expertise protected customers from more than $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions, preventing the attempted theft of their money, information, and time — and kept nearly a million risky and vulnerable new apps out of their hands.

…In 2020, nearly 1 million problematic new apps, and an additional nearly 1 million app updates, were rejected or removed for a range of reasons like those.

A smaller but significant set of these rejections was for egregious violations that could harm users or deeply diminish their experience. In 2020 alone, the App Review team rejected more than 48,000 apps for containing hidden or undocumented features, and more than 150,000 apps were rejected because they were found to be spam, copycats, or misleading to users in ways such as manipulating them into making a purchase.

Some developers perform a bait and switch: fundamentally changing how the app works after review to evade guidelines and commit forbidden and even criminal actions. When such apps are discovered, they’re rejected or removed immediately from the store, and developers are notified of a 14-day appeals process before their accounts are permanently terminated. In 2020, about 95,000 apps were removed from the App Store for fraudulent violations, predominantly for these kind of bait-and-switch maneuvers.

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Transparently trying to reset the discussion; at least the numbers are useful. As John Gruber says, Apple’s essentially saying that it has a “five nines” success on this; but why not aim for “nine nines”?
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Gold is now a green Bitcoin, and both are disastrous • Crypto Lucid

Franck Leroy:

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Fewer and fewer Bitcoin proponents still claim that this crypto can be used as a daily currency. Bitcoin is now considered a purely speculative asset, like gold.

So how does bitcoin mining compare to gold mining from an environmental perspective?

For energy usage, nothing can beat Bitcoin. Mining 1$ of bitcoin consumes 2 to 7 times more energy than mining gold.

…We estimate that, each year, around 12 000 tons of specific electronic devices are produced and destroyed. More that 80% of the weight is metal (iron, aluminum, copper, …).

This means than around 10 000 tons of metal is extracted and transformed each year only for the bitcoin mining industry. This is 4 times more than the amount of gold extracted each year (around 2500 tons).

Also, the value of bitcoin production is 1/6 of gold production (17 B$ vs 100 B$). Hence, overall, 1$ of Bitcoin requires 24 times more mining of metal than 1$ of gold.

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These numbers go up and down, of course, with the “price” of bitcoin (and gold), nut never in bitcoin’s favour. Trouble is, it’s now become a barnacle on the world’s energy supply, and there’s no obvious way to get it off. Closing exchanges might help, but would probably only mean the exchanges shifted to countries uninterested in closing them – which encouraged them, in fact.

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How COVID broke the evidence pipeline • Nature

Helen Pearson:

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[Emergency medicine specialist Simon] Carley compares the time before and after COVID-19 to a choice of meals. Before the pandemic, physicians wanted their evidence like a gourmet plate from a Michelin-starred restaurant: of exceptional quality, beautifully presented and with the provenance of all the ingredients — the clinical trials — perfectly clear. But after COVID-19 hit, standards slipped. It was, he says, as if doctors were staggering home from a club after ten pints of lager and would swallow any old evidence from the dodgy burger van on the street. “They didn’t know where it came from or what the ingredients were, they weren’t entirely sure whether it was meat or vegetarian, they would just eat anything,” he says. “And it just felt like you’ve gone from one to the other overnight.”

Kari Tikkinen, a urologist at the University of Helsinki who had run clinical trials in the past, was equally shocked early last year to talk to physicians who were so confident that untested therapies such as hydroxychloroquine were effective that they questioned the need to test them in clinical trials. It was “hype-based medicine”, he says — fuelled by former US president Donald Trump, who announced last May that he had started taking the drug himself. “It very quickly got ahead of us, where people were prescribing any variety of crazy choices for COVID,” says Reed Siemieniuk, a doctor and methodologist at McMaster University.

Many doctors and researchers did race to launch clinical trials — but most were too small to produce statistically meaningful results, says Tikkinen, who leads the Finnish arm of SOLIDARITY, an international clinical trial of COVID-19 treatments coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO). Hydroxychloroquine was the most-tested drug according to a database of 2,900 COVID-19 clinical trials called COVID-NMA: it was tested in 250 studies involving nearly 89,000 people (see ‘Too many trials?’). Many are still under way, despite convincing evidence that the drug doesn’t help: the RECOVERY trial concluded that hydroxychloroquine should not be recommended to treat COVID-19 in June last year.

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China’s population grows at slowest rate in decades • Financial Times

Sun Yu, Tom Mitchell and Thomas Hale:

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China’s population grew at its slowest rate in decades in the 10 years to 2020, according to census data released on Tuesday, which also showed that births declined sharply last year.

The nation’s once-in-a-decade census, which was completed in December, showed its population increased to 1.41bn in 2020 compared with 1.4bn a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said.

The Financial Times reported last month that the Chinese government would reveal the first year-on-year population decline in 60 years in the census data. People close to the NBS said the initial population figure came in at less than 1.4bn, but was revised up.

The official figures released on Tuesday showed the population grew just 5.4% from 1.34bn in 2010 — the lowest rate of increase between censuses since the People’s Republic of China began collecting data in 1953.

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China is facing the demographic timebomb that the developed world is up against – but a key problem is that its population is (comparatively) poor as well as ageing. Plus there’s the suspicion, raised last week, that it is fiddling the census numbers and that the figure is actually shrinking. Though when you’re trying to count more than a billion people, any semblance of accuracy past a couple of significant figures is a monstrous feat in itself.
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WhatsApp to restrict features if you refuse Facebook data sharing • Bleeping Computer

Sergiu Gatlan:

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WhatsApp published a new FAQ on its website, reinforcing the May 15th deadline to accept the new privacy changes and saying that “no one will have their accounts deleted or lose functionality” because of the policy update.

“We’ve spent the last several months providing more information about our update to users around the world,” WhatsApp said in a statement. 

“In that time, the majority of people who have received it have accepted the update and WhatsApp continues to grow.”

Users will keep receiving reminders to accept sharing their data with Facebook for the next several weeks, reminders that will ultimately become persistent.

“At that time, you’ll encounter limited functionality on WhatsApp until you accept the updates,” the company added.

As WhatsApp’s statement details, users who will not accept the privacy updates will gradually see their accounts’ functionality restricted:

• You won’t be able to access your chat list, but you can still answer incoming phone and video calls. If you have notifications enabled, you can tap on them to read or respond to a message or call back a missed phone or video call.
• After a few weeks of limited functionality, you won’t be able to receive incoming calls or notifications, and WhatsApp will stop sending messages and calls to your phone.

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So this has rolled around again. However, the counter is this Bloomberg story: “Facebook ordered to stop collecting German WhatsApp data“:

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a regulator in the nation said the company’s attempt to make users agree to the practice in its updated terms isn’t legal.

Johannes Caspar, who heads Hamburg’s privacy authority, issued a three-month emergency ban, prohibiting Facebook from continuing with the data collection. He also asked a panel of European Union data regulators to take action and issue a ruling across the 27-nation bloc. The new WhatsApp terms enabling the data scoop are invalid because they are intransparent, inconsistent and overly broad, he said

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.

Might not be quite over in Germany, and by extension the EU. Everywhere else, though, gets to like it or lump it.
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The Martian • No Mercy / No Malice

Scott Galloway:

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Is Mr. [Elon] Musk a net positive for society? 100% yes. It’s the word “net” that is the problem. We do basic math on a person/firm, issue a thumbs up/down, and decide (if thumbs up) to ignore the externalities. This is tantamount to deciding pesticides are a net good (they are), so we should disband the EPA.

Naked examples of Musk’s influence/externality: the tweeted endorsements of his favored assets. Bitcoin is a trillion-dollar cryptocurrency that could reshape the world economic order … and Musk can manipulate it with (many) fewer than 280 characters.

Researcher Lennart Ante found “significantly abnormal returns of up to 18.99%” after Musk tweeted about bitcoin. “I believe that cryptocurrency traders are looking for role models and validation,” Ante told us when we asked him about his research. But, “we are facing a moral dilemma” he pointed out, between free speech and the protection of investors. When Musk changed the bio of his Twitter account to “#bitcoin” on January 29, the cryptocurrency rose from $32,000 to more than $38,000. Is it free speech? Yes. Does that mean it won’t destabilize the markets and end badly?

I. Don’t. Know.

…The theory of relativity dictates that massive objects distort the space-time continuum, and light and matter slide toward it. Musk has become a similar celestial force in our markets — but in this case, the graviton particles are genius, attention, id, and capital.

…If there is a glitch in the matrix, it’s us. One in five U.S. households with children is food insecure, and we have a man telling his 53 million acolytes to purchase a digital currency so he can sell it at a profit to pad the earnings of a company that’s worth more than automakers producing 60 times the vehicles. And why wouldn’t he? When you tell an innovator he’s Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you.

Once we idolized astronauts and civil rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now we worship tech innovators that create billions and move financial markets. We get the heroes we deserve.

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How to keep your Android device immune to malicious vaccine themed apps • HOTforSecurity

Cristina Popov:

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Attackers are exploiting the COVID-19 vaccine apps to deploy malware to Android devices. Since the outburst of the pandemic, they haven’t missed any opportunity to spread malware via Covid19-themed emails, apps, websites and social media.

But now, Bitdefender researchers have found multiple apps taking advantage of mobile users looking for information about the vaccines or seeking an appointment to get the jab.

Sometimes disguised in or invisibly attached to legit digital products, these fake applications are ready to take over the device after just a few taps. Google has been trying to vet all vaccination-related applications properly, but some fell through the cracks.

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So they need.. antivirus? (Thanks G for the link.)
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“Running Orders” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha • Poetry Foundation

»

They call us now,
before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza?
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.

«

This isn’t the whole of the poem. I recommend the whole highly.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What happens if you post an Apple AirTag? Turns out you can track its progress. CC-licensed photo by Spixey 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. Toot toot! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The internet’s ‘dark patterns’ need to be regulated • The New York Times

Greg Bensinger is a member of the NYT’s editorial board:

»

Some things are difficult by design.

Consider Amazon. The company perfected the one-click checkout. But canceling a $119 Prime subscription is a labyrinthine process that requires multiple screens and clicks.

Or Ticketmaster. Online customers are bombarded with options for ticket insurance, subscription services for razors and other items and, when users navigate through those, they can expect to receive a battery of text messages from the company with no clear option to stop them.

These are examples of “dark patterns,” the techniques that companies use online to get consumers to sign up for things, keep subscriptions they might otherwise cancel or turn over more personal data. They come in countless variations: giant blinking sign-up buttons, hidden unsubscribe links, red X’s that actually open new pages, countdown timers and pre-checked options for marketing spam. Think of them as the digital equivalent of trying to cancel a gym membership.

There are plans in both the House and Senate to tackle dark patterns. And there’s movement at the state level, too. California strengthened its data privacy laws to include certain dark patterns and, in Washington State, lawmakers included similar language in a failed privacy bill of its own.

The phrase was coined over a decade ago by a British user experience designer — who maintains an online “hall of shame” — and since then dark patterns have become only more effective and pernicious. Because of the scale of the internet, if even a small percentage of these ploys work, many thousands or even millions of people may be affected.

«

Have you subscribed to the NYT online? To unsubscribe, you need to phone them during (their) work hours and persuade them to unsubscribe you. Editorialiser, edit thyself. Legislation is a good idea: make it obligatory that you can unsubscribe by the same method. Simple. (Via Benedict Evans’s newsletter.)
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‘Exceptional new normal’: IEA raises growth forecast for wind and solar by another 25% • Carbon Brief

Simon Evans:

»

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has raised its forecast for the global growth of wind and solar by another 25% compared to figures it published just six months ago.

Furthermore, the IEA’s “renewable energy market update” forecasts nearly 40% higher growth in 2021 than it expected a year ago, putting wind and solar on track to match global gas capacity by 2022.

The Paris-based agency says a “huge” 280 gigawatts (GW) of renewable capacity – primarily wind and solar – was installed globally last year, some 45% higher than the level in 2019, after the largest annual increase in more than 20 years.

This “exceptional” level of annual additions will become the “new normal” in 2021 and 2022, the IEA says, with the potential for further acceleration in the years that follow.

Overall, the IEA says that renewables accounted for 90% of new electricity generating capacity added globally last year and that they will meet the same share in each of the next two years.

«

What’s really notable about this is that for years, the IEA’s forecast for renewables has been miles below what actually happened. Finally, though, it seems to have noticed.
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Coal is losing the price war to wind and solar faster than anticipated • Electrek

Michelle Lewis:

»

No wonder Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Cecil Roberts, president of US coal’s largest union, the United Mine Workers of America, finally (begrudgingly, on Manchin’s part) acknowledged the need for a transition from coal to renewables in Appalachia on April 19. Coal can no longer be justified in the US, not only for environmental and societal reasons but now also for economic reasons.

As demonstrated in many social media comments on my stories about green energy, particularly when it comes to Texas, the general public is still buying the fossil fuel industry’s lies, as well as the lies of their political supporters. But once the higher costs for fossil fuels hit consumers’ pockets, the lying won’t be able to continue.

Coal may be worryingly rebounding in Asia, according to a recent report from the International Energy Agency. Energy and environmental groups expected that fossil-fuel use would get worse before it got better.

There are issues that need to be urgently addressed in renewable growth, such as the demand for, possible shortage of, and ethical procurement of minerals and the urgent need for a big boost in renewable manufacturing in the US. But bottom line, coal is now the worst possible choice for energy on all fronts.

«

The link is to the US think tank Energy Innovation, which says that local wind and solar could replace 80% of the US coal fleet and save people money. That’s a lot.
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A closer look at the DarkSide ransomware gang • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

In late March, DarkSide introduced a “call service” innovation that was integrated into the affiliate’s management panel, which enabled the affiliates to arrange calls pressuring victims into paying ransoms directly from the management panel.

In mid-April the ransomware program announced new capability for affiliates to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against targets whenever added pressure is needed during ransom negotiations.

DarkSide also has advertised a willingness to sell information about upcoming victims before their stolen information is published on the DarkSide victim shaming blog, so that enterprising investment scammers can short the company’s stock in advance of the news.

“Now our team and partners encrypt many companies that are trading on NASDAQ and other stock exchanges,” DarkSide explains. “If the company refuses to pay, we are ready to provide information before the publication, so that it would be possible to earn in the reduction price of shares. Write to us in ‘Contact Us’ and we will provide you with detailed information.”

DarkSide also started recruiting new affiliates again last month — mainly seeking network penetration testers who can help turn a single compromised computer into a full-on data breach and ransomware incident.

“We have grown significantly in terms of the client base and in comparison to other projects (judging by the analysis of publicly available information), so we are ready to grow our team and a number of our affiliates in two fields,” DarkSide explained.

…DarkSide has shown itself to be fairly ruthless with victim companies that have deep pockets, but they can be reasoned with. Cybersecurity intelligence firm Intel 471 observed a negotiation between the DarkSide crew and a $15bn US victim company that was hit with a $30m ransom demand in January 2021, and in this incident the victim’s efforts at negotiating a lower payment ultimately reduce the ransom demand by almost two-thirds.

«

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Namecheap hosted 25%+ of fake UK govt phishing sites last year – NCSC report • The Register

Gareth Corfield:

»

Domains’n’hosting outfit Namecheap harboured more than a quarter of all known phishing sites that falsely posed as UK government web presences during 2020, according to the National Cyber Security Centre today.

This stat can be found in the centre’s fourth annual Active Cyber Defence report, which boasts how much digital filth it cleansed from the internet. These included 700,000 scam sites stretching across 1.4 million URLs, or so the NCSC tells us.

It also encountered the usual COVID-themed ones we’ve all become familiar with over the last year – fake copies of the NHS Test and Trace app laced with malware – plus sites impersonating Capita TV Licensing, the outsourced subscription sales arm of the BBC. Email scams were also popular, with 26,000 being shut down after netizens flooded the NCSC’s email reporting portal with complaints of four million suspicious messages.

…One area where the NCSC hopes to make an immediate and positive difference is by killing off scam texts that appear to be sent from alphanumeric names such as UK_Gov. These are possible by design; UK mobile networks support the use of alpha tags in place of phone numbers but until very recently, there wasn’t much in the way of security for those tags.

Alpha tag scamming is easy if you know how, as infosec bod Jake Davis showed The Register last year by sending SMSes appearing to be from the Irish government saying “it looks like you’ve got the old cheeky corona.” The NCSC is now beginning to crack down on and register British Government-themed tags (plus the telly tax agency, unusually) to prevent their reuse by scammers and ne’er-do-wells through a relatively new thing: the SMS SenderID Protection Registry.

«

“There wasn’t much in the way of security”. Just calamitous. Who sets up this sort of stuff without thinking of the potential for scams?
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The oncoming ransomware storm • Stephen Diehl

Diehl is a software engineer based in London:

»

The scary part, is there is almost nothing that can be done from an information security standpoint. Software is not going to magically become more secure any faster, even the most capitalised companies in the United States aren’t able to stave off the new generation of software exploits that are dropping every other day. There are too many exploits in the wild and there’s no stopping a massive increase in discovery, especially when billions of dollars are stake for their immediate use in ransomware. Our entire field is bad at what we do and if you rely on us to fix this, we’re doomed.

This battle cannot and will not be won on the technology side alone. The tech industry can’t solve this. It requires legislation and intervention in the financial system at only the level nation states can act.

Cryptocurrency is the channel by which all the illicit funds in this epidemic flow. And it is the one channel that the US government has complete power to reign in and regulate. The free flow of money from US banks to cryptocurrency exchanges is the root cause and needs to halt. Cryptocurrencies are almost entirely used for illicit activity and investment frauds, and on the whole have no upside for society at large while also having unbounded downside and massive negative externalities.

I fear we are at a critical point where there is not much time left before this new cyberpandemic reaches critical mass. And that looks like a very scary future indeed. I imagine some very dark things become part of the public discourse.

Imagine a hundred new Stuxnet-level exploits every day, for every piece of a equipment in public works and health care. Where every day your check your phone for the level of ransomware in the wild just like you do the weather. Entire cities randomly have their metro systems, water, power grids and internet shut off and on like a sudden onset of bad cybersecurity “weather”.

«

Possibly a bit hyperbolic, but it’s always worth considering the worst-case scenario. I’m not that sure the US government can actually stop bitcoin transactions. Even if US banks don’t allow it, there are plenty of other countries that would. He’s right that cryptocurrency is the real critical point here.
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Twitter was Trump’s megaphone. His new blog isn’t as powerful • CNBC

Brandy Zadrozny:

»

Trump’s new blog has attracted a little over 212,000 engagements, defined as backlinks and social interactions — including likes, shares and comments — received across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit. Before the ban, a single Trump tweet was typically liked and retweeted hundreds of thousands of times.

The blog posts come in the form of statements that are also sent to supporters via email. In the multiple daily notes, Trump has attacked his political enemies and endorsed faithful supporters, continued to push false claims and conspiracy theories, and opined on news of the day.

Trump’s bans cost him the ability to communicate with millions of people: 88 million followers on Twitter, 32 million on Facebook, and 24 million on Instagram. Trump had just around 3 million YouTube subscribers, but his videos regularly racked up millions of views.

A CNBC analysis of Trump’s tweets in January found his most-liked tweets spread disinformation. But the conspiracy theories and name-calling that the former president has spread via his blog don’t seem to move the way they did when Trump benefited from the dual platforms of the White House and traditional social media. Trump has called his statements a “more elegant” alternative to tweeting, telling Newsmax’s Greg Kelly in March, “I like this better than Twitter. Actually they did us a favor.”

«

Less of a megaphone, more of a kazoo. Stick a fork in it: he’s done.
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I posted an AirTag and tracked its progress; here’s what happened • The Mac Security Blog

Kirk McElhearn:

»

I live near Stratford-upon-Avon, in the UK, and I sent the AirTag to a friend south of London. I mailed this AirTag on Friday afternoon, and, with first-class postage, I expected the envelope to be delivered the next day.

The AirTag weighs a mere 11g, so I put one taped to a card, then in a small bubble envelope for protection. I dropped it in the postbox in my village, just down the road from my home. I made sure to open the Find My app on my iPhone when I was next to the postbox; it showed the correct location.

Post is picked up around 5 pm, and a bit later than that, I checked the Find My app on my iPad. At 5:28, I found that my AirTag had reached the local sorting station.

This means that someone, either the postal worker who picked up the post and delivered it to the sorting station, or another employee at the sorting station, had an iPhone which spotted the AirTag. Apple touts their network of nearly a billion devices capable of spotting AirTags, and if there are that many, it should be easy to track this envelope across the country.

It didn’t take long for my AirTag to start its journey. At 5:49, it had started moving, going into Stratford-upon-Avon, presumably to be loaded on to a truck to go to the next location. At around 6:40, it had left the town, heading north.

…I don’t know if any of the truck drivers carrying the mail had iPhones. Even if they didn’t, it’s possible that if someone in a car driving next to the truck has an iPhone, then it would be spotted. Since AirTags use Bluetooth 5, the range is around 100m, but that depends on such things as interference, walls, and other obstacles, and testing would need to be done to find how efficient they are in motion.

«

Terrific idea, though the reality is a little disappointing: he tracked it. Concept proven. Next step is to try an international posting, I guess. (I’ve translated this from the American: McElhearn calls it “mail” and thinks it was collected by a “mailman”. Women can and do perform the job, Kirk.)
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Apple brass discussed disclosing 128-million iPhone hack, then decided not to • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

In September 2015, Apple managers had a dilemma on their hands: should, or should they not notify 128 million iPhone users of what remains the worst mass iOS compromise on record? Ultimately, all evidence shows, they chose to keep quiet.

The mass hack first came to light when researchers uncovered 40 malicious App Store apps, a number that mushroomed to 4,000 as more researchers poked around. The apps contained code that made iPhones and iPads part of a botnet that stole potentially sensitive user information.

An email entered into court this week in Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple shows that, on the afternoon of September 21, 2015, Apple managers had uncovered 2,500 malicious apps that had been downloaded a total of 203 million times by 128 million users, 18 million of whom were in the US.

“Joz, Tom and Christine—due to the large number of customers potentially affected, do we want to send an email to all of them?” App Store VP Matthew Fischer wrote, referring to Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak and Apple PR people Tom Neumayr and Christine Monaghan.

«

This was the XcodeGhost hack, where a man-in-the-middle app that posed as a “better Xcode” to developers, mostly in China injected malicious code into apps compiled with it. (Quite an ambitious project in its own right.) There was also a “Jekyll and Hyde” app in 2013 which, foreshadowing Epic’s method, sneaked past App Store review and then became malicious through remote command.
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Anti-maskers ready to start masking—to protect themselves from the vaccinated • Vice

Mack Lamoureux:

»

The conspiracy—which comes in several shapes and sizes—more or less says the vaccinated will “shed” certain proteins onto the unvaccinated who will then suffer adverse effects. The main worry is the “shedding” will cause irregular menstruation, infertility, and miscarriages. The entirely baseless idea is a key cog in a larger conspiracy that COVID-19 was a ploy to depopulate the world, and the vaccine is what will cull the masses. 

Experts say the conspiracy is born from a fundamental misunderstanding of how vaccines work. It has been widely debunked and you can read about it here, here, and here, among other places.  

Anti-vax influencers are instructing their fellow anti-vaxxers as well as anti-maskers (at this point the two communities overlap to a huge degree) that one of the best ways to defend themselves from this blight is to co-opt…social distancing, the very strategy they have long decried. 

Sherri Tenpenny, an anti-vaxxer who was found to be key in spreading COVID-19 conspiracy theories, suggested on a recent anti-vax livestream that you may have to “stay away from somebody who’s had these shots…forever.” 

«

Oh, really? Suits me fine.
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Hey you! Preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might think you’re good at Tetris – but how about playing a version which makes each move the hardest it can? CC-licensed photo by Sally Mahoney 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. An L-shape for an S-shaped space. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hackers who shut down pipeline: we don’t want to cause “problems for society” • Ars Technica

Jim Salter:

»

On Friday, Colonial Pipeline took many of its systems offline in the wake of a ransomware attack. With systems offline to contain the threat, the company’s pipeline system is inoperative. The system delivers approximately 45% of the East Coast’s petroleum products, including gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel.

…Colonial Pipeline has not publicly said what was demanded of it or how the demand was made. Meanwhile, the hackers have issued a statement saying that they’re just in it for the money.

Colonial Pipeline issued a statement Sunday saying that the US Department of Energy is leading the US federal government response to the attack. “[L]eading, third-party cybersecurity experts” engaged by Colonial Pipeline itself are also on the case. The company’s four main pipelines are still down, but it has begun restoring service to smaller lateral lines between terminals and delivery points as it determines how to safely restart its systems and restore full functionality.

…London-based security firm Digital Shadows said in September that DarkSide [the Eastern European group behind the attack] operates like a business and described its business model as “RaaC”—meaning Ransomware-as-a-Corporation.

…DarkSide claims to avoid targets in medical, education, nonprofit, or governmental sectors—and claims that it only attacks “companies that can pay the requested amount” after “carefully analyz[ing] accountancy” and determining a ransom amount based on a company’s net income. Digital Shadows believes these claims largely translate to “we looked you up on ZoomInfo first.”

«

Of course Darkside is going to express regret – they got noticed, and for such people that’s the worst possible situation. They don’t want federal agencies really digging into how they cash out (through dodgy bitcoin exchanges) and potentially putting a stop to it.
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HATETRIS @ Things Of Interest

»

Play Hate Tetris.

This is bad Tetris. It’s hateful Tetris. It’s Tetris according to the evil AI from “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream”.

«

There’s no “gravity” – you have to use the keyboard (it works) to make the piece come down – but it is guaranteed to frustrate you, because it has an AI which picks the next piece that appears:

»

The method by which the AI selects the worst possible piece is extremely simple to describe (test all possible locations of all possible pieces, see which of the pieces’ best-case scenarios is the worst, then spawn that worst piece), but quite time-consuming to execute, so please forgive me if your browser chugs a little after locking each piece. If you can figure out a way to accelerate the algorithm without diminishing its hate-filled efficiency, do let me know. The algorithm for “weighing” possibilities is to simply maximise the highest point of the “tower” after the piece is landed.

«

Yup. It’s hateful, horrible, it’ll ruin your day, and it’s just as addictive as the “real” thing.
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Apple robbed the mob’s bank • Mobile Dev Memo

Eric Seufert:

»

With ATT [App Tracking Transparency, Apple’s anti-tracking option], Apple has robbed the mob’s bank. In bolstering its ads business while severely handicapping other advertising platforms — but especially Facebook — with the introduction of a privacy policy that effectively breaks the mechanic that those platforms use to target ads, Apple has taken money from a party that is so unsympathetic that it can’t appeal to a greater authority for redress. Apple has brazenly, in broad daylight, stormed into the Bank of Facebook, looted its most precious resource, and, camouflaged under the noble cause of giving privacy controls to the consumer, fled the scene.

And Facebook is left with little recourse. The company attempted to sway consumer sentiment to its side through an enormously wide-reaching PR campaign, but its efforts there were hobbled by the narrow messaging that was available to it. Facebook couldn’t explain in detail why ATT will harm consumers because, in doing so, it would need to reveal just how it personalizes ads — through observing conversions on third-party websites and apps. So Facebook was restricted to a fairly weak PR strategy, which was to highlight that small businesses would be harmed by ATT. This is true, of course, but it doesn’t invigorate a deep well of compassion from consumers. Does anyone want to acknowledge that their local florist or butcher is personalizing ads to them? Meanwhile, Apple simply had to mention “privacy” whenever objections to ATT were raised and mainstream media outlets rushed to defend it.

Apple’s exploitation of leverage in this situation has been breathtaking. It’s important to note here that ATT allows users to opt out of “tracking”, which is a peculiar term that is defined in a very specific way.

«

The specific thing about it is that Apple defines it in a way that doesn’t include the, err… tracing? that it does which allows it to serve targeted ads.

Related: Apple has hired Antonio García Martinez, formerly Facebook ads product manager who essentially got its targeted ad system to work.
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New York Attorney General declares top ISPs committed net neutrality fraud • ZDNet

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:

»

When then-President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tried to destroy net neutrality in 2017, everyone knew that millions of comments in favor of breaking net neutrality were bogus. 

As then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said at the time, two million net neutrality comments were fake. Schneiderman said: “Moving forward with this vote would make a mockery of our public comment process and reward those who perpetrated this fraud to advance their own hidden agenda.” Schneiderman was wrong. 

His successor, Letitia James, found after a multi-year investigation that there had been “18 million fake comments with the FCC,” including over 500,000 fake letters sent to Congress in support of the repeal.

Behind this vast majority of this astroturfing campaign was Broadband for America, a marketing group funded by the country’s top ISPs. In classic 1984 doublespeak, it claims to be in favor of net neutrality while, in reality, being a group of its greatest enemies. Its members include AT&T, CenturyLink, Charter, CTIA – The Wireless Association, Comcast, Cox, NCTA – The Internet & Television Association, Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), and USTelecom-The Broadband Association.

James reported: “After a multi-year investigation, we found the nation’s largest broadband companies funded a secret campaign to influence the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules – resulting in millions of fake public comments impersonating Americans. These illegal schemes are unacceptable.”

Altogether, 80% of all public FCC comments filed on its net-neutrality proposal four years ago came from the scammers. There was never, as Ajit Pai, then-FCC chairman and a former Verizon attorney claimed at the time, any mass support for destroying net neutrality.

«

The ISPs paid marketing companies $4.2m to spam; those companies have been fined but “don’t have to admit wrongdoing”. The classic American failure to get justice. Though of course Ajit Pai, the most useless idiot, was happy to believe those comments were real, because it suited him.
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Amazon and Apple built vast wireless networks using your devices. Here’s how they work • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»

Apple and Amazon are transforming the devices we own into the equivalent of little cell towers or portable Wi-Fi hot spots that can connect other gadgets and sensors to the internet. They have already switched on hundreds of millions—with many more on the way. Instead of serving as wireless hubs solely for your own smartwatches, lights and sensors, your iPhones and Echo speakers can help other people’s gadgets stay connected as well—whether you know it or not.

On Friday, Amazon announced it’s expanding its Sidewalk network, which already includes certain Ring Floodlight Cam and Spotlight models, to include Echo devices released in 2018 and after. This includes Echo speakers and Echo Dots, as well as all Echo Show, Echo Plus and Echo Spot devices. It will also use recent Ring Video Doorbell Pro models to communicate on the Sidewalk network via Bluetooth. Sidewalk was designed to allow smart devices to send very small bits of data securely from any available wireless connection, to supplement Wi-Fi networks and reduce wireless communication breakdowns.

This announcement comes on the heels of Apple’s AirTag introduction. These coin-size trackers can help locate lost items almost anywhere, because they use the company’s Find My network. Each AirTag sends out a low-powered wireless signal, which can be received by the iPhones, iPads and Macs in a given area.

Yes, perfect strangers are using slivers of our bandwidth, as our devices send out and listen to little chirrups of radio chatter that don’t pertain to us. And you’re now able to leverage the radios and internet connection of countless devices owned by other people, too.

Users can opt out of these systems, but the tech giants are betting that for the most part we won’t, because of the benefits that these new networks will provide—from finding our lost possessions, pets and loved ones to remotely controlling our smart locks, security systems and lights.

“What we’re seeing now is the battle of the mesh networks,” says Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, a tech industry consultancy. “The use cases of these networks are limited only by customers’ imaginations.”

«

I’ll be honest, I still can’t think of anything to do with an Airtag. Maybe get two, and label one “Memory” and the other “Sense of humour”? Meanwhile, just after this article was written Amazon announced partnerships with Tile – the tagging company which is deeply annoyed with Apple – and Level, which makes smart locks.

Who’s missing from this lineup? Google, of course. Question: why?
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Tesla’s Autopilot may not have been available at the time of the ‘driverless’ Texas crash • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

Using Autopilot requires both the Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (Tesla’s brand name for its adaptive cruise control function) and Autosteer (which assists in lane departure and centering) to work. According to NTSB, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control could be engaged [on the road leading to the crash] but not Autosteer.

Tesla claims that its own data suggests local officials were mistaken when they reported that the car crashed without someone in the driver’s seat. The company’s executives have stated that the steering wheel was “deformed” and the seatbelts were buckled, leading them to conclude that someone was behind the wheel.

There was some limited data recovered from the crash. NTSB said the fire destroyed the onboard storage device located in the vehicle’s infotainment console. The restraint control module, which records data associated with vehicle speed, belt status, acceleration, and airbag deployment, was recovered but was also damaged by the fire.

The board likely will not issue its final report on the crash this year. By comparison, the NTSB’s investigation into a California man’s death while using Autopilot in his Tesla Model X took two years to complete.

The crash took place on Saturday, April 17th, in Spring, Texas. According to KHOU in Houston, investigators at the scene were “100% certain” that no one was in the driver’s seat at the time of the crash. Minutes before the crash, the wives of the men were said to overhear them talking about the Autopilot feature of the vehicle, which was a 2019 Tesla Model S. The two victims were identified as Everette Talbot, 69, and William Varner, 59, a prominent local anaesthesiologist.

«

I had assumed that the men who died would be in their 20s – that it was some sort of overconfident drunken kid thing. Instead it looks more like an overconfident drunken boomer thing.
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Microsoft shelves Windows 10X – not shipping in 2021 • Petri

Brad Sams:

»

Back in the fall of 2019, Microsoft held a Surface event that will likely go down in history as one of the most ambitious announcements from the company. At the keynote, Microsoft unveiled three new products that were not only completely new for the company but also pushed them in a bold new direction.

The Surface Duo, Surface Neo, and Windows 10X grabbed all the headlines; Microsoft was shoved into the limelight with a folding phone, a folding PC, and a new OS. But as time moved forward, the reality of these ambitious projects turned sour.

Of the three projects, the Surface Duo did arrive in all of its Android glory. Running a Google-created OS, the Surface Duo delivered on its promise to create a foldable device made of the same premium-lineage of the Surface brand but the highlights were short-lived.

Not long after shipping, Microsoft stopped promoting the device, updates were slow to arrive, and the future of significant software updates (moving to newer versions of Android) is unknown.

But the Surface Neo was met with a different fate. The device that was going to run Microsoft’s new 10X operating system was delayed and the OS was pushed down a different path. Instead of initially be designed for dual-screened devices, Microsoft would develop 10X for single-screened experiences first and that was the end of the Surface Neo shipping anytime soon.

As we head into the spring of 2021, the plans are changing again for the OS. According to people familiar with the company’s plans, Microsoft will not be shipping Windows 10X this year and the OS as you know it today, will likely never arrive. The company has shifted resources to Windows 10 and 10X is on the back burner, for now.

…The reality is that if Microsoft is going to invest heavily in a modern version of Windows 10, it should be to run Windows 10 on ARM.

«

Also worth reading: Extremetech’s Joel Hruska on why a lightweight Windows is a no-go and is why Apple almost surely will never “united” macOS and iOS.
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Chinese TV maker Skyworth under fire for excessive data collection that users call spying • South China Morning Post

Xinmei Shen:

»

Chinese television maker Skyworth has issued an apology after a consumer found that his set was quietly collecting a wide range of private data and sending it to a Beijing-based analytics company without his consent.

A network traffic analysis revealed that a Skyworth smart TV scanned for other devices connected to the same local network every 10 minutes and gathered data that included device names, IP addresses, network latency and even the names of other Wi-Fi networks within range, according to a post last week on the Chinese developer forum V2EX.

The data was sent to the Beijing-based firm Gozen Data, the forum user said. Gozen is a data analytics company that specialises in targeted advertising on smart TVs, and it calls itself China‘s first “home marketing company empowered by big data centred on family data”.

…The Shenzhen-based TV and set-top box maker issued a statement on April 27, saying it had ended its “cooperation” with Gozen and demanded the firm delete all its “illegally” collected data. Skyworth also said it had stopped using the Gozen app on its televisions and was looking into the issue.

Gozen issued a statement on its website on the same day, saying its Gozen Data Android app could be disabled on Skyworth TVs, but it did not address the likelihood that users would be aware of this functionality. The company also apologised for “causing user concerns about privacy and security”.

«

However, the two companies had been working together since 2014, so there might be a little bit of data here and there which has already been swallowed into some huge maw.
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Ohio lawmaker was driving while attending a government meeting via Zoom • Columbus Dispatch

Laura Bischoff:

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On the same day a distracted driving bill was introduced, state Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, participated in a government video meeting while driving.

“I wasn’t distracted. I was paying attention to the driving and listening to it (the meeting,)” Brenner said. “I had two meetings that were back to back that were in separate locations. And I’ve actually been on other calls, numerous calls, while driving. Phone calls for the most part but on video calls, I’m not paying attention to the video. To me, it’s like a phone call.”

He added that he was parked during most of the video meeting of the Ohio Controlling Board. “I was wearing a seat belt and paying attention to the road.”

House Bill 283, introduced Monday, calls for a ban on writing, sending or reading texts, viewing videos or taking photos, live streaming and using applications while driving.

It would also make holding or using an electronic device while driving a primary offense, which would permit police to pull the driver over. Currently, texting while driving is a secondary offense for drivers over 18, which means police must witness another moving violation before pulling the driver over.

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The video clip shows him looking left and right, clearly about to pull out from a junction – not “parked”. But he didn’t have the honesty to not use a fake background. For reference if you ever need to define “hypocrisy”. And we now have this week’s “things not to do on Zoom”, to go with …that, and “getting out of the bath”.
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Trump abused the system. Facebook created it • WIRED

Virginia Heffernan:

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About the American president as author of the posts, the [Facebook Oversight Board] statement says, “As president, Mr. Trump had a high level of influence. The reach of his posts was large, with 35 million followers on Facebook and 24 million on Instagram.” The board went on: “It is not always useful to draw a firm distinction between political leaders and other influential users, recognizing that other users with large audiences can also contribute to serious risks of harm.”

Though put in a matter-of-fact way, this point was the one surprise—even shock—in the oversight board’s statement. To Facebook, the American president is clearly not a public servant or even a commander-in-chief. He’s an influencer. And he gets his power not from the people but from Facebook and its business model of influencers and followers.

Power established on Facebook is not “legitimate” in sociological terms; it’s not power, like that of a schoolteacher or elected official, that’s regarded as just and appropriate by those over whom it is exercised. Far from it. “Influence” on Facebook is based on nothing but a (cheatable) point system in Facebook’s highly stylized massively multiplayer role-playing game. But that does not get mentioned by anyone on this committee, which has been blinded, in the McLuhan sense, to the game’s contrivances. Influence on Facebook is closer to influence in World of Warcraft than it is to legitimate power. But instead of calling out Facebook for creating a system that confers unregulated and dangerous “influence” on people, they speak of the abuse of that system by a designated bad actor.

Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at the Harvard Business School and a member of something called the Real Facebook Oversight Board, which was formed by Facebook skeptics determined to oversee the overseers the corporation had appointed, says that over two decades, internet-users have turned over responsibility for the common good to a “for-profit surveillance society”—the big tech companies. It’s Facebook’s business model and no one bad actor who put Facebook on what Zuboff calls “a collision course with democracy.”

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Meta-note: there is a lot of good content on Wired. It’s got a lot of sharp takes on social impacts of technology.
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You got this far – why not preorder Social Warming, coming out next month.

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