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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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?
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

Ohio lawmaker was driving while attending a government meeting via Zoom • Columbus Dispatch

Laura Bischoff:

»

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.

«

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”.
unique link to this extract

Trump abused the system. Facebook created it • WIRED

Virginia Heffernan:

»

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.”

«

Meta-note: there is a lot of good content on Wired. It’s got a lot of sharp takes on social impacts of technology.
unique link to this extract

You got this far – why not preorder Social Warming, coming out next month.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is it real or fake? What look like satellite photos could turn out to be deepfakes. CC-licensed photo by pinboke_planet on Flickr.

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

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

What does Covid teach us about climate change? • Tim Harford

»

Climate change because of greenhouse gas emissions is well under way, but at a speed measured in decades. As a result, it is almost impossible to cover climate change as a pure news story. Instead, we journalists write about parallel matters, such as the convening of global conferences or the publishing of portentous reports. The true story is enormous but never quite news.

Activists now use the phrase “climate emergency” in an effort to prompt a sense of urgency. I sympathise: we have delayed obvious policy responses such as carbon pricing for a quarter of a century, and every further delay makes the problem graver. But such delays will always be tempting.

For those of us concerned about a lack of action on the environment, this discouraging reality is a function of the very word “news”. It is not easy to cover something that happens in extreme slow motion, whether it is an existential threat such as climate change or an inspiring success story such as the availability of vaccines for childhood diseases.

Greta Thunberg complained to the Financial Times last week that “the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis”. She is right about that, and it never will be. We will never have a daily afternoon news conference in which the prime minister explains to the nation how the climate has changed over the past 24 hours.

That, then, is the disheartening difference between climate change and Covid-19. Now for the equally disheartening similarity: both are amenable to disinformation, polarisation and wishful thinking.

«

Don’t despair, though; he does have some good news.
unique link to this extract

Why did it take so long to accept the facts about Covid’s spread? • The New York Times

Zeynep Tufekci:

»

Linsey Marr, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech who made important contributions to our understanding of airborne virus transmission before the pandemic, pointed to two key scientific errors — rooted in a lot of history — that explain the resistance, and also opened a fascinating sociological window into how science can get it wrong and why.

First, Dr. Marr said, the upper limit for particles to be able to float is actually 100 microns, not five microns, as generally thought. The incorrect five-micron claim may have come about because earlier scientists conflated the size at which respiratory particles could reach the lower respiratory tract (important for studying tuberculosis) with the size at which they remain suspended in the air.

Dr. Marr said that if you inhale a particle from the air, it’s an aerosol. She agreed that droplet transmission by a larger respiratory particle is possible, if it lands on the eye, for example, but biomechanically, she said, nasal transmission faces obstacles, since nostrils point downward and the physics of particles that large makes it difficult for them to move up the nose. And in lab measurements, people emit far more of the easier-to-inhale aerosols than the droplets, she said, and even the smallest particles can be virus laden, sometimes more so than the larger ones, seemingly because of how and where they are produced in the respiratory tract.

Second, she said, proximity is conducive to transmission of aerosols as well because aerosols are more concentrated near the person emitting them. In a twist of history, modern scientists have been acting like those who equated stinky air with disease [the 19th century miasma theory], by equating close contact, a measure of distance, only with the larger droplets, a mechanism of transmission, without examination.

«

Tufekci’s questions revolve around why the CDC and WHO, and those who took their guidance from them, were so slow (and remain so) to adjust their world view. I suspect that Michael Lewis’s new book Premonition (now published), which looks at those who realised how bad the problem could get well before others, will point this out: Lewis thinks the CDC simply isn’t set up to do what it seems to, which is to control disease.
unique link to this extract

$100 as incentive to get a shot? Experiment suggests it can pay off • The New York Times

Lynn Vavrek:

»

Reassuring public service announcements about the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness have proliferated. But increasingly, people are realizing that it will take more than just information to sway the hesitant.

In recent randomized survey experiments by the UCLA Covid-19 Health and Politics Project, two seemingly strong incentives have emerged.

Roughly a third of the unvaccinated population said a cash payment would make them more likely to get a shot. This suggests that some governors may be on the right track; West Virginia’s governor, Jim Justice, for example, recently announced the state would give young people $100 bonds if they got an inoculation.

Similarly large increases in willingness to take vaccines emerged for those who were asked about getting a vaccine if doing so meant they wouldn’t need to wear a mask or social-distance in public, compared with a group that was told it would still have to do those things.

The UCLA project, which is still going on, has interviewed more than 75,000 people over the last 10 months.

«

That’s a big group, so this feels like a robust result. Money turns out to be the most persuasive solution, apparently. Which is understandable – you get the benefit of the vaccine as well, after all. Another point: the gigantic leap in willingness suggests there isn’t really a deep rooted fear of the vaccines. If $100 convinces you (and smaller amounts did too, just fewer people) then you clearly don’t have a principled position.
unique link to this extract

“The internals of Apple’s App Review testing” • Thread Reader App

Steve Troughton-Smith is a very experienced Mac (and iOS, I think) developer, and has dug down into the emails and presentations from the Apple-Epic trial to pull out lots of relevant data. For instance: there are more than 900 rules used for app rejection, when apps are rejected the two most common reasons are “information needed” and “exhibit(s) bugs” (making 24% of rejections), watchOS has just 17,551 apps, tvOS has 10,009.

And consider this: two-thirds of new apps submitted to the App Store are rejected. (For updates, it’s about a quarter.)

There’s tons more. It’s a long thread (collated here off Twitter). But worthwhile.
unique link to this extract

Clubhouse launches Android app as downloads plummet • Reuters

»

Live audio app Clubhouse will begin introducing a test version of its app to Google’s Android users in the United States on Sunday, the company said, in a potentially big expansion of its market.

The app, which spiked in popularity early this year after celebrity billionaire Elon Musk and others appeared in audio chats, has sparked copy cats from startups and larger rivals including Facebook and Twitter.

It has been available only to users of Apple devices and by invitation. In some markets such as China, invitations were so sought after some were auctioned on online marketplaces.

But downloads of the app, one measure of popularity, have significantly fallen.

After peaking in February with 9.6 million downloads, that number fell to 2.7 million in March and then 900,000 downloads in April, according to Sensor Tower.

The drop has sparked questions about its long term viability and whether its success was owed in part to people spending more time at home during the pandemic.

«

That 10-to-1 collapse in downloads suggests to me at least that Clubhouse isn’t going to thrive. If a growing userbase doesn’t lead to a growing number of would-be users, your troubles are just beginning. As people emerge from lockdowns, as everything returns to some semblance of normality, we’ll find out just where not-a-podcast stuff fits in to our lives. Meanwhile, the people at Clubhouse are very positive about everything. Naturally. To me, though, it feels like the wave has passed.
unique link to this extract

How China turned a prize-winning iPhone hack against the Uyghurs • MIT Technology Review

Patrick Howell O’Neill:

»

In an unexpected statement [in 2017], the billionaire founder and CEO of the Chinese cybersecurity giant Qihoo 360—one of the most important technology firms in China—publicly criticized Chinese citizens who went overseas to take part in hacking competitions [such as Pwn2own].

In an interview with the Chinese news site Sina, Zhou Hongyi said that performing well in such events represented merely an “imaginary” success. Zhou warned that once Chinese hackers show off vulnerabilities at overseas competitions, they can “no longer be used.” Instead, he argued, the hackers and their knowledge should “stay in China” so that they could recognize the true importance and “strategic value” of the software vulnerabilities. 

Beijing agreed. Soon, the Chinese government banned cybersecurity researchers from attending overseas hacking competitions. Just months later, a new competition popped up inside China to take the place of the international contests. The Tianfu Cup, as it was called, offered prizes that added up to over a million dollars. 

The inaugural event was held in November 2018. The $200,000 top prize went to Qihoo 360 researcher Qixun Zhao, who showed off a remarkable chain of exploits that allowed him to easily and reliably take control of even the newest and most up-to-date iPhones. From a starting point within the Safari web browser, he found a weakness in the core of the iPhones operating system, its kernel. The result? A remote attacker could take over any iPhone that visited a web page containing Qixun’s malicious code. It’s the kind of hack that can potentially be sold for millions of dollars on the open market to give criminals or governments the ability to spy on large numbers of people. Qixun named it “Chaos.”

Two months later, in January 2019, Apple issued an update that fixed the flaw. There was little fanfare—just a quick note of thanks to those who discovered it.

But in August of that year, Google published an extraordinary analysis into a hacking campaign it said was “exploiting iPhones en masse.” Researchers dissected five distinct exploit chains they’d spotted “in the wild.” These included the exploit that won Qixun the top prize at Tianfu, which they said had also been discovered by an unnamed “attacker.” 

«

The attacks were against phones used by Uyghurs (or those in close contact with them), and happened between November 2018 and January 2019. Nationalist hacking. It’s quite a reminder of how China treats its own citizens (hackers and Uyghurs) and views the outside world. (Thanks Chris R for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Apple IOS 14.5 privacy changes spark low opt-in rates, falling ad prices • Business Insider

Lara O’Reilly:

»

About 96% of iOS 14.5 users in the US who have been presented with the privacy pop-ups opted out of ad tracking, according to the mobile-analytics service Flurry’s daily tracker on May 7. Worldwide, that figure was a little lower, at 88%. Social apps have seen the lowest opt-in rates, with utilities, weather, and gaming apps having some of the highest, Ben Holmes, the senior vice president of performance and exchange at the mobile-ad firm AdColony, said during a panel on the Clubhouse app Thursday. (Some users’ settings prevent them from being served the pop-ups at all.)

It’s early days, but ad prices for iPhone users are also dropping, which could reflect a diminished trackable audience, though ad prices can often fluctuate over any given day or week. The location-focused adtech company Blis said the cost to reach 1,000 iOS 14.5 users — CPMs, in ad industry parlance — were 14% lower than the rates to reach users on the earlier version of iOS over the past week. Verve, a fellow location-focused mobile-ad platform, said CPMs [ad prices per thousand viewings] across all versions of iOS had fallen 3% on average between the App Tracking Transparency rollout and May 6.

That’s bad news for developers who monetize their apps through advertising. The mobile-game publisher Tilting Point told Digiday earlier this week it had a 30% drop in CPMs between users with the IDFA and those without.

One of the biggest frustrations advertisers have expressed around the changes is the hampering of their ability to analyze which of their ad campaigns are working. Apple’s privacy-focused measurement solution, SKAdNetwork, lacks many of the real-time reporting bells and whistles that sophisticated mobile marketers are used to.

«

So it’s beginning to have an effect. Does this mean people will have to spend more money advertising on Facebook in order to get the same effect? Or will they find some other technique? Or give up?
unique link to this extract

Google goes nuclear against Roku by adding YouTube TV to the main YouTube app • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

A week after their broken-down negotiations spilled into the public, Google and Roku still haven’t been able to reach a deal to renew YouTube TV’s presence on the huge streaming platform. But Google has come up with something of a workaround in the meantime: it’s going to let people access YouTube TV directly from the main YouTube app.

YouTube users will start seeing a “Go to YouTube TV” option in the main YouTube app over the next few days. When they select that, they’ll then be switched over to the standard YouTube TV user experience. This option is coming to Roku devices first — where it’s currently most needed — but will also come to YouTube on other platforms as well.

In essence, Google has basically stuffed the YouTube TV app into YouTube itself, a solution that seems unlikely to make Roku very happy. Google says it’s “still working to come to an agreement with Roku to ensure continued access to YouTube TV for our mutual customers,” and it notes the YouTube TV app remains usable for those who already have it installed.

But in the event that things totally fall apart, Google says it’s “in discussions with other partners to secure free streaming devices in case YouTube TV members face any access issues on Roku.” A Google spokesperson told The Verge that this workaround is only for consumption of YouTube TV; customers cannot sign up for new subscriptions through the YouTube app at this time.

On Friday afternoon, Roku responded to Google’s latest move by calling the company “an unchecked monopolist.”

«

“…will also come to YouTube on other platforms as well” suggests that Google has been planning to do this for a while, since that isn’t a trivial effort (is it?). More important than whether it leaves Roku happy – though that does count – is whether it leaves customers happy. Also, Google’s missing out on those marginal signups.
unique link to this extract

A growing problem of ‘deepfake geography’: how AI falsifies satellite images • UW News

Kim Eckhart:

»

A fire in Central Park seems to appear as a smoke plume and a line of flames in a satellite image. Colorful lights on Diwali night in India, seen from space, seem to show widespread fireworks activity.

Both images exemplify what a new University of Washington-led study calls “location spoofing.” The photos — created by different people, for different purposes — are fake but look like genuine images of real places. And with the more sophisticated AI technologies available today, researchers warn that such “deepfake geography” could become a growing problem.

So, using satellite photos of three cities and drawing upon methods used to manipulate video and audio files, a team of researchers set out to identify new ways of detecting fake satellite photos, warn of the dangers of falsified geospatial data and call for a system of geographic fact-checking.

“This isn’t just Photoshopping things. It’s making data look uncannily realistic,” said Bo Zhao, assistant professor of geography at the UW and lead author of the study, published on April 21 in the journal Cartography and Geographic Information Science. “The techniques are already there. We’re just trying to expose the possibility of using the same techniques, and of the need to develop a coping strategy for it.”

«

After all, you can create fake humans and animals – why not faked locations?
unique link to this extract

The autonomous vehicle world is shrinking — it’s overdue • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

For years, Missy Cummings, director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University, has been criticizing rosy predictions about our driverless future. She’s consistently warned that the technology is much further away and harder to get right than anyone in the industry cares to admit.

The recent trend in consolidation is vindication for her position, she says.

“It’s kind of like the elephant in the room,” she said of the shrinking of the AV world. “People will mention that and then they’ll stop themselves from making the Socratic connection to what this means about the viability of this industry.”

But Cummings doesn’t think people in the industry will be able to ignore the truth for much longer. “There is an embarrassingly large sum of money that’s been invested in this, so people feel like they have to keep going down that path because surely all these people who invested all this money can’t be wrong,” she says. “Not everyone is delusional,” she added. “Just most people in this business.”

That said, Toyota and Aurora weren’t delusional when they decided to buy the automated driving teams at Lyft and Uber, respectively. They likely saw the value in the code produced by those teams, as well as the talent accrued by the ride-hailing companies over the years. When you can’t hire the people you’d like to staff your own projects, then you have to acquihire them, the distinctive Silicon Valley practice of buying a smaller company for the express purpose of acquiring their team of software engineers. Also, Uber and Lyft were very motivated to sell as recently public companies under pressure to staunch the bleeding and become profitable.

…“The buying up of these companies represents companies being able to buy skill sets that they would not otherwise be able to recruit,” Cummings said. “And I think that’s very valuable.”

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

No getting away from the plugs: preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book.

A “tip jar” scheme is coming to Twitter – which feels like it could lead to some desperate behaviour. CC-licensed photo by MTSOfan 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. It’s behind you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

It’s Friday! (Depending on location.) Shouldn’t you preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book, just in case?

Introducing Tip Jar • Twitter Blog

Esther Crawford is Twitter’s senior product manager:

»

We $ee you – sharing your PayPal link after your Tweet goes viral, adding your $Cashtag to your profile so people can support your work, dropping your Venmo handle on your birthday or if you just need some extra help. You drive the conversation on Twitter and we want to make it easier for you to support each other beyond Follows, Retweets, and Likes. Today, we’re introducing Tip Jar – a new way for people to send and receive tips.

You’ll know an account’s Tip Jar is enabled if you see a Tip Jar icon next to the Follow button on their profile page. Tap the icon, and you’ll see a list of payment services or platforms that the account has enabled. Select whichever payment service or platform you prefer and you’ll be taken off Twitter to the selected app where you can show your support in the amount you choose. The services* you can add today include Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo. Twitter takes no cut. On Android, tips can also be sent within Spaces.

«

Twitter is about to take a very weird turn, I think. Let’s call it the Era of Thirst.
unique link to this extract

Apple AirTags only partly stop stalking • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

»

Clip a button-sized AirTag onto your keys, and it’ll help you find where you accidentally dropped them in the park. But if someone else slips an AirTag into your bag or car without your knowledge, it could also be used to covertly track everywhere you go. Along with helping you find lost items, AirTags are a new means of inexpensive, effective stalking.

I know because I tested AirTags by letting a Washington Post colleague pretend to stalk me. And Apple’s efforts to stop the misuse of its trackers just aren’t sufficient.

To discourage what it calls “unwanted tracking,” Apple built technology into AirTags to warn potential victims, including audible alarms and messages about suspicious AirTags that pop up on iPhones. To put Apple’s personal security protections to the test, my colleague Jonathan Baran paired an AirTag with his iPhone, slipped his tag in my backpack (with my permission), and then tracked me for a week from across San Francisco Bay.

I got multiple alerts: from the hidden AirTag and on my iPhone. But it wasn’t hard to find ways an abusive partner could circumvent Apple’s systems. To name one: The audible alarm only rang after three days — and then it turned out to be just 15 seconds of light chirping. And another: while an iPhone alerted me that an unknown AirTag was moving with me, similar warnings aren’t available for the roughly half of Americans who use Android phones.

«

The argument I hear is that this would enable stalking in “mixed” relationships where the stalky partner has an iPhone and the stalked person has an Android. Well, OK, though is that a common setup? It must be a fraction of a fraction. More to the point, would-be stalkers can just buy GPS tracking devices quite cheaply on Amazon (one readers suggests you try a search on “hidden GPS tracking device” – they’re cheaper than an AirTag). No worries about an iPhone-carrying stalking target being warned either.

So yes, AirTags *can* in theory be used to stalk people. But more effective ways already exist, and have done for a while. Meanwhile, AirTags owners: there’s a groovy hidden interface that’s more like a submarine sonar.
unique link to this extract

Everything you’ve heard about Section 230 is wrong • WIRED

Gilad Edelman:

»

it’s hard to prove Section 230 is the reason for the success of American social media giants. The internet was invented in the US, which gave its tech sector an enormous head start. America’s biggest tech successes include corporate titans whose core businesses don’t depend on user- generated content: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. Tesla didn’t become the world’s most valuable car company because of Section 230.

Another response is that even if Facebook does owe its wild success to Section 230, perhaps that’s not a reason to pop champagne. The reason we’re talking about reforming tech laws in the first place is that “the internet as we know it” often seems optimized less for users than for the shareholders of the largest corporations. Section 230’s defenders may be right that without it, Facebook and Google would not be the world-devouring behemoths they are today. If the law had developed slowly, if they faced potential liability for user behavior, the impossibility of careful moderation at scale might have kept them from growing as quickly as they did and spreading as far. What would we have gotten in their place? Perhaps smaller, more differentiated platforms, an ecosystem in which more conversations took place within intentional communities rather than in a public square full of billions of people, many of them behaving like lunatics.

As I said, that’s an alternate timeline. From the vantage point of 2021, it’s probably too late to ditch Section 230 and let the courts figure it all out from scratch. Only Congress can scrape away the decades of judicial interpretations that have attached like barnacles to the original legislation. The question is how to change the law to address its worst side effects without placing internet companies under impossible legal burdens.

There are a number of ideas on the table, ranging in concreteness from op-eds to white papers to proposed, sometimes even bipartisan, legislation. And they vary according to what problem the authors are most interested in solving.

«

A better headline for this (long) article would be “How Section 230 can and should be changed to improve things”. Even if you already understand S230 (though most people don’t), it gives some thorough history. The suggestions for how to improve it, by paring away unneeded protections, are definitely worth reading. The catch: it’s subscriber-only, so you might need to see if it has been syndicated elsewhere. (Try a search on the headline.)
unique link to this extract

£10,000 to increase your energy bill: making the economics of heat pumps stack up • Institute for Global Change

Tim Lord:

»

perhaps the most important enabling technology for net zero in the UK is the humble heat pump – a box about one metre cubed on the side of our houses which has the potential to decarbonise our home heating.

While there are debates about the right way of decarbonising UK heating, there is no doubt that heat pumps will need to play a big role.  And the government has acknowledged that. We currently install heat pumps at a rate of around 30,000 per year.  The government’s target is to install 600,000 a year by 2028.  That figure is likely to need to rise to 1.5 million a year by 2035.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of ramp-up that’s required to hit those targets.

To illustrate: if you stood on Whitehall and faced north, a chain of all the heat pumps installed last year would stretch to the M25. 

By 2028, we’ll need that line of heat pumps to stretch to Edinburgh. By 2035, it would need to stretch all the way to John O’Groats… and back again.

To get that level of take-up, we need a proposition for consumers that is desirable. But at the moment, the basic consumer proposition is: pay £10,000 for a device which you don’t understand, and which will increase your energy bill.   And that’s if you can find an installer to fit it.

Addressing that problem is a multi-faceted issue, which I will return to in future. But there is one key element which has to work, and which we can do something about relatively quickly: the running costs need to be lower than for a gas boiler.

«

You may not have heard of the IGC (I hadn’t). Its full title is the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. (No lowballing there.) I wonder what David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s institutes will aim to do.
unique link to this extract

The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you • Signal Blog

»

Facebook’s own tools have the potential to divulge what is otherwise unseen. It’s already possible to catch fragments of these truths in the ads you’re shown; they are glimmers that reflect the world of a surveilling stranger who knows you. We wanted to use those same tools to directly highlight how most technology works. We wanted to buy some Instagram ads.

We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses. Facebook was not into that idea.

Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.

«

In its way, this is just like Apple blocking apps on the App Store from saying that Apple takes 30% of digital transactions, or advertising other places to subscribe. The only real crime in Silicon Valley is to reveal what’s behind the curtain.
unique link to this extract

Nick Clegg steers Facebook’s Trump decision • The New York Times

Adam Satariano and Cecilia Kang:

»

Inside Facebook, where Mr. Zuckerberg leans on a group of friends and early employees for counsel, Mr. Clegg earned the trust of his new boss. At the company’s headquarters, where proximity to Mr. Zuckerberg is power, Mr. Clegg’s desk was placed nearby. He orchestrated a trip through Europe with Mr. Zuckerberg, meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels and President Emmanuel Macron of France in Paris.

Since Mr. Clegg’s arrival, Facebook has shifted some of its policy positions. It now appears more accepting of regulation and higher taxes. He overcame reluctance from Mr. Zuckerberg and others in the company to ban political ads in the weeks before Election Day last year. And he was the main internal supporter for recently announced product changes that give users more control over what posts they see in their Facebook feeds.

“He has a track record of knowing what it’s like to work inside a cabinet that needs to make decisions quickly and move at the speed of a country, or in this case a platform,” said Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, who worked with Mr. Clegg on the user-control changes.

Critics say Mr. Clegg’s role is an attempt by Facebook to use a respected global political figure to soften its image. Despite pledges to accept new government regulation, the company continues to fight strong oversight, policymakers said. Others said changes made by Mr. Clegg did not address core problems with the company’s privacy-invading business model, which is optimized to keep people scrolling their Facebook feeds, amplifying divisive and inflammatory content and exaggerating political divisions in society.

“‘Are you sure you’re on the right side here?’ That is the question that will get thrown back at Clegg,” said Damian Collins, a Conservative member of the British Parliament who led an investigation of social media in politics. “He’s taken a lot of money to go work for a company that doesn’t meet the highest ethical standards.”

Nowhere has Mr. Clegg’s influence been felt more than in the creation of the oversight board, an idea that had been kicked around internally but gained momentum after he joined.

«

The profile notes, ever-so-cattily, that Clegg wouldn’t speak to the writers but did provide a list of people who’d give positive opinions of him. However: dislike him if you wish, but he’s evidently a very smart operator.
unique link to this extract

A simpler and safer future — without passwords • Google Blog

Mark Risher is Google’s director of product management, identity and user security:

»

One of the best ways to protect your account from a breached or bad password is by having a second form of verification in place – another way for your account to confirm it is really you logging in. Google has been doing this for years, ensuring that your Google Account is protected by multiple layers of verification.

Today we ask people who have enrolled in two-step verification (2SV) to confirm it’s really them with a simple tap via a Google prompt on their phone whenever they sign in. Soon we’ll start automatically enrolling users in 2SV if their accounts are appropriately configured. (You can check the status of your account in our Security Checkup). Using their mobile device to sign in gives people a safer and more secure authentication experience than passwords alone.

We are also building advanced security technologies into devices to make this multi-factor authentication seamless and even more secure than a password. For example, we’ve built our security keys directly into Android devices, and launched our Google Smart Lock app for iOS, so now people can use their phones as their secondary form of authentication. 

«

Essentially, this means not using passwords (or at least not relying solely on them) and obliging people to start using 2-factor authentication for logins.
unique link to this extract

The occasional terror and utter confusion of dating in the digital age • Vanity Fair

Nancy Jo Sales, in an extract from her forthcoming book “Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno”:

»

I got my first dick pic from a Houston tech millionaire. He didn’t look much like a millionaire; he looked like the Dude from The Big Lebowski. He was sitting on the back patio of a Houston bar where I’d gone because somebody told me there would be tech millionaires there who liked to invest in movies. There were Lamborghinis and Ferraris parked out front—not really my scene, but if I was going to get a movie made, I was going to need some money, and I had heard that schmoozing rich guys was one way you could get it.

The tech dude was spread out on a piece of lawn furniture, drinking a cocktail and scratching his balls—foreshadowing, in a way, for the dick pic. Everybody was treating him like he was a king, although he was clearly high and quite greasy-looking. Somebody introduced me to him, and, after some pleasantries, I launched into a pitch for my film (then envisioned as a companion piece to my book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers). I told him about the girls I’d been interviewing at the Miss Teen USA beauty pageant in Houston, and how they’d told me they had lost their self-esteem through cyberbullying and having their nudes shared nonconsensually online. And now, they said, they were seeking “empowerment” through being in this beauty pageant. I told him how complicated it all was and how it made me feel sad.

The tech dude sat back, listening with a slit-eyed expression, and said it all sounded very interesting, and how much did I think I would need to make this film?

“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe half a million?”

“How about a million?” he said. He gave me his number. I was elated.

I let about a week pass, which I thought was a good amount of time to wait to contact the tech dude again. He’d told me to text him when I got back to New York, and so, early one evening on a weekday, I texted him, reminding him of who I was and of our conversation.

“When would be a good time to call to talk?” I asked.

And he sent me a dick pic. With a text that said: “How about we talk about this?”

«

It seems to be worth pointing out that she’d done well not to be a recipient sooner than that. But why so many wayward wangs winging about? She examines that.
unique link to this extract

June 2019: How Apple’s app review process for the App Store works • CNBC

Kif Leswing, in April 2019:

»

People familiar with the matter told CNBC that an executive board led by Apple marketing Senior Vice President Phil Schiller meets every week to discuss controversial apps or other iPhone software programs that may infringe Apple’s App Store guidelines.

The “executive review board,” or ERB, sets policy for Apple’s Worldwide Developer Relations department, which is often called App Review. ERB is also the body that makes the final call on whether an app can stay on the store or is banned.

For example, last year, the ERB and Schiller made the decision to ban the Infowars app from the App Store for violating content policies after publishing threats to a reporter, a person familiar with the matter said.

Inside the app review team, Apple employees manually screen every single iPhone app before they become available to download on Apple’s platforms, the people said. Apple recently opened new App Review offices in Cork, Ireland, and Shanghai, China, according to a person familiar with the matter. The department has added significant headcount in recent years, they added.

Last month, Apple published a new webpage that explains the principles that govern the App Store as well as the most common reasons for rejection to show an increased level of transparency over previous years.

“We’re proud of the store we’ve built and the way we’ve built it,” Apple said on the page.

«

Mentioned because it was brought up in the Epic v Apple case this week. Seems relevant somehow.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Don’t stick your head into a photon beam in a particle accelerator. One man did, and lived – but with strange aftereffects. CC-licensed photo by Oak Ridge National Laboratory 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 look now. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Good riddance, Donald Trump? • The New York Times

Kara Swisher:

»

In general, I have considered the case of Mr. Trump to be much less complex than people seem to think. And it has been made to appear highly complicated by big tech companies like Facebook because they want to exhaust us all in a noisy and intractable debate.

Mr. Trump should be seen as an outlier — a lone, longtime rule breaker who was coddled and protected on social media platforms until he wandered into seditious territory. He’s an unrepentant gamer of Facebook’s badly enforced rules who will never change. He got away with it for years and spread myriad self-serving lies far and wide.

So why should Mr. Trump stop now?

One way to answer that would be to ask why so many Republicans believe the Big Lie that President Biden was not elected fairly. Or why do so many of the same people resist Covid-19 vaccinations?

It’s all because of the inexhaustible Trump digital army, which is both organized and scattered, and has been enabled by social media companies.

The Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman called the behavior of these pro-Trump forces “malicious compliance” — which means totally noncompliant — in an interview with me earlier this year. And that’s the reason he finally and correctly threw some Trumpets off his platform.

For a long time, Reddit was one of the most vehement defenders of any and all speech on tech platforms. That is, until it was clear that Reddit was being played for idiots by trolls.

And Facebook has been played, too.

Mr. Trump (and his acolytes) spent years crossing lines in the digital sand. He’s good at it — and now he’s paying the price for his social media success by being rendered silent (at least as silent as a loudmouth can be).

«

I found the decision hilarious: the FOB punted the decision back to Facebook, telling it to come up with a proper policy for why it banned Trump so there can be a complaint about it which can be referred to the FOB which will dither about it for a while. But the truth of it is that Trump doesn’t care about Facebook – he wants to be back on Twitter. But Twitter will never let him back on.
unique link to this extract

Twitter begins to show prompts before people send ‘mean’ replies • NBC News

David Ingram:

»

Nasty replies on Twitter will require a little more thought to send.

The tech company said Wednesday it was releasing a feature that automatically detects “mean” replies on its service and prompts people to review the replies before sending them.

“Want to review this before Tweeting?” the prompt asks in a sample provided by the San Francisco-based company.

Twitter users will have three options in response: tweet as is, edit or delete.

The prompts are part of wider efforts at Twitter and other social media companies to rethink how their products are designed and what incentives they may have built in to encourage anger, harassment, jealousy or other bad behavior. Facebook-owned Instagram is testing ways to hide like counts on its service.

«

Now, you might say that the existence of the “tweet as is” option makes this redundant, but adding just that bit of friction makes it more difficult, a bit slower for people who want to incite trouble.

The question though is how good this will be at detecting actual “mean” content, and how much it will mistake sarcastic or ironic content for actual harassment. Though you could argue that sarcasm and irony fall into the category.
unique link to this extract

The man struck by a particle accelerator beam • Predict

Ella Alderson:

»

[In the late 1970s Soviet Union] Anatoli Bugorski was checking up on some malfunctioning equipment on the accelerator when the accident took place. Operators in the control room did not remove the beam despite knowing that Anatoli was going to be entering the chamber to perform his inspection. Neither was the door to the chamber locked nor a warning sign illuminated to alert Anatoli that there was still an active beam inside. So it was that he entered the room, leaned down in the space where the beam passes from one section of the accelerator tube to the next, and was promptly struck by a beam of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light. The moment of impact brought a flash of light that Anatoli later described as “brighter than a thousand suns”.

As it was entering the cavern of Anatoli’s head the particle beam was around 200,000 rads. Because of collisions that took place between the particles and Anatoli’s matter, the beam measured 300,000 rads upon exiting his skull. At a level of 400 rads, radiation can kill half the people it touches. At 1,000 rads and above, the radiation will kill almost anyone. Anatoli had received a dose of radiation 300 times the fatal amount. Despite this, there was no pain. As a particle physicist Anatoli understood what had happened even if he couldn’t be sure of the exact gravity of the situation. He collected himself, finished his work in the chamber, and went home without telling anyone what had happened.

It wasn’t until the next day when he began to show worrying symptoms that he was taken to the hospital. The left side of his face was swollen and unrecognizable, with the skin beginning to blister and his hair falling out where the beam had struck. These effects were temporary and inconsequential compared to what would follow. Everyone involved expected Anatoli to die. The doctors and nurses carefully oversaw his treatment, though it’s likely no one expected him to survive past three weeks at most. And that’s exactly the most bizarre part of the entire incident: Anatoli did not die.

«

Though to the regret of comic book authors, nor did he acquire the ability to fly, pass through walls, manipulate objects at a distance or transmute elements. But there was one peculiar, if limited, effect which in its way would make most people envious.

unique link to this extract

Peloton treadmills recalled after Tread+ child death: what owners do next • SlashGear

Chris Davies:

»

Peloton will recall all of its treadmill models, after concerns about child safety around the fitness equipment and at least one reported death. The voluntary recall impacts both the Tread+ and Tread models, with Peloton and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) advising owners to cease using them immediately.

It’s an unexpected turnaround from the popular fitness equipment company, which had strongly pushed back against calls for a recall earlier in the year. As recently as April 17, Peloton refuted the CPSC claims, branding them “inaccurate and misleading,” and arguing that “there is no reason to stop using the Tread+, as long as all warnings and safety instructions are followed,”

In a stark change of approach today, Peloton CEO John Foley apologized for that attitude, and for delaying the recall.

“The decision to recall both products was the right thing to do for Peloton’s Members and their families,” Foley said in a statement. “I want to be clear, Peloton made a mistake in our initial response to the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s request that we recall the Tread+. We should have engaged more productively with them from the outset. For that, I apologize. Today’s announcement reflects our recognition that, by working closely with the CPSC, we can increase safety awareness for our Members”.

«

This was completely predicted by Ed Zitron, a PR of some experience, who explained on April 20 why this was inevitable.

The next thing it has to deal with: “Peloton’s leaky API let anyone grab riders’ private account data“. Reported to the company on January 20, and which fixed it right… no, it didn’t.

Related: “This is your brain on Peloton“, an NYT piece about how absorbing the Peloton experience is. (I haven’t tried it. Apple’s Fitness+ is inclusive, but not real-time interactive in that way.)
unique link to this extract

Global heating pace risks ‘unstoppable’ sea level rise as Antarctic ice sheet melts • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

»

The current pace of global heating risks unleashing “rapid and unstoppable” sea level rise from the melting of Antarctica’s vast ice sheet, a new research paper has warned.

Unless planet-heating emissions are swiftly reduced to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, the world faces a situation where there is an “abrupt jump” in the pace of Antarctic ice loss around 2060, the study states, fueling sea level rise and placing coastal cities in greater peril.

“If the world warms up at a rate dictated by current policies we will see the Antarctic system start to get away from us around 2060,” said Robert DeConto, an expert in polar climate change at the University of Massachusetts and lead author of the study. “Once you put enough heat into the climate system, you are going to lose those ice shelves, and once that is set in motion you can’t reverse it.”

DeConto added: “The oceans would have to cool back down before the ice sheet could heal, which would take a very long time. On a societal timescale it would essentially be a permanent change.”

This tipping point for Antarctica could be triggered by a global temperature rise of 3C (5.4F) above the preindustrial era, which many researchers say is feasible by 2100 under governments’ current policies.

The new research, published in Nature, finds that ice loss from Antarctica would be “irreversible on multi-century timescales” should this happen, helping raise the world’s oceans by 17cm to 21cm (6.69in to 8.27in) by the end of the century.

«

There is no good news on this.
unique link to this extract

Clean energy demand for critical minerals set to soar as the world pursues net zero goals • International Energy Agency

»

The special report, part of the IEA’s flagship World Energy Outlook series, underscores that the mineral requirements of an energy system powered by clean energy technologies differ profoundly from one that runs on fossil fuels. A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a similarly sized gas-fired power plant.

Demand outlooks and supply vulnerabilities vary widely by mineral, but the energy sector’s overall needs for critical minerals could increase by as much as six times by 2040, depending on how rapidly governments act to reduce emissions. Not only is this a massive increase in absolute terms, but as the costs of technologies fall, mineral inputs will account for an increasingly important part of the value of key components, making their overall costs more vulnerable to potential mineral price swings.

The commercial importance of these minerals also grow rapidly: today’s revenue from coal production is ten times larger than from energy transition minerals. However, in climate-driven scenarios, these positions are reversed well before 2040.

«

This feels like a lot of wars in the offing.
unique link to this extract

Does Amazon know what it sells? • Benedict Evans

»

Of Amazon’s top 50 best-sellers in “Children’s Vaccination & Immunisation”, close to 20 are by anti-vaccine polemicists, and 5 are novels about fictional pandemics. This poses two questions. First, how much content moderation should a universal bookshop do? Second, does Amazon really know what it sells?

The content moderation questions here are closely related to those that applied when Facebook and Twitter banned the US president. A single newspaper or a bookshop has no obligation to give you a platform, but there are other newspapers and other bookshops – what does it mean if there are only three newspapers (or only three with significant reach) and they all ban you? Should they allow you to be on the platform, but not ‘amplify’ you either with an ‘algorithm’ or something as mechanical as a best-seller list (and of course being in the list will increase your sales, so that’s also a moderation choice). What books, exactly, do we want Amazon to ban, or to ‘down-rank’? Who decides? What if Amazon put those books in ‘conspiracy theories’ instead? I don’t think we have a settled consensus.

More interesting to me in this case, though, is the fact that five of the top 50 are not about “Children’s Vaccination & Immunisation” at all – they’re novels! This is a much more general problem, that I think that reflects a pretty fundamental aspect of Amazon as a retailer – it does not, in important ways, actually know what it sells, and that has always been inherent to the model.

There’s an old cliché that ecommerce has infinite shelf space, but that’s not quite true for Amazon. It would be more useful to say that it has one shelf that’s infinitely long. Everything it sells has to fit on the same shelf and be treated in the same way – it has to fit into the same retailing model and the same logistics model.

«

It is a huge problem: it requires Amazon to understand what’s inside the book, not just what the metadata attached to it says.
unique link to this extract

If you have a Dell computer, there’s a big security flaw you need to patch now • Yahoo

Jacob Siegal:

»

On Tuesday, security research firm SentinelLabs reported on a vulnerability in Dell’s firmware update driver impacting hundreds of the brand’s devices, from desktops to laptops to tablets. As the firm explains, the flaw can be exploited to allow anyone using the computer to escalate their privileges and run code in kernel mode.

Dell has since issued a security advisory on its website for the vulnerability with a list of nearly 400 devices that have been impacted. The list includes dozens of Inspiron and Latitude laptops, as well as recent XPS 13, XPS 15, and XPS 17 models. There is a separate list of older devices that no longer receive service but are also impacted. If you spot a device that you own on the list, here are the steps that you need to take.

First and foremost, you need to remove the vulnerable dbutil_2_3.sys driver from your system.

«

Oh, the hours of fun you’ll have. Slightly embarrassing for Dell, whose founder Michael Dell was celebrating the company’s (first) 37 years on the precise day that the security advisory was issued.
unique link to this extract

A comparison of reverse image searching platforms • Security Research

»

Sometimes when trying to conduct a reverse image search, it can be useful to alter the original image in some way in order to find the best results. For example, sometimes an image may be posted and claim to be an original, but is actually just a flipped/reversed version of an existing photo. By flipping the photo and then searching for it, you may be able to find additional results that might not have been returned from searching only one photo. Careful cropping may also yield much better results, as other objects in photos may cause the search engine to focus on the wrong subject.

«

This dates from September 2019, but still useful.
unique link to this extract

“This is definitely the most bizarre question I have ever seen on a job application” • Boing Boing

Mark Frauenfelder:

»

Twitter user @beeta was asked this unusual question on a job application: “You’ve been given an elephant. You can’t give it away or sell it. What would you do with the elephant?”

Employers ask this kind of question because they want to see how you think.

Here are some of the replies to @beeta’s tweet:

• I took a class on how to respond to job interview questions once and they used this exact one as an example. The answer they’re looking for is “Open a business where you hire the elephant out for events like birthday parties.”

«

There are plenty of others, but that’s the one that’s obviously best. (Taking it to a zoo or wildlife refuge surely counts as “giving it away”, unless you then also take a job at the zoo/refuge.)

Anyway, food for thought for anyone who might be hiring people at the moment.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You could probably do worse than to
preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book – out June 24.

A drought in Taiwan is drying up reservoirs – and if it continues, could hit chip manufacture by summer. CC-licensed photo by http://www.dantw.com 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. Safe journey. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Too much time thinking about Trump? Preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book, and distract yourself.

🚨 How Basecamp blew up • Platformer

Casey Newton, following up on his piece last week about how Basecamp got into a tangle. This feels explosive because of the implications around Ryan Singer, who was the CTO, and who has deleted a ton of tweets – and apparently kept posting Breitbart content approvingly in the company Slack:

»

On Friday, employees had their chance to address these issues directly with Fried and his co-founder. What followed was a wrenching discussion that left several employees I spoke with in tears. Thirty minutes after the meeting ended, Fried announced that Basecamp’s longtime head of strategy, Ryan Singer, had been suspended and placed under investigation after he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company. Over the weekend, Singer — who worked for the company for nearly 18 years, and authored a book about product management for Basecamp called Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters — resigned.

Within a few hours of the meeting, at least 20 people — more than one-third of Basecamp’s 57 employees — had announced their intention to accept buyouts from the company. And while many of them had been leaning toward resigning in the aftermath of Fried’s original post, the meeting itself pushed several to accelerate their decisions, employees said. The response overwhelmed the founders, who extended the deadline to accept buyouts indefinitely amid an unexpected surge of interest.

This account is based on interviews with six Basecamp employees who were present at the meeting, along with a partial transcript created by employees.

«

Newton is doing terrific work; one of the best around in terms of the contacts and context.
unique link to this extract

This motorcycle airbag vest will stop working if you miss a payment • Vice

Aaron Gordon:

»

Airbag vests are pretty much exactly what they sound like, garments worn by people who undertake exceedingly dangerous personal hobbies in order to slightly reduce the risk of severe bodily harm or death. For example, in 2018 the motorcycle racing circuit MotoGP made airbag vests mandatory.

Since then airbag vests have become steadily cheaper and therefore more popular among recreational riders. One motorcycle apparel company named Klim, for example, sells an airbag vest called the Ai-1 for $400. In the promotional video launching the product, product line manager Jayson Plummer called the vest “a whole new era of a platform where analog meets digital and results in a superior protection story.” Which is an interesting way of framing the fact that the vest includes an additional subscription-based payment option that will block the vest from inflating if the payments don’t go through.

This is possible because the vest includes two components: the vest itself made by Klim and the airbag system including a small black box made by a French company called In&Motion called the “In&Box detection module.” The module has the sensors and computer components that detect a crash and make the bags inflate.

The customer buys the vest for $400 which comes with the module, but then they must download an app and choose how to unlock the module so the vest actually works: either plonk down another $400 to own the whole shebang outright—bringing the total vest cost to $800—or, as Plummer put it in the video, opt for the “subscription-based model” of $12 per month or $120 per year.

«

I guess it figures out when you start your ride whether you’re paid up or not. Not clear whether it tells you, though.

Quite a method for extracting money from people. The always-connected, always-paying economy.
unique link to this extract

Timepieces that tell you how you are • Gazettabyte

Roy Rubenstein with some info about how the glucose monitoring from Rockley Photonics (mentioned yesterday) might work:

»

The technique underpinning smartwatch monitoring has the long title of non-invasive diffuse reflective spectroscopy.

Light at different wavelengths penetrates the skin and is scattered by blood vessels and cells and the interstitial fluid in between. The reflected light is analysed using spectroscopy to glean medical insights.

The smartwatch uses a green LED since blood haemoglobin has a good light absorption at that wavelength. “Effectively, what is being measured is the expansion and contraction of the blood vessels,” says [Rockley Photonics CEO Andrew] Rickman. “It is measuring the amount of light that is absorbed by the change of the volume of blood.”

It doesn’t stop there. Using a red LED and extending it into the infrared range, the blood oxygenation level is measured using the ratio of oxygenated (bright red) and unoxygenated (darker red) haemoglobin. “The ratio of the two wavelengths that you get back is proportional to the blood oxygen level,” says Rickman.

The visible range can also detect bilirubin, a yellow-orange bile pigment associated with jaundice. “But that is pretty much it,” says Rickman. “All the other thousands of constituents, if they have absorption peaks, are swamped in the visual range by haemoglobin.”

What Rockley has done is extend the light’s spectral to measure absorption peaks that otherwise are dwarfed by water and haemoglobin. “We are addressing the visible range and extending it into the infrared range, getting much more accuracy using laser technology compared to LEDs which opens up a whole range of things,” says Rickman.

To do this, Rockley has used its silicon photonics expertise to shrink a benchtop spectrometer to the size of a chip.

«

Related: magistrates can now get people to wear “alcohol tags” in sentencing for offenders whose crimes were “influenced by alcohol”. (Thanks Adewale Adetugbo for the Rockley link, Joel D for the tagging link.)
unique link to this extract

Taiwan drought may worsen global component shortage • Counterpoint Research

Brady Wang:

»

A stable and quality source of water is essential for semiconductor production. However, Taiwan is currently suffering from its worst drought in 56 years due to less than usual rainfall during the past year. The main sources of water in Taiwan are (1) the plum rains that occur in spring and summer when hot and cold air meet, (2) the heavy rainfall from typhoons in summer, and (3) the light rainfall in the mountains from the northeast monsoon in fall and winter. The proportions here are about 12%, 39% and 6% respectively.

Taiwan usually receives 7-9 typhoons every year. However, only one typhoon landed in Taiwan in 2020. To make matters worse, last winter and spring’s rainfall was heavily deficient, causing a shortage of water in Taiwan. The country is topographically divided by the 3,000-metre-high Central Mountain Range, which separates Taiwan’s eastern and western parts. The rains brought by the northeast monsoon in autumn and winter are mostly concentrated in the eastern and northern catchment areas, which means abundant rainfall for Draco, though it is of limited help to the Central and Tainan science parks. Therefore, water shortage becomes a serious problem for Taiwan’s technology industry in 2021. It may also have a serious impact on the global supply chain.

The Taiwanese government has taken many measures to address the water shortage problem, including transferring water between reservoirs, stopping water supply for agriculture, reducing water supply for households, drilling groundwater wells, and desalinating seawater. Besides, industrial users, including semiconductor manufacturers, have been asked to reduce their water consumption. TSMC, for example, has significantly increased the water recycling rate. The water level in the northern reservoirs has reached a multi-year low, though still sufficient for the continued use by Hsinchu Science Park (HSP).

However, the average effective water storage of the reservoirs supplying the Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP) and Southern Taiwan Science Park (STSP) on April 30 was only 8.9% and 14.3% respectively (Exhibit 2). According to Counterpoint estimates, if there is no heavy rainfall or the rainfall does not fall in the catchment area, CTSP will face a water outage in July and STSP around August.

«

unique link to this extract

Apple is holding the web back with ‘uniquely underpowered’ iOS browsers, says Google engineer • WCCFTech

Furqan Shahid:

»

In a blog post, [Google Chrome engineer] Alex [Russel] talks about how the WebKit and iOS browsers are “Uniquely Underpowered” compared to the other modern browsers. He claims that Apple “consistently” delays new features for its browsers that “hold the key to unlocking whole categories of experiences on the web.”

»

Apple’s iOS browser (Safari) and engine (WebKit) are uniquely under-powered. Consistent delays in the delivery of important features ensure the web can never be a credible alternative to its proprietary tools and App Store.

«

Alex has cited an example of this by mentioning Stadia along with other cloud gaming services. Apple did not allow those services to be available on the App Store and pushed them to use the web instead, which required Apple to allow gamepad APIs so controllers can be used with these new web apps. That is a function that other browsers have offered for a long time except on iOS. But Apple still held back:

»

Suppose Apple had implemented WebRTC and the Gamepad API in a timely way. Who can say if the game streaming revolution now taking place might have happened sooner? It’s possible that Amazon Luna, NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Google Stadia, and Microsoft xCloud could have been built years earlier.

It’s also possible that APIs delivered on every other platform, but not yet available on any iOS browser (because Apple), may hold the key to unlocking whole categories of experiences on the web.

«

«

Russel’s post is quite complicated, and does accept that there’s little to choose between the browsers that have any significant share. He also allows that Chrome lacks some of the things that Safari has.
unique link to this extract

Don’t buy into Facebook’s ad-tracking pressure on iOS 14.5 • WIRED

Brian Barrett on why you can ignore Facebook’s weepy popups suggesting that letting it track you keeps the site “free of charge”:

»

“There are some types of ads, mostly retargeting, that will be harder to display, since now Facebook wouldn’t know who visited an app, put an item in the shopping cart, etc.,” says Ron Berman, a marketing professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He notes that Facebook will also have a harder time demonstrating that product sales were tied to specific ads, given the limitations on what information can now flow across sites and apps.

But you need not look much further than Facebook’s most recent quarterly earnings report, released last week, to see that iOS 14.5 seems unlikely to push the company toward any kind of precipice. The company took in over $26bn of revenue in the first three months of 2021, and its net income of $9.5bn nearly doubled that of the same period a year ago. It has over $64bn of cash and equivalents on hand. It’s doing just fine. Even if every single iOS 14.5 user opts out of tracking, Facebook will still have Android devices aplenty from which to squeeze profits.

It’s also not as if tracking prevention makes ads go away entirely. It arguably makes them less relevant. People may not click on them as often, which makes them less valuable, and outside analysts have predicted that Apple’s new policy will show up in Facebook’s bottom line. “We’ve seen estimates ranging from about a 2% to a 7% impairment of Facebook’s ad revenues this year and that range seems plausible to us, especially at the low end,” says Nicole Perrin, a principal analyst at eMarketer.

However, she adds, the company is expected to increase its ad revenue overall despite App Tracking Transparency. As WIRED’s Gilad Edelman has noted before, when third-party data disappears, companies that hold more first-party data have an edge. That’s Google, and that’s Facebook.

«

unique link to this extract

Trump launches new communications platform months after Twitter, Facebook ban • Fox News

Brooke Singman:

»

Former President Trump on Tuesday launched a communications platform, which will eventually give him the ability to communicate directly with his followers, after months of being banned from sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The platform, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” appears on http://www.DonaldJTrump.com/desk.

«

2003 called, and would like to point out that the “new communications platform” is known as a “blog”. (Meanwhile, at 1030 EST/ 1530 BST, the Facebook Oversight Board will announce its decision on whether Trump should be allowed back on Facebook. The broad expectation I’m seeing is that the FOB will say he should be. Divisive and polarising, algorithmically fuelled: social warming in action.)
unique link to this extract

Teens, tech and mental health: Oxford study finds no link – BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

»

There remains “little association” between technology use and mental-health problems, a study of more than 430,000 10 to 15-year-olds suggests.

The Oxford Internet Institute compared TV viewing, social-media and device use with feelings of depression, suicidal tendencies and behavioural problems. It found a small drop in association between depression and social-media use and TV viewing, from 1991 to 2019. There was a small rise in that between emotional issues and social-media use.

“We couldn’t tell the difference between social-media impact and mental health in 2010 and 2019,” study co-author Prof Andrew Przybylski. said. “We’re not saying that fewer happy people use more social media.
“We’re saying that the connection is not getting stronger.”

And this was a warning to regulators and lawmakers focusing on commonly held beliefs about the harmful effects of technology on young people’s mental health. Participants, in the US and UK, graded their own feelings using set questions with sliding scale responses. And they were asked about the duration of social-media or device activity but not more specifically how they had spent that time.

The paper is published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

«

I read a lot of these sorts of papers in preparing my book, and they’re very contradictory. I also spoke to Przybylski, who is generally dubious about studies that have suggested these links – there have been quite a few, and some books, strongly pushing the idea. One common problem these studies run up against is that kids use different devices: boys usually play video games (which makes them happy) while girls use social networks (and don’t seem to be happier).
unique link to this extract

The loneliness of the modern office team member • Financial Times

Pilita Clark:

»

Every other week or so, a number emerges somewhere in the world that I find both understandable and troubling.

It is the percentage of people who consistently say they don’t want to go back to working full-time in the office. Nearly 60% of British workers said this was how they felt back in September last year and also in March this year, even though more than a third of the UK population had had at least one Covid jab by then.

In the US, the share of workers who would prefer to keep working remotely as much as possible went from 35% in September to 44% in January. More recent European research found 97% of people who have been at home would prefer to stay there for at least part of the week once their offices reopen.

Since I am one of the millions thrilled to be liberated from a rushed commute and the tedium of presenteeism, these findings seem utterly rational. But they are also worrying because there is a gloomier reason that even well-paid, valued people in lofty jobs may be in no rush to go back to the office: long before the outbreak, they were lonely.

Their relationships with people in the office felt shallow. Worse, their sense of isolation may have had less to do with their personal lives than the way their work in teams was organised.

«

The heavy implication of course being that you’re doing a job that can be done from home. What about delivery drivers? Warehouse workers? People who answer telephones on switchboards? Perhaps I haven’t looked, but I’d like to know what proportion of jobs can and cannot be done remotely. It seems relevant.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You’ll probably not be surprised to learn that Yahoo(!) has been sold again, this time to a private equity company. CC-licensed photo by Ippei Ogiwara 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. Just breathe into your watch. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

At a loose end? Why not preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book?

Here are Apple’s and Epic’s full slideshows arguing why they should win at trial • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

»

Both Apple and Epic have released their opening presentations on why they feel they should win this week’s trial, which is set to determine the future of the App Store. In the documents, which you can look through below, each company lays out its case.

The lawsuit started when Apple removed Epic Games’ Fortnite from the App Store after Epic bypassed Apple’s system for in-app purchases. But it’s turned into a much deeper examination of Apple’s walled-garden approach to technology, and whether some of the walls the company puts up might violate antitrust law.

We took a deeper look at the companies’ legal strategies in advance of the trial, but you can see the same arguments play out in these presentations. Epic uses metaphors of brick walls and gas stations to argue that Apple’s control over what can and cannot be installed on the iPhone is unfair, and that allowing other methods of installing apps wouldn’t harm iOS’s security. Apple’s pushes back saying that Epic getting the openness that it wants would harm not just the App Store but other stores from Sony and Nintendo.

«

There’s a Zoom link so you can watch proceedings (Pacific Time 0830-1330, or 1130-1630 Mon-Thu). Password: 715 550. According to Gizmodo, the remote court experience has been pretty terrible already.

Plenty of tasty emails emerging, such as Phil Schiller in 2011 suggesting that once the App Store hit $1bn in annual profit they could look at reducing the 70-30 split in case rival methods (web apps!) become more attractive.
unique link to this extract

Did Sweden get Covid wrong? • UnHerd

Freddie Sayers speaks to Johan Giesecke, who was very against lockdowns in Sweden:

»

When I remind him of his prediction that countries would end up with similar results after a year, he readily concedes he was mistaken. “One of the things I got wrong a year ago is the rate of spread of this disease. I thought it would spread quicker. And I also thought it would be more similar in different countries. We can see now that there are big differences in the rates of spread in between countries. It may have to do with lockdown, it may have to do with cultural things in these countries. But there is a big difference between countries.”

The difference that is most commonly cited in the ‘case for the prosecution’ against the Swedish strategy is the following chart showing Sweden’s deaths per million dramatically exceeding its neighbouring Scandinavian countries. This is generally considered solid proof that the Swedish strategy failed.

Johan Giesecke disagrees: “The differences between Sweden and its neighbours are much bigger than people realise from the outside — different systems, different cultural traditions…If you compare Sweden to other European countries [such as the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium] it’s the other way round. On the ranking of excess mortality, Sweden is somewhere in the middle or below the middle of European countries. So I think it’s really Norway and Finland that are the outliers more than Sweden.”

Explaining what he means by cultural differences, he mentions among other factors that “they’re more sparsely populated. There are less people per square kilometre in these two countries. There are also much fewer people who were born outside Europe living in these two countries.”

So, crucially, if Sweden had instituted a hard lockdown and shut the border earlier, would its death rate have been closer to its Nordic neighbours? “Maybe not,” he says, “I think we would still have more deaths than they have.”

He is also fairly dismissive of charts currently showing that Sweden has the highest level of infection in Europe:

“I don’t think you should compare countries now, while we are still in the pandemic. You should wait until the pandemic has receded before we start comparing countries. If you did that chart a month ago it would be very different. And a month from now? I don’t know but it would be very different. These snapshots may not show the whole truth.”

«

Quite what Giesecke is implying is important about “people who were born outside Europe living in these two countries” isn’t followed up, which seems a gigantic lacuna. And aside from the point about children not going to school (which I think we’ll realise was a big error), Giesecke just seems to be Mr Wrong About It All – from levels of prevalence to IFR.
unique link to this extract

The hardest puzzle you’ll ever see—and the secret you need to solve it • Nautilus

Brian Gallagher:

»

Over his near century of life, [Raymond] Smullyan, 96, became an accomplished pianist and magician, made fundamental contributions to modern logic, and wrote about Taoist philosophy and chess. “He is the undisputed master of logical puzzles,” Bruce Horowitz, one of his former Ph.D. students, has said.

One mark of Smullyan’s legacy is the interest philosophers and logicians still have in his most difficult puzzle, known as the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever. The title was given by a philosopher of logic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a colleague of Smullyan’s named George Boolos, who—no slouch himself—adored logical challenges of any sort. He once tested himself by giving a lecture on Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, “one of the most important results in modern logic,” using only single syllable words.

The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever goes like this:

»

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for “yes” and “no” are “da” and “ja,” in some order. You do not know which word means which.

«

Always up for a challenge, I sat down on my couch, pen and paper in hand, confident I could conquer the puzzle in two hours tops.

«

Nope. The answer takes you through some mindbending logic (lots of reliance on “if and only if”), but the explanation is done well.
unique link to this extract

Why can’t Google get a grip on ripoff ads? • BBC News

Chris Fox:

»

In October 2018, the BBC brought several adverts to Google’s attention that broke its rules. A month later, Google told the BBC it had developed a machine learning system that could prevent the adverts appearing again.

At the time, it only banned adverts for third-party services that charged more than the official government website. However, in May 2020 it changed its policy to ban “adverts for documents and/or services that can be obtained directly from a government or a delegated provider” including “offers of assistance to obtain these products or services”.

Since that change, the BBC has repeated the same set of Google searches on seven separate occasions over a 12-month period. Every time, there were adverts for expensive third-party services when searching for:

Esta; US Esta; apply for Esta; US visa; Canada ETA (a travel document for Canada); apply for Canada ETA; apply for Canada visa; apply for Australia visa; apply driving licence; renew driving licence; driving licence change address.

Some of the websites continued to appear in the adverts even after they were flagged to Google with its reporting tools.

«

unique link to this extract

Verizon sells Yahoo and AOL businesses to Apollo for $5bn • CNBC

Steve Kovach:

»

Verizon will sell its media group to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5bn, the companies announced Monday. The sale allows Verizon to offload properties from the former internet empires of AOL and Yahoo.

Verizon will keep a 10% stake in the company and it will be rebranded to just Yahoo.

The sale will see online media brands under the former Yahoo and AOL umbrellas like TechCrunch, Yahoo Finance and Engadget go to Apollo at much lower valuations than they commanded just a few years ago. Verizon bought AOL for $4.4bn in 2015 and Yahoo two years later for $4.5bn.

Verizon will get $4.25bn in cash from the sale along with its 10% stake in the company. Verizon and Apollo said they expect the transaction to close in the second half of 2021.

«

Amazing decline in the perceived value of those properties. Remember February 2008, when Microsoft bid $44.6bn for Yahoo? (And the exchange rate: then, $44.6bn = £22.4bn. Now it would be £32.2bn: a 43% decline.) The list of companies that Yahoo acquired and, for the most part, ruined, is long and includes names like Flickr, Delicious, Geocities and Tumblr. At least that’s (probably) over.
unique link to this extract

Whatever the ruling, Facebook’s Oversight Board is a smokescreen • The Real Facebook Oversight Board

»

Facebook’s Oversight Board will announce on Wednesday [at 1530 BST, 1030 EST] its decision on a permanent ban of Donald Trump. Obviously Donald Trump has violated Facebook’s terms of service repeatedly, incited hate, spread disinformation, fomented violence and been used as a model for other authoritarian leaders to abuse Facebook. He should be banned forever.

But do not let Facebook’s Oversight Board distract from the need to ensure real accountability for hate speech, election lies, disinformation and other harmful content.

«

Anyhow, set your calendars.
unique link to this extract

Facebook and the normalisation of deviance • The New Yorker

Sue Halpern (where “normalisation of deviance” refers to just accepting and ignoring how your system allows bad outcomes; it was what led to the Challenger explosion):

»

On April 19th, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice-president of content policy, announced that, in anticipation of a verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the company would remove hate speech, calls to violence, and misinformation relating to that trial. That accommodation was a tacit acknowledgement of the power that users of the platform have to incite violence and spread dangerous information, and it was reminiscent of the company’s decision, after the November election, to tweak its newsfeed algorithm in order to suppress partisan outlets, such as Breitbart.

By mid-December, the original algorithm was restored, prompting several employees to tell the Times’ Kevin Roose that Facebook executives had reduced or vetoed past efforts to combat misinformation and hate speech on the platform, “either because they hurt Facebook’s usage numbers or because executives feared they would disproportionately harm right-wing publishers.” According to the Tech Transparency Project, right-wing extremists spent months on Facebook organizing their storming of the Capitol, on January 6th. Last week, an internal Facebook report obtained by Buzzfeed News confirmed the company’s failure to stop coördinated “Stop the Steal” efforts on the platform. Soon afterward, Facebook removed the report from its employee message board.

…[The Trump reinstatement/permaban] decision will not be a referendum on Trump’s disastrous presidency, or on his promotion of Stop the Steal. Rather, it will answer a single, discrete question: Did Trump violate Facebook’s policies about what is allowed on its platform? This narrow brief is codified in the Oversight Board’s charter, which says that “the board will review content enforcement decisions and determine whether they were consistent with Facebook’s content policies and values.”

As events of the past few months have again demonstrated, Facebook’s policies and values have normalized the kind of deviance that enables a disregard for regions and populations who are not “big on people’s minds.” They are not democratic or humanistic but, rather, corporate. Whichever way the Trump decision—or any decision made by the Oversight Board—goes, this will still be true.

«

unique link to this extract

Twitter expands Spaces to anyone with 600+ followers, details plans for tickets, reminders and more • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Twitter Spaces, the company’s new live audio rooms feature, is opening up more broadly. The company announced on Monday it’s making Twitter Spaces available to any account with 600 followers or more, including both iOS and Android users. It also officially unveiled some of the features it’s preparing to launch, like Ticketed Spaces, scheduling features, reminders, support for co-hosting, accessibility improvements and more.

Along with the expansion, Twitter is making Spaces more visible on its platform, too. The company notes it has begun testing the ability to find and join a Space from a purple bubble around someone’s profile picture right from the Home timeline.

Twitter says it decided on the 600 follower figure as being the minimum to gain access to Twitter Spaces based on its earlier testing. Accounts with 600 or more followers tend to have “a good experience” hosting live conversations because they have a larger existing audience who can tune in. However, Twitter says it’s still planning to bring Spaces to all users in the future.

In the meantime, it’s speeding ahead with new features and developments. Twitter has been building Spaces in public, taking into consideration user feedback as it prioritizes features and updates. Already, it has built out an expanded set of audience management controls, as users requested, introduced a way for hosts to mute all speakers at once and added the laughing emoji to its set of reactions, after users requested it.

…Twitter Spaces’ rival, Clubhouse, also just announced a reminders feature during its townhall event on Sunday as well at the start of its external Android testing. The two platforms, it seems, could soon be neck-and-neck in terms of feature set.

«

Can’t see Clubhouse surviving, then. I’d love to see the usage figures now that lockdown is easing.
unique link to this extract

Google’s foldable Pixel phone was just confirmed by a top leaker • BGR

Chris Smith:

»

A report about Samsung Display providing foldable OLED panels to various smartphone vendors casually mentioned Google a few days ago. Sources from Korea detailed the various foldable handsets in the works at Oppo and Xiaomi, revealing that these two Chinese smartphone vendors are working on new form factors that resemble Samsung’s foldable phones. The report didn’t say which design the foldable Pixel might employ, but it did reveal that the handset will have a 7.6-inch inward-folding panel from Samsung. All these devices are expected to launch sometime this year.

Google has already been working on adapting the Android experience for foldable devices, so making its own “Pixel Fold” handset makes plenty of sense. The best way to demo new features intended for foldable phones is by using its own hardware. And it looks like the Pixel Fold, or whatever Google ends up calling the handset, is real.

«

The Pixel range is already a minority sport; the proportion of Pixel buyers who would want a foldable one might be higher than the general market, but I can’t see it turning the range into top sellers. Again, one has to ask what Google’s purpose is with this. It can’t be making any money from it, and it’s hard to see that the lessons from manufacturing have any applicability elsewhere in the company.
unique link to this extract

Apple Watch could add blood sugar and alcohol readings after deal with UK tech company • Daily Telegraph

James Titcomb:

»

Apple is exploring advanced smartwatch technology that monitors wearers’ blood pressure, glucose and alcohol levels under a deal with a British electronics start-up.

The US tech giant has been revealed as the largest customer of Rockley Photonics, which says its next-generation sensors could be in gadgets next year.

The British company has developed ultra-accurate sensors that read multiple blood signals that are typically only detectable using medical equipment, by beaming infrared light through skin from a module on the back of a smartwatch.

The more limited modules in today’s devices are able to detect measures such as heart rate but the ability to track variables such as blood glucose, which could detect diabetes, has been a long-term goal for wearable technology makers.

Rockley, which has offices in Oxford, Wales and Silicon Valley, revealed its relationship with Apple in listing documents as it prepares to go public in New York. 

The filings said that Apple accounted for the majority of its revenue in the last two years and that it has an ongoing “supply and development agreement” with the company under which it expects to continue to rely on Apple for most of its income.

«

It seems surprising that you could capture sufficient data to record that sort of data at all accurately. But if it can measure glucose at all accurately, that will make it an automatic purchase for diabetics. And alcohol level, well, useful for drivers…
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Although Coleridge never finished Kubla Khan, we can train the AI system GPT-3 to do it, really quite successfully. What next? CC-licensed photo by Granpic on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Not H. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

EU says Apple’s 30% cut from rival music providers violates competition law • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

The EC sent a Statement of Objections to Apple reflecting its preliminary conclusion that Apple violated European Union competition law. This kicks off a legal process in which Apple will be able to respond in writing and request an oral hearing before a final judgment is made. The EC took today’s action in response to a complaint from Spotify.

“If the case is pursued, the EU could demand concessions and potentially impose a fine of up to 10% of Apple’s global turnover—as much as $27bn, although it rarely levies the maximum penalty,” according to Reuters.

The European regulatory body said it “takes issue with the mandatory use of Apple’s own in-app purchase mechanism imposed on music streaming app developers to distribute their apps via Apple’s App Store” and with Apple-imposed “restrictions on app developers preventing them from informing iPhone and iPad users of alternative, cheaper purchasing possibilities.”

The commission said it found that “Apple has a dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps through its App Store” and that it abused its dominant position by imposing rules on music streaming apps that compete against the Apple Music service.

“Our concern is that Apple distorts competition in the music streaming market to the benefit of Apple’s own music streaming service, Apple Music,” said EC Executive VP Margrethe Vestager, who is in charge of competition policy. Vestager said that “Apple deprives users of cheaper music streaming choices” by “charging high commission fees on each transaction in the App store for rivals and by forbidding [third-party app developers] from informing their customers of alternative subscription options.”

«

unique link to this extract

In Apple versus Epic Games, courtroom battle is only half the fight • Reuters

Stephen Nellis:

»

Epic Games faces an uphill legal battle against Apple Inc in an antitrust trial starting Monday, and a defeat for the maker of “Fortnite” could make it harder for U.S. government regulators to pursue a similar case against the iPhone maker, legal experts said.

But win or lose at the trial, Epic, which has pursued an aggressive public relations campaign against Apple alongside its court pleadings, may have already accomplished a major goal: Drawing Apple squarely into the global debate over whether and how massive technology companies should be regulated.

Apple has mostly succeeded in staying out of the regulatory crosshairs by arguing that the iPhone is a niche product in a smartphone world dominated by Google’s Android operating system. But that argument has become harder to sustain with the number of iPhone users now exceeding 1 billion.

Epic alleges Apple has such a strong lock on those customers that the app store constitutes a distinct market for software developers over which Apple has monopoly power. Apple is abusing that power, Epic argues, by forcing developers to use Apple’s in-app payment systems – which charge commissions of up to 30% – and to submit to app-review guidelines the gaming company says discriminate against products that compete with Apple’s own.

«

Epic claims that the App Store generates an operating profit margin (ie after costs are taken out) of 78%. Apple says that’s “simply wrong” and looks forward to refuting it in court. Should be fun.
unique link to this extract

John Doe 29: image from FBI child exploitation case geolocated to Turkey • bellingcat

Carlos Gonzales:

»

In 2020, a new set of photos linked to the case were published in an FBI poster. Images from this set labelled BB001 and BB002 are shown below.

After careful analysis, we were able to geolocate the poolside seating area in one of the images to a hotel near to the town of Side in Turkey (coordinates: 36.810011, 31.346188). Again, and to be clear, no person or commercial establishments, directly or indirectly referenced in this article, is suspected of being involved in the abuse of children.

«

Put like this, it sounds a bit blah. There was a photo! They geolocated it! Big deal!

Then you go and look at the photos, and you begin to think: how in the world could you pinpoint a place – and an approximate time, as well – based on so little information? It makes “enhance, enhance” in Blade Runner look pretty tame.
unique link to this extract

The computers are getting better at writing, thanks to artificial intelligence • The New Yorker

Stephen Marche:

»

GPT-3 is a tool. It does not think or feel. It performs instructions in language. The OpenAI people imagine it for “generating news articles, translation, answering questions.” But these are the businessman’s pedantic and vaguely optimistic approaches to the world’s language needs.

For those who choose to use artificial intelligence, it will alter the task of writing. “The writer’s job becomes as an editor almost,” Gupta said. “Your role starts to become deciding what’s good and executing on your taste, not as much the low-level work of pumping out word by word by word. You’re still editing lines and copy and making those words beautiful, but, as you move up in that chain, and you’re executing your taste, you have the potential to do a lot more.” The artist wants to do something with language. The machines will enact it. The intention will be the art, the craft of language an afterthought.

For writers who don’t like writing—which, in my experience, is nearly all of us—Sudowrite may well be a salvation. Just pop in what you have, whatever scraps of notes, and let the machine give you options. There are other, more obvious applications. Sudowrite was relatively effective when I asked it to continue Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” I assume it will be used by publishers to complete unfinished works like Jane Austen’s “Sanditon” or P. G. Wodehouse’s “Sunset at Blandings.” With a competent technician and an editor-writer you could compose them now, rapidly, with the technology that’s available. There must be a market for a new Austen or Wodehouse. I could do either in a weekend.

«

Marche includes a couple of examples of work kinda-sorta written by GPT-3: a continuation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan – the latter famously unfinished.
unique link to this extract

Renew and Refill Bob Cassette for a fraction of the cost! • dekuNukem on Github

“dekuNukem”:

»

With shipping and VAT added, it costs a whopping £43 ($60) for 90 washes! That is 48p (67c) per wash. It might not sound like much, but it quickly adds up.

Over a year of daily washes, it would have cost £174 ($242) in Bob cassettes alone! Imagine paying that much recurring cost for a dishwasher! And remember its internet connectivity? Yep, the whole reason is that it can reorder more cassettes automatically when it runs low, just like those wretched HP inkjet printers.

It is clear that Daan Tech are banking on the convenience of subscription models. Now I’m sure a lot of people would have no problem with that, but personally, I can think of a few better uses of my £174 than on dishwasher detergents.

Another point to consider is what happens if they went bust? No more cassettes, and now you have a fancy paperweight, like so many unnecessarily-smart appliances before it.

Credit where credit’s due, Daan Tech didn’t completely lock down the machine with Bob cassettes. Once empty, you can leave it there and add detergents manually. However, they strongly suggest against this, quoting a few drawbacks:

• It’s a chore to measure and add them manually at each wash.
• Dosing can be tricky, as most tablets, pods, and liquids are for full-size dishwashers.
• Multi-stage dosing impossible, can’t add rinse aid after main wash.
• Limescale might develop over time and damage the machine.

It is clear that this dishwasher was designed with Bob cassettes in mind, and I do enjoy their set-and-forget simplicity. That’s why I made it a priority to investigate how it works.

Looking at the cassette, we can see it has a small circuit board in the middle, with 4 contacts on each side. At the receptacle, we can see the connector for the PCB, as well as two hoses to pump out the detergent during a wash…there are only 4 wires going into the machine. Coupled with the fact that Bob needs to read the cassette to determine how many washes are left, and write to update it after a wash, I had a pretty good guess of what that mystery PCB contains.

The answer is an I2C EEPROM, a popular type of non-volatile memory. EEPROMs retain whatever’s inside even after losing power, and are very cheap, making them perfect at holding small configuration data in embedded systems.

«

So of course he looked at the code inside it, and hacked it so he could refill the cassette as he liked.
unique link to this extract

AirTag teardown part one: yeah, this tracks • iFixit

Sam Goldheart:

»

Unlike the keychain-ready competition, the AirTag’s perfectly round exterior provides no place for you to thread a keyring—at least not easily. The official method to attach one of these to your keys is (wait for it): purchase accessories. But if you can hold a drill steady—and are willing to take a $29 risk—we’ve got a DIY hack for you.

After some reconnaissance inside our first AirTag, we grabbed a 1/16” drill bit and carefully punched a hole through the second tracker in our four-pack—after removing the battery, of course. We miraculously managed to avoid all chips, boards, and antennas, only drilling through plastic and glue. The best part? The AirTag survived the operation like a champ and works as if nothing happened. 

Amazingly, the sound profile didn’t seem to change much: measuring the decibel level  at one iPhone-Mini-length away from the AirTag, the Hole-y One™ was within a +/- 1 dB margin of error from a brand new ‘Tag (about 78-80 dB). Considering Apple is using the plastic dome itself as the speaker diaphragm, this comes as a pleasant surprise.

One last warning before we share our drilling secrets: attempt this at your own risk! Drilling in the wrong place can cause serious damage, so don’t try this at home unless you’re willing to potentially turn your tracker into a very light paperweight. With that out of the way, here’s a hastily-masked video demonstration of the “safe zones” as we see them.

«

You’d have to be brave. But no doubt quite a few people are going to try this, with all sorts of mixed outcomes. But the teardown shows that these are really, really compact devices, especially compared with rivals (though those do have.. somewhere to thread into).
unique link to this extract

A third of Basecamp’s workers resign after a ban on talking politics • The New York Times

Sarah Kessler:

»

About a third of Basecamp’s employees have said they are resigning after the company, which makes productivity software, announced new policies banning workplace conversations about politics.

Jason Fried, Basecamp’s chief executive, detailed the policies in a blog post on Monday, calling “societal and political discussions” on company messaging tools “a major distraction.” He wrote that the company would also ban committees, cut benefits such as a fitness allowance (with employees receiving the equivalent cash value) and stop “lingering and dwelling on past decisions.”

Basecamp had 57 employees, including Mr. Fried, when the announcement was made, according to a staff list on its website. Since then, at least 20 of them have posted publicly that they intend to resign or have already resigned, according to a tally by The New York Times. Basecamp did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Fried and David Hansson, two of Basecamp’s founders, have published several books about workplace culture, and news of their latest management philosophy was met with a mix of applause and criticism on social media.

«

The past week was the most amazing shot/chaser sequence, starting with Fried’s “hey, no more politics at work!” blogpost through to mass resignations on Friday evening. I guess that’s one way to evaluate management technique.

The resignations included the entire iOS app team for Hey, the email product, so it’s going to be fun to watch how that progresses over the next few months. I suspect we’ll discover that developers are fungible, but Basecamp’s/Hey’s reputation is always going to be marked by this event.
unique link to this extract

Crypto miners are killing free CI • Layer CI

Colin Chartier:

»

At LayerCI, we help developers build full-stack websites by creating per-branch preview environments and running end-to-end tests for them automatically. This is called CI (Continuous Integration.)

Because developers can run arbitrary code on our servers, they often violate our terms of service to run cryptocurrency miners as a “build step” for their websites. You can learn more in our docs.

“testronan” is an avid Flask user. Every hour they make a commit to their only GitHub repository: “testronan/MyFirstRepository-Flask”

The prolific programmer is certainly making sure that their contributions are well tested. Their repository contains configurations for five different CI providers: TravisCI, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Wercker, and LayerCI.

Seemingly quite proficient at shell scripting, their CI tasks run “listen.sh”: A shell script that combines a complicated NodeJS script with some seemingly random numbers:

(sleep 10; echo 4; sleep 2; echo “tex.webd”;sleep 2; echo 7; sleep 1; echo 1; sleep 1; echo “exit”; sleep 2) | stdbuf -oL npm run commands

MyFirstRepository-Flask has nothing to do with Flask or webservers. It hosts cryptocurrency mining scripts that send WebDollars to an anonymous address. The numbers correspond to installation options for the NodeJS implementation of WebDollar.

…At WebDollar’s April peak price of $.0005, the repository was making $77USD per month – a considerable sum in many countries, especially given that the only tools required are a laptop and an internet connection.

«

Perhaps crypto is best thought of as a parasite, consuming every computing resource that it possibly can? In which case, what’s the cure?
unique link to this extract

He tried to cash in on the NFT craze by auctioning a house. It didn’t work • CNN

Anna Bahney, CNN Business:

»

For months, Shane Dulgeroff had watched NFTs – or non-fungible tokens – for pieces of digital art, baseball cards and other collectibles sell for mind-boggling amounts.

Then, the 27-year-old California real estate broker had an idea. What if he commissioned a digital rendering of a home that he owned and auctioned it off as an NFT, along with the real world property?

Within weeks, he had a technicolor work of digital art by Kii Arens, a contemporary, pop artist and graphic designer. Dulgeroff bundled it with his two-unit duplex in Thousand Oaks, California, which he advertised as bringing in an annual rental income of $60,000. The offering was put up for auction at OpenSea, an online marketplace for digital assets that are backed by a blockchain, like Ethereum.

“This is going down in history,” Dulgeroff said before the auction opened on April 9th. “Not only is it the world’s first property to be sold this way, but once this sale closes, it will open up people’s eyes to a new way to sell real estate.”

When Dulgeroff first put the NFT up for auction, it wasn’t immediately clear how much the house and artwork might go for. But given the booming market for NFTs and the established and reliable rental returns on the investment property — along with the bragging rights of having bought a property through an NFT — he envisioned it could bring in a huge number.

“I keep seeing this number: $20 million,” he said at the time. “It could be in that ballpark.”

«

He got zero bids. Why?

»

While Dulgeroff said he had heard from interested buyers from the real estate world, they had questions about how the title would transfer, whether it had to be an all-cash payment and how to get their money onto the platform.

«

Oh, so fussy! Wanting to know if they’d actually own it!
unique link to this extract

Joshua Wolf Shenk resigns as editor of the Believer magazine • Los Angeles Times

Dorany Pineda:

»

In a farewell letter shared with the staff, Shenk said his resignation followed “a dumb, reckless choice to disregard appropriate setting and attire for a Zoom meeting. I crossed a line that I can’t walk back over. I sorely regret the harm to you — and, by extension, to the people we serve. I’m sorry.”

The incident occurred during a video meeting in early February with about a dozen staff members of the Believer and BMI, according to three sources who were in the meeting.

According to Ira Silverberg, a literary agent and editor who is acting as Shenk’s advisor, Shenk was soaking in a bathtub with Epsom salts during the meeting to alleviate nerve pain caused by fibromyalgia.

He had chosen a virtual background to mask his location and had worn a mesh shirt. When Shenk’s computer battery died, he got up to plug it in, believing the camera was off. But the video kept running. According to Silverberg, Shenk reported the incident immediately.

In a statement to The Times, Shenk apologized for the pain the incident caused to the BMI staff, who he called “the most talented, devoted and creative people I’ve ever worked with.

“After my lapse in judgment, I decided to resign so that BMI’s work — sparking culture in Southern Nevada, publishing The Believer, and hosting writers persecuted in their home countries — could best continue in their exceptionally capable hands,” Shenk said.

«

Please, if you’re going to use Zoom (or other video calling systems) this week, don’t try to outdo this. And don’t try to do this.
unique link to this extract

Shipping containers are falling overboard at a rapid rate • SupplyChainBrain

Ann Koh:

»

The shipping industry is seeing the biggest spike in lost containers in seven years. More than 3,000 boxes dropped into the sea last year, and more than 1,000 have fallen overboard so far in 2021. The accidents are disrupting supply chains for hundreds of U.S. retailers and manufacturers such as Amazon and Tesla.

There are a host of reasons for the sudden rise in accidents. Weather is getting more unpredictable, while ships are growing bigger, allowing for containers to be stacked higher than ever before. But greatly exacerbating the situation is a surge in e-commerce after consumer demand exploded during the pandemic, increasing the urgency for shipping lines to deliver products as quickly as possible.

“The increased movement of containers means that these very large containerships are much closer to full capacity than in the past,” said Clive Reed, founder of Reed Marine Maritime Casualty Management Consultancy. “There is commercial pressure on the ships to arrive on time and consequently make more voyages.”

After gale-force winds and large waves buffeted the 364-meter One Apus in November, causing the loss of more than 1,800 containers, footage showed thousands of steel boxes strewn like Lego pieces onboard, some torn to metal shreds. The incident was the worst since 2013, when the MOL Comfort broke in two and sank with its entire cargo of 4,293 containers into the Indian Ocean.

In January, the Maersk Essen lost about 750 boxes while sailing from Xiamen, China, to Los Angeles. A month later, 260 containers fell off the Maersk Eindhoven when it lost power in heavy seas.

«

Of course it’s our fault. Damn consumers, wanting things, forcing ships to overturn.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The US CDC won’t tell you, but based on what we know, wearing masks while outdoors has probably never been necessary throughout the pandemic. CC-licensed photo by Kristoffer Trolle 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. One-third done already. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

On social media, American-style free speech is dead • WIRED

Gilad Edelman interviews Evelyn Douek, a Harvard doctoral student who has written an article in the Columbia Law Review pointing out how the pandemic dismantled the social networks’ claims to be free speech havens:

»

GE: One point you make is that, in this First Amendment–style approach, the distinctions are more categorical. Can you give an example of a kind of content moderation decision that embodies that way of looking at it?

ED: Yeah, so this is really important, because it’s one of the defining features of American free speech jurisprudence that the rest of the world has like looked at and gone, Mmm, not so much. It is a bit of technical, and so to break it down, let’s take, for example, adult nudity.

The way that it started [for social media] was fairly unsophisticated. It was like, “If there’s boobs, take it down.” That was the dominant approach for a while. And then people would go, Hold on, you’re removing a whole bunch of things that have societal value. Like people raising awareness about breast cancer, or people breastfeeding that shouldn’t be stigmatized. Or, in a bunch of cultures, adult nudity and breasts are a perfectly normal, accepted, celebrated kind of expression. So gradually this category of adult nudity became, first of all, untenable as an absolute category. And so it got sort of broken down into finer and finer distinctions that no longer really looks like a solid category, but looks much more like, OK we’ll take these finer and finer sort of instances and balance, what’s the social cost of this, what’s the benefit, and how should we reconcile that and approach it in a more proportionate manner?

GE: So it sounds like what you’re saying is a categorical approach to content moderation attempts to draw pretty bright lines around certain categories of posts that are not allowed, versus everything else that is allowed. But over time, you have to keep slicing these categories more and more thinly. And at a certain point, maybe it’s hard to say exactly where, it stops looking like a true category at all, because the judgments have to get so nuanced.

Yeah, that’s basically it. Let’s take another category: false speech. That was a category that was, like, absolutely protected by platforms pretty much universally for the history of content moderation. It was like, “The fact that it’s false is not enough for us to get involved and we’re not going to look at that any further. ‘It’s just false’ is not a reason that we will inquire into the value of that speech.”

The pandemic really changed that.

«

It really did. I devote a whole chapter of my forthcoming book (out in June) to looking at how and why the social networks changed their attitude to removing content when Covid-19 appeared. (You might, if you can think back to the 2016 Olympics, be able to think of an example when Facebook in particular proved very unwilling to remove content about a different virus.)
unique link to this extract

The CDC’s new guidelines are too timid and too complicated • The Atlantic

Zeynep Tufekci on the US CDC’s new guidelines about when you can and can’t wear a mask, which had an accompanying chart that looked like ratatouille:

»

To add to the confusion, in earlier guidelines, the CDC already said that vaccinated people could meet indoors without masks even if one of the households had unvaccinated members. It’s confusing to say that vaccinated people can meet indoors without masks with unvaccinated people in one guideline, but that they should wear masks outdoors in a crowd in another guideline, without further explanation of why. If the idea is that, in crowds, we should keep masks for everyone because of sociological reasons, to avoid the awkwardness of selective mask enforcement, the CDC should just say so.

What about rules for vaccinated people indoors, then? One could argue that the science is already fairly strong that the vaccinated are likely fine even indoors, especially if community transmission isn’t very high, and that the CDC guidelines implicitly assume this. That said, one can concede that this part of the empirical record is still evolving. However, that’s not currently relevant for public rules and behavior, because just like we can’t tell only the sick to wear masks, we cannot tell only the vaccinated to chuck their masks indoors—a grocery-store clerk shouldn’t have to police this. For now, indoor spaces have to keep masks as a rule simply for sociological reasons. We should make that explicit too.

The CDC needs clearer, science-based guidelines that inform and empower us. People do not need a complicated patchwork of charts with rigid, binary rules. The science supports a simple guideline that allows for the removal of all mask mandates outdoors, except for unvaccinated people in prolonged close contact, especially that involving talking, yelling, or singing.

«

The UK’s rules are at least simple, even if they’re just as science-lite in explanation as the CDC’s: hands [wash them – unnecessary, but it comforts people], face [ditto], space [social distance], fresh air. Masks are only presently required inside places you don’t live (shops, gyms, etc), and have never been required outside.

The CDC’s reluctance to inject any science into explaining its advice may say a lot about how terrible most people are at understanding this topic. Ironic, since not understanding can get you killed.
unique link to this extract

Scammers are hacking Target’s gig workers and stealing their money • Vice

Lauren Kaori Gurley:

»

On the morning of March 28, a gig worker near Tampa, Florida, was shopping an order for Shipt, Target’s delivery platform, when he received an email from “Shipt Support” asking him to reset his password. 

The worker says he didn’t request to reset his password, but didn’t think much of the email and went on with this day. Later that evening, the worker says he was sitting at home on his couch when he received a phone call from Shipt’s corporate headquarters’ phone number. Someone identifying themselves as a Shipt employee and addressing the worker by his first name said there had been unusual activity on his account regarding his password and asked him to read back a code that had been emailed to him to verify his identity. 

Remembering the password reset email from earlier that day, the worker provided an authentication code that he’d received via email from Shipt. Shortly after, he received an email notifying him that someone had added a debit card to his account. 

When the worker checked his account again, he realized someone had logged in and cashed out his entire paycheck—$499.51. “I noticed my withdrawal balance was zero,” he said in a public video uploaded to Facebook. “At that point, I’m livid. I’m pissed.” 

In recent weeks, personal shoppers on Target’s delivery app, which boasts roughly 300,000 personal shoppers in the United States, have been repeatedly targeted by scammers hoping to steal their earnings by phishing gig workers’ credentials from them. 

«

The systemic flaw here is in the US phone network (also found in other phone networks), in not having authentication methods for the origin of phone calls made over the network. Websites have developed SSL so that you can’t pretend to be a site. I don’t pretend to understand the underlying complexity in phone networks, but they’re pretty good at billing you based on the origin and destination of your call, so it seems strange they’re so lax about how they let calls represent themselves.

Phone networks are infrastructure too. Just saying.
unique link to this extract

Windows 10 now active on 1.3 billion devices, says Microsoft • ExtremeTech

Ryan Whitwam:

»

It’s been just over a year since Microsoft announced it had hit its goal of 1 billion monthly active Windows 10 devices. It took a while to get there, but Microsoft now says Windows 10 is growing even faster, reaching a whopping 1.3 billion active installs in the last quarter. Like a number of other technology firms, Microsoft has the global pandemic to thank for its windfall. It turns out people buy more computers when they’re stuck at home. 

“Over a year into the pandemic, digital adoption curves aren’t slowing down. They’re accelerating, and it’s just the beginning,” said CEO Satya Nadella. The latest device count comes from Microsoft’s earnings report, which featured a stunning $41.7bn in revenue for the quarter.

When Microsoft launched Windows 10 in 2015, it said it expected to reach a billion active monthly devices in summer 2018, but it missed that target by about 18 months. A big piece of Windows 10’s dominance was supposed to be smartphones, and Microsoft decided to abandon its Windows Phone program a few years later. It now makes Android phones, well, one phone so far. The Surface brand, which includes Windows laptops and the Duo Android phone, saw a 12% revenue lift in the last quarter. 

«

Growing by 300 million in a single year is pretty remarkable, given that 290m PCs were sold. But that suggests upgrades from older ones have really slowed down.
unique link to this extract

Epic Apple documents show PS4, not iPhone, is Fortnite’s cash cow • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Earlier this month, we learned that the iOS version of Fortnite was a huge revenue driver for Epic Games — the game earned more than $700m from iOS customers over the two years before it was pulled by Apple, according to court documents (PDF) released ahead of Epic’s trial against the iPhone maker. But even though iOS Fortnite players brought in a staggering amount of money for Epic, iOS isn’t the biggest platform in terms of revenue for the game — apparently, it might even be among the smallest.

Court documents reveal that PlayStation 4 generated 46.8% of Fortnite’s total revenues from March 2018 through July 2020, while Xbox One, the second-highest platform, generated 27.5%. iOS ranked fifth, with just 7% of total revenue. The remaining 18.7% would have been split between Android, Nintendo Switch, and PCs.

In 2020, iOS revenues were projected to be an even smaller piece of the pie: just 5.8%, compared to 24% for Xbox One and “almost 40%” for PlayStation 4, according to a new deposition (PDF) of Epic Games’ David Nikdel, a senior programmer who works on the backend services for Fortnite.

“iOS was always the lowest or second lowest if Android was listed, correct?” lawyers asked Joe Babcock, Epic’s CFO until March 2020, in a separate deposition. The answer was yes.

«

And because of that, Epic needed to run its own app store? That doesn’t quite make sense.
unique link to this extract

Global electric car sales set for further strong growth after 40% rise in 2020 • International Energy Agency

»

The IEA’s Global Electric Vehicle Outlook 2021 finds that despite the pandemic setting off a cascade of economic recessions, a record 3 million new electric cars were registered in 2020, a 41% increase from the previous year. By comparison, the global automobile market contracted 16% in 2020. Electric cars’ strong momentum has continued into this year, with sales in the first quarter of 2021 reaching nearly two and half times their level in the same period a year earlier.

Last year’s increase brought the number of electric cars on the world’s roads to more than 10 million, with another roughly 1 million electric vans, heavy trucks and buses. For the first time last year, Europe overtook China as the centre of the global electric car market. Electric car registrations in Europe more than doubled to 1.4 million, while in China they increased 9% to 1.2 million.

“While they can’t do the job alone, electric vehicles have an indispensable role to play in reaching net-zero emissions worldwide,” said Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the IEA. “Current sales trends are very encouraging, but our shared climate and energy goals call for even faster market uptake. Governments should now be doing the essential groundwork to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles by using economic recovery packages to invest in battery manufacturing and the development of widespread and reliable charging infrastructure.”

«

Note how the US is very much not the centre of the electric car market: at most there were 0.4 million cars registered there in the year.
unique link to this extract

I Photoshop Paddington into another movie until I forget • Jay Chou on Reddit

These are wonderful: now that (of course) Paddington 2 is the most popular film of all time (as measured by critics), he is adding the Peruvian bear into scenes from all sorts of other films. Particularly good: Justice League (got to look hard) and the film P2 displaced, Citizen Kane.
unique link to this extract

The wind and solar boom is here • The New York Times

Farhad Manjoo:

»

“The fossil fuel era is over,” declares Carbon Tracker Initiative, a nonprofit think tank that studies the economics of clean energy, in a new report. Kingsmill Bond, its energy strategist, told me that the transition to renewable energy will alter geopolitics and global economics on a scale comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution.

He cites one telling example to illustrate how and why. The world’s largest conventional oil field, Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, has the capacity to produce nearly four million barrels of oil per day. If you were to convert Ghawar’s annual oil output into electricity, you’d get almost one petawatt-hour of power per year. (That’s nearly enough to power Japan for a year; the world’s annual electrical energy demand is 27 petawatt-hours.)

The Ghawar oil field takes up a lot of space — about 3,000 square miles, around the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. But it soon might sound crazy to use that much sunny land for drilling oil. Bond estimates that if you put up solar panels on an area the size of Ghawar, you could now generate more than one petawatt-hour per year — more than you’d get from the oil buried under Ghawar.

But the oil will one day run out, while the sun will keep shining over Ghawar — and not just there, but everywhere else, too. This is the magic of the sun, as Bond explains: Only Saudi Arabia has a Ghawar, but with solar power almost every country in the world with enough space can generate one petawatt-hour of power (and without endangering the planet to boot).

«

unique link to this extract

Nuclear energy • AVC

Fred Wilson is a venture capitalist (hence “AVC”):

»

When I was in my early 20s, I had a conversation with my dad. I told him I was against nuclear power because it was dangerous and because it created radioactive waste that we had no idea how to safely dispose of. He replied that there certainly were problems with nuclear energy but that they paled in comparison to those of burning fossil fuels. This was before greenhouse gases and climate change were front and center in my mind and the minds of most people. I was not convinced by my dad’s argument.

Forty years later, my dad is no longer with us, but his words ring loudly in my ears. I have come full circle on nuclear energy and now see it as way more attractive than most other forms of generating energy.

«

Teenager: “my parents are wrong about so many things.”
Same person, 20 years later: “I can see now that my parents have changed their views about lots of things.” (Joke courtesy my older brother, told to me many decades ago. Thanks, Steve, it stuck.)

This is also Wilson’s way of saying that his company, USV, has a big new climate venture capital fund. Not sure they’ll really have enough money to make a difference to the development of fission or fusion, but can’t hurt, I suppose.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In future, Olympic rowing medals might be won virtually. No idea how that works for teams, though. CC-licensed photo [of Heather Stanning, Britain’s world rowing champion] by Defence Images 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. Named tentatively. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

🚨 What really happened at Basecamp • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

[Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier] Hansson wanted to acknowledge the situation as a failure and move on. But when employees who had been involved in the list [of “funny” customer names collected since 2009 for a jape inside the company] wanted to continue talking about it, he grew exasperated. “You are the person you are complaining about,” he thought.

Employees took a different view. In a response to Hansson’s post, one employee noted that the way we treat names — especially foreign names — is deeply connected to social and racial hierarchies. Just a few weeks earlier, eight people had been killed in a shooting spree in Atlanta. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent, and their names had sometimes been mangled in press reports. (The Asian American Journalists Association responded by issuing a pronunciation guide.) The point was that dehumanizing behavior begins with very small actions, and it did not seem like too much to ask Basecamp’s founders to acknowledge that.

Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint.

Two other employees were sufficiently concerned by the public dressing-down of a colleague that they filed complaints with Basecamp’s human resources officer. (HR declined to take action against the company co-founder.)

Less than two weeks later, [CEO Jason] Fried announced the new company policies.

«

Newton with the inside story of the “dispute” (with Basecamp banning discussion of “politics” on company systems) that has had Valley Twitter agog for the past couple of days. It’s very hard to work out how much this is “are you sure this is actually a topic, at all?” and how much it’s “can’t you hear how clotheared the things you’re saying are?”
unique link to this extract

Apple’s follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac • Nikkei Asia

Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li:

»

The next generation of Mac processors designed by Apple entered mass production this month, sources familiar with the matter told Nikkei Asia, bringing the U.S. tech giant one step closer to its goal of replacing Intel-designed central processing units with its own.

Shipments of the new chipset – tentatively known as the M2, after Apple’s current M1 processor – could begin as early as July for use in MacBooks that are scheduled to go on sale in the second half of this year, the people said.

The latest entry in the “Apple silicon” lineup is, like its predecessor, a so-called system-on-a-chip, meaning it integrates central processing units, graphic processing units and artificial intelligence accelerators all on one chip. Sources said it will eventually be used in other Mac and Apple devices beyond the MacBook.

The new chipset is produced by key Apple supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract chipmaker, using the latest semiconductor production technology, known as 5-nanometer plus, or N5P. Producing such advanced chipsets takes at least three months.

The start of mass production came as Apple introduced new iMac and iPad Pro models using the M1.

«

“Tentatively known as the M2”, aka “neither we nor the manufacturer know”. Though I guess calling it the N1 would make it too difficult to distinguish. Together with the schematics ransomwared from Quanta, we now know roughly when and what we’ll get this summer.

Apple also announced its quarterly results – a blow-the-doors-off $90bn in revenue (only just short of the usual bumper Christmas quarter) – in which profits rose 54% and Mac revenue was up 70% year-on-year. The M1 and the usable keyboards are making a hell of a difference.
unique link to this extract

Win a gold medal from your front room? IOC launches Olympic Virtual Series • The Guardian

Sean Ingle:

»

The prospect of an Olympic gold medal being won from someone’s living room or garden shed moved a step closer on Thursday after the IOC announced it was moving into esports and virtual sports.

The inaugural Olympic virtual series, which starts next month, will involve five sports – baseball, cycling, rowing, sailing and motor sport – as part of a plan to grow new audiences for the International Olympic Committee.

A well-placed source told the Guardian that while medals would not be awarded for now, the possibility of medal events in the future for “physical” virtual sport, such as online rowing and cycling, should not be ruled out. But the source insisted there would never be gold medals for Overwatch or League of Legends.

In a statement the IOC said the Olympic Virtual Series would “mobilise virtual sport, esports and gaming enthusiasts all around the world in order to reach new Olympic audiences, while also encouraging the development of physical and non-physical forms of sports in line with the recommendations of the IOC’s Olympic Agenda 2020+5”.

«

Rowing, eh? *blows on hands, looks at rowing machine*
unique link to this extract

Stinson Beach residents must reckon with abandoning their homes as sea levels rise • SF Gate

Andrew Chamings:

»

Many residents in one of the Bay Area’s most popular day-trip destinations are being told that they may need to abandon their homes as sea levels rise, KPIX reported this week, and the state coastal commission and county is now battling over the town’s future

Studies show that numerous homes in Stinson Beach will flood with just one foot of sea rise, an unavoidable result of human-caused climate change. Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) projects that this will likely happen in under 20 years (the same data set shows a rise of nearly four feet by the end of the century.)

Six years ago, residents in two of the lowest lying neighborhoods in Stinson Beach — Calles and the Sonoma-Patio — received notice from the county informing them that sea level rise would “have an impact on their ability to get permits for improvements on their properties,” KPIX reported.

“Lots of people delighted with their beach house and their one-and-a-half-minute walk to the beach all of a sudden discovered that you wouldn’t be able to get a permit, for anything,” resident and HOA President Mike Matthews told the station. “That equates to ‘can’t sell your house,’ and that equates to loss of the value of it so there was an extreme reaction.”

«

I bet there was an extreme reaction. Those houses would essentially go from being worth millions to zero.
unique link to this extract

How to end India’s Covid nightmare • UnHerd

Tom Chivers:

»

The US has millions of doses of vaccines which it’s simply not using. I’ve seen the exact number estimated as high as 100 million, but I think it’s widely accepted that there are 30 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses sitting, bottled but unused, in a warehouse in Ohio. There seems to be no short-term likelihood that the US FDA will approve it, over (to my mind misguided) fears about blood clotting, so they’re just gathering dust.

Since Aaronson wrote his post, there has been some apparent good news: the US says it will start releasing AstraZeneca doses, a total of 60 million. But there’s no sense of urgency. It’s waiting for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to complete a “safety review”, which could take weeks, before releasing the first 10 million. Meanwhile, in India, at the very least 2,500 people are dying every day from Covid in an unthinkable, ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.

I wanted to remind people of the urgency. Imagine that there are 30 million doses sitting in Ohio; how much good could they do if we could get them into Indian arms straight away? So I thought it would be interesting to attempt a Fermi estimate of that, a sort of first approximation. It won’t be exact, but it might get us to within an order of magnitude, and give us a sense of how much using these vaccines matters.

«

Chivers tries to work out how many deaths could be avoided by sending those doses to India immediately. The number is large. So though are the number of cases every day: though the official figure is around 300,000, best calculations suggest the real number is anywhere between 6 and 10 million per day. India, of course, has 1.4 billion people (close enough), so the numbers could go anywhere – including up.
unique link to this extract

Saudi, US net zero oil producer initiative meets sceptical response • Climate Change News

Joe Lo:

»

At Joe Biden’s climate summit on Friday, the US, Canada, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – together responsible for 40% of global oil and gas production – set up a forum “that will develop pragmatic net-zero emission strategies”.

Strategies could include stopping methane leaks and flaring, deployment of carbon capture and storage technologies, diversification from reliance on hydrocarbon revenues, and “other measures in line with each country’s national circumstances”, according to the joint statement.

There was no mention of leaving oil in the ground, an omission climate advocates were quick to criticise.

Tzeporah Berman, chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-proliferation Treaty campaign, said in a statement: “[This] is worrying because all of these countries continue to expand fossil fuel production and pour billions of dollars into technologies to reduce emissions ‘per barrel’ rather than to manage an equitable decline of overall emissions and production. If your house is on fire you don’t add more fuel.”

«

The climate writer Alex Steffen has a description for this:

»

We’re winning too slowly because we face a set of interest groups for whom losing slowly is the same thing as victory.

We live within what I call the Interval of Predatory Delay, a time that began over 50 years ago, when a set of high-polluting industries decided it was wiser and more profitable to fight to delay change on climate and sustainability than to invest in lower-carbon and more sustainable systems and processes. Easier to torch the planet and lie relentlessly, they decided, than avoid catastrophe and lose revenue.

«

unique link to this extract

BT Sport up for sale in broadband push • Daily Telegraph

Christopher Williams and Ben Woods:

»

BT is in talks with Amazon, Disney and others to offload a stake in its television arm, The Telegraph can reveal, as the pandemic casts doubt over the future of sport.

The telecoms operator has appointed the investment bank Lazard to explore a partial sale of BT Sport as it focuses on upgrading Britain’s broadband network.

It is understood that BT is in talks with potential partners including Amazon, Disney and Dazn, an international sports streaming venture funded by Sir Leonard Blavatnik, the Ukraine-born billionaire.

A British broadcaster is also involved in the discussions and potentially leading the bidding, City sources said.

BT has a longstanding partnership with ITV, although has also worked with Channel 4 and the BBC. Any traditional broadcaster could seek to show more top-flight football on terrestrial television.

The same source said Dazn, which recently agreed a sports broadcasting partnership with BT’s Italian equivalent, was “most keen”.

The discussions pit a traditional broadcaster against Dazn, a streaming upstart, and two global media giants. Potential private equity partners including CVC, a major investor in rugby, and Silverlake, a shareholder in Manchester City are understood to have backed away from talks.

A source said: “The world of sport has been rocked by coronavirus. It’s no surprise that BT is rethinking how best to keep growing the business.”

«

BT Sport has never looked like a comfortable match for BT: big bets on how much to pay for content over multiple years is a different game from consultancy services and fibre laying.
unique link to this extract

Seven ways Boris Johnson’s Downing Street refurb may have broken rules • openDemocracy

Seth Thévoz:

»

The makeover of the prime minister’s flat, reported to have cost up to £200,000, has caused nothing but headaches for the government. Ever since the first carefully phrased denials were issued, this story has kept escalating.

As openDemocracy revealed last month, Boris Johnson has been breaking his own government’s transparency rules by failing to publish an up-to-date register of ministers’ interests. The prime minister’s own former senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, said Johnson planned to “have donors secretly pay” for the work.

Here’s what we do know. The civil service refused to pay £58,000 for luxury designer Lulu Lytle’s June 2020 invoice. There were also concerns about the total bill exceeding the £30,000-limit on taxpayer funds for the project.

In July 2020, with Lytle’s invoice deadline looming and Johnson unable to afford it himself, the Conservatives are said to have used Tory party funds to meet the bill.

In order to cover this amount, Tory donors from the Leader’s Group later dug deep – Tory peer David Brownlow paid £58,000 in October 2020. openDemocracy understands the amount was later repaid back to Brownlow, and that he looked at setting up a Trust with himself as chair, to avoid having to disclose the donation. Lord Brownlow has not commented on this.

The Conservative Party denies currently using its funds to pay the bill – but that was never the allegation. It has refused to be drawn in on whether it had previously used its funds in that way.

Last week, Cabinet Office minister Nicholas True told the House of Lords the extra cost had now been “met by the prime minister personally”. This raises even more questions – Boris Johnson has not declared any income windfall, so how can he suddenly afford a £58,000 bill that he couldn’t afford last July? Labour shadow Cabinet Office minister Rachel Reeves suggested Johnson was “Possibly breaking the law.”

«

The seven ways are listed. For any readers who are confused over what all this is about, and why it matters. (They all matter, but some more than others.)
unique link to this extract

India’s genome sequencing program is finally good to go – so what’s the holdup? • The Wire Science

Priyanka Pulla:

»

Rakesh Mishra, the director of Hyderabad’s Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), is frustrated. CCMB has been sequencing SARS-CoV-2 viral genomes since the COVID-19 pandemic began – initially as part of its own research program and since December 2020 as part of the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG), a group of ten labs the government put together to ramp up sequencing across to India.

To do its work, Mishra’s team needs specialised plastic containers and reagents that go into sequencing machines. But buying them has become needlessly complicated in the last year, taking time away from his lab’s core jobs, according to Mishra.

The source of his troubles is a finance ministry order in May 2020 that stopped government labs from importing goods worth less than Rs 200 crore. The order was meant to boost local manufacturing, in the spirit of ‘Make in India’, but had unintended consequences for India’s fledgling genome-sequencing efforts. Several reagents and plastics used by Indian labs come from foreign manufacturers, like the US-based Illumina Incorporation, and have no Indian substitutes.

The ministry’s sudden restrictions threw these labs out of gear. By September 2020, sequencing across the country had come to a near-complete halt, as labs ran out of reagents they needed. Then, in response to their complaints, the ministry exempted reagents from its restrictions in January 2021.

But plastics are now the new thorn in his side, Mishra said. These materials still haven’t been exempted from the ministry’s order, which means his lab can’t buy them in bulk unless it can conduct a market assessment to show that no Indian alternatives exist. Such an assessment is a needless bureaucratic distraction at a time when labs desperately need to sequence more viral genomes – and faster. “It’s like asking us to run a 100-metre dash with our hands tied,” Mishra said. “I can run, but I will run very slow.”

«

The import ban has the Modi feel, that Make India Great Again intervention that screws things up. (Thanks G for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The European Commission is about to charge Apple with antitrust violations for its App Store behaviour towards Spotify and others, reports say. CC-licensed photo by Scott Beale 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. Best viewed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

EU to charge Apple with anti-competitive behaviour this week • Financial Times

Javier Espinoza:

»

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition chief, will later this week issue charges against Apple stating that its App Store rules break EU law, according to several people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The charges relate to a complaint brought two years ago by Spotify, the music streaming app, that Apple takes 30% commission to distribute apps through its iPhone App Store and forbids apps from directing users to pay for subscriptions elsewhere.

Brussels opened an official competition investigation in June, when Vestager said Apple appeared to be a so-called gatekeeper “when it comes to the distribution of apps and content to users of Apple’s popular devices”. 

Apple, which has denied any allegations of anti-competitive behaviour, did not immediately reply to a request for comment. At the time of Spotify’s initial complaint, Apple said the music app wanted to “keep all the benefits” of its App Store “without making any contributions to that marketplace”.

The case is one of the most high-profile antitrust cases in Europe against a US tech group. The people familiar with the process warned that the timing could still slip.

Brussels is also investigating Apple for allegedly breaking EU laws when it comes to promoting its own ebooks over rivals on the App Store, and over concerns that it undermines competition in mobile payments by limiting access to the near-field communication chips in iPhones for rivals to Apple Pay.

If Apple is ultimately found guilty of breaking EU rules, after a long period of potential appeals, the company faces a fine of up to 10% of global revenues.

«

Quite the fun week for Apple, given that the Epic antitrust case is now underway in the US. The App Store turns out to be the blessing – the thing that has persuaded so many people to buy an iPhone, the thing that keeps them tied to it – and, potentially, the curse as well.
unique link to this extract

Bitcoin’s most recent adopters are working-class migrants • Rest of World

Andalusia Knoll Soloff:

»

[Maria] Salgado thought cryptocurrencies were a scam when she first heard about them through colleagues and Facebook ads. But in 2017, she realized that more and more of her friends were getting involved in crypto, and that’s when she became a convert. “I realized we were all fighting for the same thing: to have a better life.”

Salgado is now part of a growing number of Latin Americans using cryptocurrency to transfer money from the United States south of the Rio Grande. They represent a new wave of crypto users who are not tech enthusiasts or white-collar financiers but rather working-class people whose livelihoods depend on a technology that is often seen as experimental.

The savings in commission fees makes crypto remittances a gamble worth taking for low-wage migrants. Before Bitcoin, like most migrants, she would send her money via the international transfer companies Western Union, MoneyGram, or Vigo. They all charged her, on average, $10 for every $200 she sent. Meanwhile, companies like Mexican crypto exchange Bitso charge commissions as low as $1 per $1,000 sent.

Jesús Cervantes González, an economist with the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies (CEMLA), told Rest of World that the pandemic led migrants to search for digital solutions to send money home. Many traditional exchanges closed their doors to the public, even as remittances steadily rose between 2010 and 2020, increasing by 8.3% in 2020. They went down for only two months in 2020, when Covid-19 first started spreading widely in the US and unemployment for Latinos surged — from 4.8% in February 2020 to 18.5% in April 2020.

«

Notice that this use of bitcoin is completely independent of its “price”. Transferring a balance from one place to the other would just be an entry in the blockchain. But because some people fixate on its “price” (because they’ve discovered a version of the greater fool system to sell them), the blockchain process consumes – wastes – colossal amounts of energy. Bitcoin’s maximum bound on transactions per second (max: 7) is independent of “price” or hashing rate; it depends on the size of each bitcoin block

In other words, all the energy consumption is unnecessary. It can undercut the greedier exchanges easily.
unique link to this extract

High energy cosmic ray sources mapped out for the first time • Quanta Magazine

Natalie Wolchover:

»

A cosmic ray is just an atomic nucleus — a proton or a cluster of protons and neutrons. Yet the rare ones known as “ultrahigh-energy” cosmic rays have as much energy as professionally served tennis balls. They’re millions of times more energetic than the protons that hurtle around the circular tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. In fact, the most energetic cosmic ray ever detected, nicknamed the “Oh-My-God particle,” struck the sky in 1991 going something like 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light, giving it roughly the energy of a bowling ball dropped from shoulder height onto a toe. “You would have to build a collider as large as the orbit of the planet Mercury to accelerate protons to the energies we see,” said Ralph Engel, an astrophysicist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and the co-leader of the world’s largest cosmic-ray observatory, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina.

The question is: What’s out there in space doing the accelerating?

«

Before you move on to the next one, I’d like to point out that this article includes a 3D map of the universe (not just the Milky Way – no half measures here) which you can pan, zoom and rotate. It’s not 1:1 scale, you’ll be relieved to hear.
unique link to this extract

Mighty’s master plan to reignite the future of desktop computing • MightyApp

Suhail Doshi:

»

We’re excited to finally unveil Mighty, a faster browser that is entirely streamed from a powerful computer in the cloud.

After two years of hard work, we’ve created something that’s indistinguishable from a Google Chrome that runs at 4K, 60 frames a second, takes no more than 500 MB of RAM, and often less than 30% CPU even with 50+ tabs open. This is the first step in making a new kind of computer.

If you’re not sure what that means, imagine your browser is a Netflix video but running on cutting-edge server hardware somewhere else.

When you switch to Mighty, it will feel like you went out and bought a new computer with a much faster processor and much more memory. But you don’t have buy a new computer. All you have to do is download a desktop app.

«

This… makes… no… sense… at… ALL. It’s a browser inside (in effect) a browser? Except it depends on your network connection and.. how fast your computer renders what’s in the app (a bit like.. a browser?) There’s a demo video. I do not understand what they are trying to do. Would it serve as virtualisation? It’s streaming video.. of a browser. Also, I’ve no idea how they think they’ll make money. (Adverts? Selling you data? They don’t say.)

This is the second thing that has been promoted on Paul Graham’s Twitter feed (the other was yesterday’s Prometheus Fuels* – let’s capture carbon from the air and… burn it??) that I’ve noticed in just two days. 🤔

*see correction – not a very big one, but involving chemistry – at end.
unique link to this extract

How safe are you from Covid when you fly? • The New York Times

Mika Gröndahl, Tariro Mzezewa, Or Fleisher and Jeremy White:

»

Air is refreshed roughly every two to three minutes — a higher rate than in grocery stores and other indoor spaces, experts say. It’s one reason, in addition to safety protocols, that there have not been many superspreader events documented on flights.

The high exchange rate on planes forces new and existing cabin air to mix evenly, with the goal of minimizing pockets of air that could become stale or linger for too long.

…To prevent air from circulating throughout the cabin, the ventilation system keeps it contained to a few rows.

…Throughout the flight, cabin air is periodically sucked through two HEPA filters into a manifold under the floor, where fresh and recirculated air are mixed. Each filter has 12 panels of densely pleated fiberglass mesh that catch most microscopic particles.

«

The picture you get is that you’re pretty safe, unless you have the bad luck to be seated near someone who is infected and sneezing. (I thought coughing was the thing?) But the bigger risks are perhaps in the airport terminal, where air circulation might be less good and you’ll be closer to people not wearing masks.

The animation for the air circulation is lovely – worth viewing for itself.
unique link to this extract

Google promised its contact tracing app was completely private—but it wasn’t • The Markup

Alfred Ng:

»

millions of people have downloaded contact tracing apps developed through Apple’s and Google’s framework: The U.K.’s National Health Services’ app has at least 16 million users, while Canada’s Digital Service COVID Alert app boasted more than six million downloads in January, and Virginia’s Department of Health noted more than two million residents were using its COVIDWISE app.

California governor Gavin Newsom endorsed his state’s version of the app, calling it “100% private & secure” in a tweet last December.

But The Markup has learned that not only does the Android version of the contact tracing tool contain a privacy flaw, but when researchers from the privacy analysis firm AppCensus alerted Google to the problem back in February of this year, Google failed to change it. AppCensus was testing the system as part of a contract with the Department of Homeland Security. The company found no similar issues with the iPhone version of the framework.

“This fix is a one-line thing where you remove a line that logs sensitive information to the system log. It doesn’t impact the program, it doesn’t change how it works, ” said Joel Reardon, co-founder and forensics lead of AppCensus. “It’s such an obvious fix, and I was flabbergasted that it wasn’t seen as that.”

“We were notified of an issue where the Bluetooth identifiers were temporarily accessible to specific system level applications for debugging purposes, and we immediately started rolling out a fix to address this,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in an emailed statement to The Markup.

Serge Egelman, AppCensus’s co-founder and chief technology officer, however, said that Google had repeatedly dismissed the firm’s concerns about the bug until The Markup contacted Google for comment on the issue late last week.

«

Funny how that keeps happening.
unique link to this extract

Tesla turns a record profit despite new Model S and Model X delay • The Verge

Sean O’Kane:

»

Tesla generated $10.4bn in sales the first quarter, and recorded a $438m profit. That’s basically double the revenue it generated in the first quarter of 2020, when Tesla had to temporarily shut down its factory in China due to the earliest outbreaks of the coronavirus. It’s also the most profit Tesla’s ever made in a quarter.

This is the seventh quarter in a row that Tesla has turned a profit, though the company was once again buoyed by selling emissions credits to other automakers. Tesla said Monday that it sold a record $518m worth of regulatory credits, meaning that it would’ve finished the quarter in the red without them. Tesla presented the growth of regulatory credit sales as a positive in the presentation it published Monday. But many close followers of Tesla have been waiting for the moment when it’s able to turn a profit based on the products it sells. This was not that moment.

Tesla also says it made about $101m on the sale of bitcoin in the first quarter. The company announced in January that it had bought $1.5bn worth of the cryptocurrency and started allowing customers to pay for cars using bitcoin.

«

Reminds me – a bit – of Apple’s darker days from 1996-01, when it used to boost its operating losses into net profits by selling off shares it owned in a company called ARM. Whatever happened to that, eh.

Question is how long the regulatory credit scheme, which also allows normal vehicle makers to keep pumping out gas guzzlers, will keep going.
unique link to this extract

The Linux Foundation’s demands to the University of Minnesota for its bad Linux patches security project • ZDNet

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, following up the story from last week:

»

To say that Linux kernel developers are livid about a pair of University of Minnesota (UMN) graduate students playing at inserting security vulnerabilities into the Linux kernel for the purposes of a research paper “On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits” is a gross understatement. 

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux kernel maintainer for the stable branch, well-known for being the most generous and easygoing of the Linux kernel maintainers, exploded and banned UMN developers from working on the Linux kernel. That was because their patches had been “obviously submitted in bad faith with the intent to cause problems.” 

The researchers, Qiushi Wu and Aditya Pakki, and their graduate advisor, Kangjie Lu, an assistant professor in the UMN Computer Science & Engineering Department of the UMN then apologized for their Linux kernel blunders. 

That’s not enough. The Linux kernel developers and the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board via the Linux Foundation have asked UMN to take specific actions before their people will be allowed to contribute to Linux again. We now know what these demands are.

«

Essentially they’re this:

»

the name of each targeted [piece of] software, the commit information, purported name of the proposer, email address, date/time, subject, and/or code, so that all software developers can quickly identify such proposals and potentially take remedial action for such experiments.

«

This is almost a sociological experiment in “how far along the road with a really bad idea can you get?” Putting vulnerabilities into open source code on purpose with the intent of not being found is the sort of thing you might suggest on Twitter after a few drinks. But sobriety should follow too.
unique link to this extract

China set to report first population decline in five decades • Financial Times

Sun Yu:

»

China is set to report its first population decline since the famine that accompanied the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s disastrous economic policy in the late 1950s that caused the deaths of tens of millions of people.

The current fall in population comes despite the relaxation of strict family planning policies, which was meant to reverse the falling birth rate of the world’s most populous country.

The latest Chinese census, which was completed in December but has yet to be made public, is expected to report the total population of the country at less than 1.4bn, according to people familiar with the research. In 2019, China’s population was reported to have exceeded the 1.4bn mark.

The people cautioned, however, that the figure was considered very sensitive and would not be released until multiple government departments had reached a consensus on the data and its implications.

“The census results will have a huge impact on how the Chinese people see their country and how various government departments work,” said Huang Wenzheng, a fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think-tank. “They need to be handled very carefully.”

…Analysts said a decline would suggest that China’s population could soon be exceeded by India’s, which is estimated at 1.38bn. A fall in population could exact an extensive toll on Asia’s largest economy, affecting everything from consumption to care for the elderly.

“The pace and scale of China’s demographic crisis are faster and bigger than we imagined,” said Huang. “That could have a disastrous impact on the country.”

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: re Prometheus Fuels yesterday: a litre of petrol only weighs 740g, so doesn’t contain 2.5kg of carbon; it has around 690g of carbon. (When burnt it becomes 2.5kg of carbon dioxide because you add two hefty oxygen atoms.) I don’t think this affects the calculation of how much air has to be processed to produce a litre of fuel. More to the point, removing carbon dioxide in order to burn it again makes as much sense as pulling smoke out of a smoky room and then blowing it back through the keyhole. The “smoke” is the problem here.