What aspect of the low-tax country of Cyprus can have attracted American billionaire Eric Schmidt to apply for citizenship? CC-licensed photo by Malcolm Murdoch on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. In the court of the ochre king. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech is strongly effective, data show • Stat News

Matthew Herper:

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Pfizer and partner BioNTech said Monday that their vaccine against Covid-19 was strongly effective, exceeding expectations with results that are likely to be met with cautious excitement — and relief — in the face of the global pandemic.

The vaccine is the first to be tested in the United States to generate late-stage data. The companies said an early analysis of the results showed that individuals who received two injections of the vaccine three weeks apart experienced more than 90% fewer cases of symptomatic Covid-19 than those who received a placebo. For months, researchers have cautioned that a vaccine that might only be 60% or 70% effective. 

The Phase 3 study is ongoing and additional data could affect results.

In keeping with guidance from the Food and Drug Administration, the companies will not file for an emergency use authorization to distribute the vaccine until they reach another milestone: when half of the patients in their study have been observed for any safety issues for at least two months following their second dose. Pfizer expects to cross that threshold in the third week of November.

“I’ve been in vaccine development for 35 years,” William Gruber, Pfizer’s senior vice president of vaccine clinical research and development, told STAT. “I’ve seen some really good things. This is extraordinary.” He later added: “This really bodes well for us being able to get a handle on the epidemic and get us out of this situation.”

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This is amazing news; the result of colossal effort. (Pfizer was at pains to point out that it wasn’t part of the Trump admin’s “Warp Speed” project, and took no money from the US government.) I’ve been saying for a while that by March or April 2021 we might be getting somewhere towards what used to be normality. This makes that feel a lot more within reach.

It’s all coming up roses, isn’t it? I guess that’s what happens when people have been shovelling crap on you for ages.
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The Journalist vs. Facebook • Rest of World

Peter Guest:

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Since 2016, [Rappler founder Maria] Ressa has become increasingly convinced that Facebook needs to profoundly change how it’s designed and governed. She believes the platform’s algorithms and content-moderation policies are inherently prejudiced against reasoned debate based on settled truths. “The platform itself is biased against facts. It’s really biased against journalism,” she says. “Social media platforms have atomized meaning to meaninglessness. They have completely deconstructed context.”

Her opinions are backed by a growing body of academic research, which shows that social media sites often reward emotional messages over rational analysis, funnel users toward content that reinforces their preexisting beliefs, and spread lies more rapidly and widely than they do the truth.

Ressa says one of Facebook’s most alarming shortcomings is its reluctance to moderate disinformation posted by governments and politicians. The company has justified its restraint by arguing that statements from public figures should remain online for public scrutiny. Although Facebook has removed state-backed propaganda in some instances, Ressa, along with other activists, say that these actions frequently amount to too little, too late. They say Facebook’s inaction has allowed propaganda and disinformation to spread unchecked, overwhelming and delegitimizing the news media.

“What we saw [in the Philippines] was that news organizations were being pushed to the periphery, and the center of the conversation was being taken over by the pro-government, state-sponsored disinformation,” Ressa says.

Without checks and balances on social media, Ressa says, authoritarian governments like Duterte’s can impose their own narratives — that drug addicts and communists run the country, and that journalists like Ressa are criminals and conspirators.

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The irony is that Rappler was founded essentially as a publication which got its distribution on Facebook. And to some extent still is. But the Philippines is where Facebook was first used in a big way for election disinformation.
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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has applied to become a citizen of Cyprus • Vox

Theodore Schleifer:

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The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is finalizing a plan to become a citizen of the island of Cyprus, Recode has learned, becoming one of the highest-profile Americans to take advantage of one of the world’s most controversial “passport-for-sale” programs.

Schmidt, one of America’s wealthiest people, and his family have won approval to become citizens of the Mediterranean nation, according to a previously unreported notice in a Cypriot publication in October. While it is not clear why exactly Schmidt has pursued this foreign citizenship, the new passport gives him the ability to travel to the European Union, along with a potentially favorable personal tax regime.

The move is a window into how the world’s billionaires can maximize their freedoms and finances by relying on the permissive laws of countries where they do not live. Schmidt’s decision in some ways mirrors that of another famous tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, who in 2011 controversially managed to secure citizenship in New Zealand.

Interest from Americans in non-American citizenship has been spiking during the coronavirus pandemic, which has sharply limited Americans’ ability to travel overseas. Experts say some of that increase is also due to concerns about political instability in the United States.

But it is still uncommon to see Americans apply to the Cyprus program, according to published data and citizenship advisers who work with the country. The program is far more popular with oligarchs from the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, and it has become mired in so many scandals that the Cypriot government announced last month that it was to be shut down.

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I really don’t understand billionaires’ need to remain billionaire-y. How much money can you spend at any one time, in any one place? How many private jets are enough? How large a private yacht do you need, precisely?

Schmidt is also being spoken of as a potentially influential figure in the incoming Biden administration. I think that would be a mistake. Unless he renounces this Cyprus stuff. (Which might, let’s allow, have been a just-in-case hedge against a Trump win.)
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iPhone 12 mini review: fit to size • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

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The phone is smaller than the traditional 4.7-inch-home-button iPhone design we saw from the iPhone 6 on through the 6S, 7, 8, and 2020 SE models, even though the screen itself is larger.

That’s because the 12 mini, just like the rest of the iPhone 12 line, has switched over to Apple’s more modern OLED screens and Face ID notch for unlocking. Those two features allow Apple to design the phone with minimal bezels and maximal screen.

Despite the smaller screen size, you don’t miss out on as much as you might expect. Compared to the regular iPhone 12 with a 6.1-inch screen, there are maybe one or two lines of text that are cut off. What you actually miss out on is that sense of immersion you can get from a bigger screen when you’re playing a game or watching a movie. Those were the only times this screen felt cramped.

If there is a knock on the screen, it’s that it doesn’t offer a high refresh rate like many Android phones — including the Pixel 5, which isn’t too far off from the iPhone 12 mini’s size. I’m more annoyed that the Pro iPhones don’t have it, though — here on the mini, I think battery life is more important.

To me, the iPhone 12 mini is most reminiscent of the iPhone 5. Yes, it is bigger and has a glass rear panel instead of aluminum, but it shares the squared-off aluminum sides and general feeling of being an object that was designed to be proportional to your hand. This is a phone that you can get a grip on, literally.

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Battery life is his principal complaint, though: smaller phone, smaller battery. (Though as ever, Apple could do thicker phone, thicker battery.)
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Ink-stained wretches: the battle for the soul of digital freedom taking place inside your printer • Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cory Doctorow isn’t best pleased with HP:

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HP’s latest gambit challenges the basis of private property itself: a bold scheme! With the HP Instant Ink program, printer owners no longer own their ink cartridges or the ink in them. Instead, HP’s customers have to pay a recurring monthly fee based on the number of pages they anticipate printing from month to month; HP mails subscribers cartridges with enough ink to cover their anticipated needs. If you exceed your estimated page-count, HP bills you for every page (if you choose not to pay, your printer refuses to print, even if there’s ink in the cartridges).

If you don’t print all your pages, you can “roll over” a few of those pages to the next month, but you can’t bank a year’s worth of pages to, say, print out your novel or tax paperwork. Once you hit your maximum number of “banked” pages, HP annihilates any other pages you’ve paid for (but continues to bill you every month).

Now, you may be thinking, “All right, but at least HP’s customers know what they’re getting into when they take out one of these subscriptions,” but you’ve underestimated HP’s ingenuity.

HP takes the position that its offers can be retracted at any time. For example, HP’s “Free Ink for Life” subscription plan offered printer owners 15 pages per month as a means of tempting users to try out its ink subscription plan and of picking up some extra revenue in those months when these customers exceeded their 15-page limit.

But Free Ink for Life customers got a nasty shock at the end of last month: HP had unilaterally canceled their “free ink for life” plan and replaced it with “a $0.99/month for all eternity or your printer stops working” plan.

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I’ve never been attracted by these “subscription” schemes, particularly for ink – one’s need for printing varies so much, and so suddenly – and everything I’ve observed about HP’s tactics makes me feel relieved.

Read the rest of the article, by the way, for the amazing (non-ink-related) hack that took over printers just by getting them to print something out.
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61% of Americans support abolishing Electoral College • Gallup

Megan Brennan:

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Heading into the 2020 presidential election, three in five Americans favor amending the US Constitution to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote system, marking a six-percentage point uptick since April 2019. This preference for electing the president based on who receives the most votes nationwide is driven by 89% of Democrats and 68% of independents. Far fewer Republicans, 23%, share this view, as 77% of them support keeping the current system in which the candidate with the most votes in the Electoral College wins the election.

Gallup has periodically measured public attitudes about the process of electing the president using this question since shortly after the 2000 election when George W. Bush won the electoral vote, and Al Gore won the popular vote. The latest findings, from an Aug. 31- Sept. 13 Gallup poll, are similar to readings after the 2000 election and in 2004 and 2011.

Of the seven times this question was asked over the past two decades, support for amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College only fell below the majority level once – in November 2016 after Donald Trump won the electoral vote and Hillary Clinton the popular vote. At that point, 49% of Americans wanted the current system to be replaced, and 47% wanted it to remain in place. By 2019, support for using the national vote totals over the Electoral College had risen to 55%.

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They’ve legalised mushrooms and hard drugs (in some states). Might as well get on and do the sensible thing. The GOP, relying on rural areas with disproportionate influence, doesn’t like it. The EC looks more and more outdated. Without it, the US could have determined its election days earlier.

And these trends towards change tend to end up happening – see legalisation of same-sex marriage, for example, where strong backing eventually leads to change. The problem is how to mount a legal challenge to the EC system.
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Guess The Correlation

Omar Wagih:

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I’m a PhD student studying bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge and the European Bioinformatics Institute. This game is a side project to feed one of my many day-to-day curiosities.

I’m always grateful for suggestions and happy to answer questions about the game or how the data will be used. So tweet me at @omarwagih or email me.

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Fun game where you’re shown some dots on a graph plot and asked to guess the correlation (it’s a value between 0 and 1). I felt enthused when I got the first answer correct to 1%. And it’s part of a project he’s doing about how we perceive correlations – do we overestimate, underestimate? Give it a go: it’s a nice distraction for a minute or two at least.
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Infamous ‘hoax’ artist behind Trumpworld’s new voter fraud claim • Daily Beast

Will Sommer:

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the mythical supercomputer claim has been embraced by prominent Trump backers, including former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik, former Trump 2016 campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, right-wing pundit John Cardillo, and Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson.

The election fraud claims center on Dennis Montgomery, a former intelligence contractor and self-proclaimed whistleblower who claims to have created the “Hammer” supercomputer and the “Scorecard” software some Trump fans believe was used to change the votes.

“He’s a genius, and he loves America,” Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and one-time leader in the birther movement, said of Montgomery on Tuesday on Bannon’s podcast, as Bannon praised an article on Montgomery’s claims. “He’s the programmer that made all this happen, and he’s on our side.”

Montgomery’s lawyer, Larry Klayman—a favorite attorney for fringe right-wing figures—didn’t respond to a request for comment. Klayman himself was temporarily suspended from practicing law in June.

What Trump allies tend to leave out, however, is that Montgomery has a long history of making outlandish claims that fail to come true. As an intelligence contractor at the height of the War on Terror, Montgomery was behind what’s been called “one of the most elaborate and dangerous hoaxes in American history,” churning out allegedly fictitious data that once prompted the Bush administration to consider shooting down airplanes.

And now, Trump allies want voters to believe Montgomery’s claims about the election.

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The fabulous thing about the belief that the election was shot through, Emmental-style, with fraud is that you’d have to accept that it was done in multiple geographically large states (Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania) with few electoral votes, but not in one (Florida) with enough EVs to tip the thing early. And no sign of the giant fraud in Florida, or anywhere.

Still: SUPERCOMPUTER. Must be true.
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Apple must ask why good help is so hard to find • Bloomberg Opinion

Tim Culpan:

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The term “student worker program” should ring immediate alarm bells for anyone who cares about labour rights. Getting college or vocational students to work factory production lines is an accepted practice in China that foreign clients including Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. have signed onto for years. Apple at least asks its manufacturing partners to ensure that the work relates to their studies. Under the pressure to churn out product, though, such programs are vulnerable to abuse.

Pegatron [which Apple has suspended as a supplier – big move] said it fired the manager responsible, whom it said “went to extraordinary lengths to evade our oversight mechanisms.” Still, we need to question what conditions incentivized employees to work so hard to not only break Apple’s labor code, but also make such efforts to cover their tracks.

This isn’t the first time Pegatron has appeared in print alongside allegations of labor violations. As far back as 2014, China Labor Watch named the company, alongside Catcher Technology Co., Jabil Inc. and Foxconn Technology Group, for failing to undertake corrective action related to labor and safety standards. 

Apple attracts the most criticism in the technology industry over labor and environmental standards. This partly reflects ever stricter rules that the company has imposed on its supply-chain partners, the results of which Apple publicizes in its annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report. 

Critics may argue that this is a marketing exercise designed to make consumers feel more comfortable about buying shiny gadgets produced by cheap labor — which helped to yield $57bn of profit for Apple last year. Yet incidents like this show that for all its talent and money, the US company doesn’t control its suppliers as much as it might wish.

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So suppliers are cutting corners, trying to get more of an edge? The fact that this is only found at Apple factories seems more likely to be an artefact of thorough inspection than something that only happens at Apple’s suppliers. The root problem is razor-margin capitalism. How do we fix that, exactly?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This older Dutch gentleman survived his encounter with an e-bike, but others haven’t been so lucky. CC-licensed photo by Dean Groom 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. Re-counted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The digital nomads did not prepare for this • The New York Times

Erin Griffith:

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David Malka, an entrepreneur in Los Angeles, had heard from friends who were living their best work-abroad lives. In June, he created a plan: he and his girlfriend would work from Amsterdam, with a quick stop at a discounted resort in Mexico along the way.

The first snag happened almost immediately. In Cabo San Lucas, Mr. Malka and his girlfriend realized that the European Union wasn’t about to reopen its borders to American travelers, as they had hoped. Returning to the United States wasn’t an option: Mr. Malka’s girlfriend was from the United Kingdom, and her visa wouldn’t allow it.

The two decided to stay in Mexico a bit longer. At first it was glamorous, Mr. Malka said. Working by laptop — he manages a portfolio of vacation rental properties — they had the resort to themselves. But by the second week, their situation began to feel like “Groundhog Day.” The city and the beach were closed, so the couple never left the resort. Meanwhile, the travel shutdown was hammering his business.

“All we could do is sit by the pool or go to the gym,” Mr. Malka said. The repetition, boredom and isolation all wore on them.

Eventually, the couple took a 28-hour, two-layover trip to Amsterdam, where Mr. Malka was indeed turned away at customs. They retreated to London, where they promptly broke up.
He has been there since. “Cold, raining, depressing,” he said. “Those are the first three adjectives that come to mind.”

Now Mr. Malka is trying to figure out how to get to Bali — it’s technically closed to visitors, but he heard about a special visa that can be rushed for $800 — or use his ancestry to obtain Portuguese citizenship. It’s a lot of logistics.

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That taste in my mouth – it’s delicious, yummy schadenfreude, I’m pretty sure.
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Lil Miquela, LoL’s Seraphine: virtual influencers make more real money than ever • Bloomberg

Thuy Ong:

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Virtual influencers were already gaining, well, influence long before Covid-19 struck.

Seraphine’s flowing pink hair and cat-themed Instagram posts had attracted thousands of fans when the news that she was created by Riot Games Inc. — the studio behind smash-hit esports game League of Legends — sent her account viral. Now her follower count is nearly 400,000 and she’s making appearances in Shanghai to promote her music, while most flesh-and-blood social-media stars are stuck at home. Despite not being real, she still sometimes wears a mask.

At a time when interacting safely with other humans can no longer be taken for granted, the appetite for digital spokespeople is accelerating. Brands are expected to spend as much as $15bn annually on influencer marketing by 2022, up from $8bn last year, according to Business Insider Intelligence. A growing slice of that money belongs to virtual influencers, and traditional marketing is experiencing serious disruption.

“Virtual influencers, while fake, have real business potential,” says Christopher Travers, the founder of virtualhumans.org, a website that documents the industry. “They are cheaper to work with than humans in the long term, are 100% controllable, can appear in many places at once, and, most importantly, they never age or die.”

Seraphine — who on Oct. 13 was also revealed to be a playable character on League of Legends, which draws as many as 8 million concurrent daily users — is one of about 125 active virtual influencers, according to Travers. More than 50 of those debuted on social media in the 18 months to June 2020. On YouTube, virtual influencers number more than 5,000.

Digital avatars developed by creative agencies, the biggest influencers can attract brand partnerships and other lucrative deals. With 2.8 million social-media followers and a fee of about $8,500 per sponsored post, Lil Miquela — a “model” who’s done promotions for Calvin Klein, Prada and other fashion brands — is the industry’s highest earner, according to OnBuy, a U.K.-based online marketplace. OnBuy estimates Lil Miquela will make about $11.7m for her creators this year.

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OK, I really don’t get this. When you look at their posts, they’re just froth. Frothy froth.
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Intel’s success came with making its own chips. Until now • WSJ

Asa Fitch:

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By 2019, Intel engineers and executives were debating how to manufacture future 10-nanometer CPU chips that had been held up because of earlier engineering delays. The debates were sometimes fierce, with some engineers urging management to consider letting someone else fabricate the chips if in-house facilities couldn’t, and some executives arguing that the factories could fix their problems.

Chief Engineer Venkata “Murthy” Renduchintala told analysts in May 2019 that Intel had learned lessons from earlier stumbles and that its 10-nanometer chips were on track. Intel’s next generation—7-nanometer CPUs—were on track to start production in 2021, he told them.

That didn’t happen. The manufacture of the next generation of CPUs is now a year behind initial plans, which will delay the arrival of products on the market by six months, Intel said. Intel shook up its technical team and announced Mr. Renduchintala’s departure. He declined to comment. Intel declined to comment on the departure, citing a statement at the time that he left amid a management shake-up aimed at improving the company’s chip-technology execution.

Mr. Swan in the July call told analysts: “We’re going to be pretty pragmatic about if and when we should be making stuff inside or making outside.”

The company’s new approach, Mr. Swan said, would be to make market-leading chips on schedule. Intel’s factories would be the preferred manufacturing option, but, if needed, production could be outsourced. Intel still plans to invest heavily in its own factories and future cutting-edge transistor technology, Mr. Swan has said.

As part of its move toward more outsourcing, Intel is adopting for some chips what it calls “disaggregation”—a process that lets it make a single chip using manufacturing processes in different places. Intel might start a chip in one in-house factory and then move it to another, or might start making a chip at an Intel plant and then ship it to an outside manufacturer to add elements Intel doesn’t produce as well. The company said it is beginning that type of mixed manufacturing, but on a limited basis with chips including a coming graphics-processing unit.

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If Intel outsources, who will it trust to make the chips? Those are incredibly valuable templates. And who will have the capacity? Would it trust TSMC? Plus, will some PC makers start to peel off towards ARM architectures when they see what Apple has managed tomorrow (Tuesday)?
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Dutch government pilots technology to cut e-bike road deaths • The Guardian

Daniel Boffey:

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Electric bike motors will be shut down when entering residential or built-up areas of Amsterdam, under a government-funded project to cut road deaths from the increasingly powerful vehicles.

The digital technology, which has been successfully trialled on a 4km stretch of bike lanes at Schiphol airport, was funded by the Dutch ministry of infrastructure and water management.

The not-for-profit Townmaking Institute behind the concept is working with e-bike manufacturers and government authorities with the expectation that the speed-cutting technology and new regulations could be rolled out by 2022.

Sixty-five people died last year while riding e-bikes, which have an integrated electric motor to propel the wheels, up from 57 in 2018. The vast majority were men over the age of 65. The standard e-bike reaches speeds of 12mph (20km/h), but faster models, such as speed pedelecs, can reach 28mph.

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I really would like to know more about these kamikaze Dutch pensioners. I guess the absence of a helmet would be a big part in the severity of their injuries.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Biden’s win, House losses, and what’s next for the Left • The New York Times

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Astead Herndon: So what are you saying: Investment in digital advertising and canvassing are a greater reason moderate Democrats lost than any progressive policy?

Ocasio-Cortez: These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?

If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.

Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.

There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.

If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: “This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.” And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election? They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.

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For AOC, understanding the importance and nuance of digital is like a fish understanding water; in the weeks before the election she was on Twitch (no? Ask yer kids) pulling in new voters. But a lot of Democrats, and observers, read this Q+A and saw it as an attack on their policies. As she says, why let the opposition determine how you’re viewed? Some people just can’t be helped.
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On Election Day, Facebook and Twitter did better by making their products worse • The New York Times

Kevin Roose:

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it’s worth examining how Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are averting election-related trouble, because it sheds light on the very real problems they still face.

For months, nearly every step these companies have taken to safeguard the election has involved slowing down, shutting off or otherwise hampering core parts of their products — in effect, defending democracy by making their apps worse.

They added friction to processes, like political ad-buying, that had previously been smooth and seamless. They brought in human experts to root out extremist groups and manually intervened to slow the spread of sketchy stories. They overrode their own algorithms to insert information from trusted experts into users’ feeds. And as results came in, they relied on the calls made by news organizations like The Associated Press, rather than trusting that their systems would naturally bring the truth to the surface.

Nowhere was this shift more apparent than at Facebook, which for years envisioned itself as a kind of post-human communication platform. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, often spoke about his philosophy of “frictionless” design — making things as easy as possible for users. Other executives I talked to seemed to believe that ultimately, Facebook would become a kind of self-policing machine, with artificial intelligence doing most of the dirty work and humans intervening as little as possible.

But in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Facebook went in the opposite direction. It put in place a new, cumbersome approval process for political advertisers, and blocked new political ads in the period after Election Day. It throttled false claims, and put in place a “virality circuit-breaker” to give fact-checkers time to evaluate suspicious stories. And it temporarily shut off its recommendation algorithm for certain types of private groups, to lessen the possibility of violent unrest. (On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the company was taking other temporary measures to tamp down election-related misinformation, including adding more friction to the process of sharing posts.)

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It’s increasingly recognised that the way to make social media less harmful is to make it more difficult to share content easily. There’s still plenty of work to do, but last week’s experience might be seen inside Facebook and Twitter as validation of what they did.
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Inside the Trump campaign as it grapples with defeat while plowing forward with legal fight – ABC News

Will Steakin, Katherine Faulders, and John Santucci:

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Since Election Day, many Trump campaign staffers have been huddled on a noisy floor in the campaign’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters fielding hundreds of calls a day on a hotline the campaign set up as they try to find instances of voter fraud, multiple sources told ABC News.

But the hotline has turned into a nightmare for some, as staffers, some of whom have contracts that expire in the coming days, have been bombarded with prank calls from people laughing or mocking them over Biden’s win before hanging up, sources tell ABC News. Prank calling the Trump campaign’s hotline has already become a trend on TikTok, the social media network that was used earlier in the year in an attempt to tank the president’s rally in Tulsa by mass-requesting tickets.

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TikTok’s revenge. Hasn’t been banned from US app stores (that was blocked by a federal judge in late September) but is still due to be forcibly sold to Oracle on 12 November, or else shut down. Quite the tightrope. Biden has no power to reverse this as president-elect, so we’re going to have to see whether ByteDance can pull a rabbit out of the hat here.
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Post Trump, conservative media faces a split • Buzzfeed News

Rosie Gray:

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The fragmentation of conservative media has empowered the loudest voices calling to “stop the steal” and weakened any possibility that reality will intrude on those who are consuming their news through the hodgepodge of fringe sources popular on the Trump right these days.

On the final weekend of the campaign, I asked voters at Trump rallies where they got their news. Some did mention Fox News, but I was surprised that nearly everyone I talked to emphasized other sources just as much or more. The Parrishes, a retired couple who went to Trump’s rally in Hickory, North Carolina, told me they didn’t like Fox News apart from Tucker Carlson, finding the hosts too “egotistical and arrogant,” said Mary Ellen Parrish, and that “there’s a lot of deception,” her husband Chuck said. The couple mostly get their information online: Mary Ellen from Twitter and Chuck from YouTube, where he has discovered the “flat Earth” conspiracy theory, to which he ascribes.

Jerry Senn, 82, at Trump’s rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, mentioned One America News Network and Newsmax as his favorites, though he likes Fox too. He goes online to read Bill O’Reilly and Dennis Prager’s websites. Jennifer Justice, 34, at the same rally, said, “I don’t watch mainstream news. I follow a lot of people on YouTube and on alternative media, but I don’t watch Fox. I don’t watch MSNBC. I don’t watch CNN.” Some of her favorites include Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, and Candace Owens. Multiple voters mentioned how much news they get from Facebook.

Already, Trump family members and some of the new wave of Trump-like politicians are using Trump’s popularity with the base to threaten any Republican who doesn’t publicly agree with the fraud allegations.

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All worth reading; as is the quite separate Twitter thread (here on one easily read page) by Matthew Sheffield, a “former conservative activist and journalist”, on the bias inherent in conservative media.
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Trump will lose his Twitter ‘public interest’ protections in January • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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President Donald Trump will lose Twitter privileges he enjoys as a world leader when President-Elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20th, 2021. Twitter confirmed that Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account will be subject to the same rules as any other user — including bans on inciting violence and posting false information about voting or the coronavirus pandemic.

Twitter applies special policies to world leaders and some other officials, leaving rule-breaking content online if there’s “a clear public interest value to keeping the tweet on the service.” The public interest policy was formalized in 2019, codifying a rule that had been informally enforced for some time.

“Twitter’s approach to world leaders, candidates, and public officials is based on the principle that people should be able to choose to see what their leaders are saying with clear context. This means that we may apply warnings and labels, and limit engagement to certain tweets. This policy framework applies to current world leaders and candidates for office, and not private citizens when they no longer hold these positions,” a Twitter spokesperson confirms to The Verge.

These changes will cover Trump’s personal account. Position-specific accounts like @WhiteHouse, @POTUS, and @FLOTUS are transferred to a new administration after an outgoing president steps down.

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The fun part is going to be about how quickly Trump gets suspended for tweeting something offensive. (And unlike the White House, removing him from the @POTUS account will be pretty easy – though have you noticed how nobody ever took any notice of that account? That it was only about his personal account?)

At the same time, though, the fact that these exemptions exist is disturbing. How world-leadery do you have to be? How public an official?

In other news, the first bookmark I made about Trump was on 10 December 2015. Looking forward to doing the last of them around five years later.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A benchmark for Apple’s upcoming ARM-based Macs seems to have leaked – and it’s impressive. CC-licensed photo by Oliver Hammond on Flickr.

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

A14X Bionic allegedly benchmarked days before Apple Silicon Mac event • AppleInsider

Wesley Hilliard:

»

The chip expected to be at the core of the first Apple Silicon Mac — the “A14X” — may have been benchmarked just days before the next Apple event.

The alleged CPU benchmarks for the “A14X” show a 1.80GHz processor capable of turbo-boosting to 3.10GHz marking this the first custom Apple Silicon to ever clock above 3GHz. It is an 8-core processor with big-little arrangement. The GPU results show 8GB of RAM will be included with the processor.

The single-core benchmark for the “A14X” scored 1634 vs the A12Z at 1118. The A14 scored 1,583 points for single-core tests, which is expected as single-core results shouldn’t change much between the regular and “X” models.

The multi-core benchmark for the “A14X” scored 7220 vs the A12Z at 4657. The A14 scored 4198 for multi-core, which means the “A14X” delivers a marked increase in performance in the sorts of environments that the GeekBench test suite focuses on. The additional RAM and graphics capabilities boost this result much higher than the standard iPhone processor.

For comparison, a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the Intel Core-i9 processor scores 1096 for single and 6869 for multi-core tests. This means the alleged “A14X” outperforms the existing MacBook Pro lineup by a notable margin.

The benchmark testing was reportedly performed with Geekbench 5 on an unknown device.

«

Just to make it clear: compared to the 16in MacBook Pro, it’s 50% faster on single-core and 5% faster on multi-core. And that’s on the first iteration of Apple’s architecture.

This is likely to be real: Apple often lets a little Geekbench test slip out, or someone who is testing the machine outside it (because you know it has seeded some with people in relevant industries) does.
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What would we experience if Earth spontaneously turned into a black hole? • Medium

Ethan Siegel:

»

the first thing that would happen would be a transition from being at rest — where the force from the atoms on Earth’s surface pushed back on us with an equal and opposite force to gravitational acceleration — to being in free-fall: at 9.8 m/s² (32 feet/s²), towards the center of the Earth.

Unlike most free-fall scenarios we experience on Earth today, such as a skydiver experiences when jumping out of an airplane, you’d have an eerie, lasting experience.

• You wouldn’t feel the wind rushing past you, but rather the air would accelerate down towards the center of the Earth exactly at the same rate you did.
• There would be no drag forces on you, and you would never reach a maximum speed: a terminal velocity. You’d simply fall faster and faster as time progressed.
• That “rising stomach” sensation that you’d feel — like you get at the top of a drop on a roller coaster — would begin as soon as free-fall started, but would continue unabated.
• You’d experience total weightlessness, like an astronaut on the International Space Station, and would be unable to “feel” how fast you were falling.
• Which is a good thing, because not only would you fall faster and faster towards the Earth’s center as time went on, but your acceleration would actually increase as you got closer to that central singularity.

«

The rising stomach thing that continues unabated? Yeah, you can get that watching US election count coverage.
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LG rollable phone: Everything we know so far • Android Authority

Hadlee Simons:

»

LG made a big splash last month when it officially unveiled the Wing smartphone. The phone looks like a normal device upfront, but slide the main screen to the side and you’ve got a smaller screen underneath.

The LG Wing design is clearly unique in the modern smartphone space, but the company confirmed that it’s only the first device in its new Explorer Project line of standout phones. Fortunately, between leaks and official teases, we’ve got a good idea of what to expect next.

All signs are pointing to an LG smartphone with a rollable display, and we’ve rounded up all the major leaks, info drops, and rumors below to get a better idea of what to expect. Be sure to bookmark this page, as we’ll be updating it regularly!

«

Apparently there’s a name filing for a product to go live in early 2021. The name: “Rollable”. It seems like the phone screen might slide out sidewise (a bit like an extendable dining table).

Grand plan by LG, given how much success foldables have had this year. Huh?
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US Feds seized nearly $1bn in bitcoin from wallet linked to Silk Road • Vice

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

On Tuesday, someone emptied out one of the most mysterious and most valuable Bitcoin wallets in existence, which contained almost $1bn dollars linked to the notorious Silk Road dark web market. 

We now know who did it: the US government. 

On Thursday, the Department of Justice announced that it had seized the wallet. 

“Silk Road was the most notorious online criminal marketplace of its day,” US Attorney David Anderson said in a press release. “The successful prosecution of Silk Road’s founder in 2015 left open a billion-dollar question. Where did the money go? Today’s forfeiture complaint answers this open question at least in part. $1bn of these criminal proceeds are now in the United States’ possession.”

«

But that’s not all! The plot thickens.

»

In the civil forfeiture complaint, Anderson explained that the government took control of the wallet on Monday, after an unnamed hacker agreed to forfeit the cryptocurrency. The hacker, who is only identified as “Individual X,” allegedly broke into Silk Road’s website and stole the bitcoin in 2012 or 2013. The hacker then transferred to the infamous wallet with the address “1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx,” according to the complaint.

It’s unclear who Individual X actually is, and the complaint does not explain how the feds found them.

«

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A massive “Stop the Count” Facebook Group has ties to Republican operatives • Mother Jones

Ali Breland:

»

A rapidly growing Facebook group falsely accusing Democrats of “scheming” to steal the election with a plot to “nullify Republican votes” appears to be part of a coordinated campaign by Republican operatives, and has ties to the Tea Party.  

The domain is registered to a firm that works on Republican projects.

The “Stop the Steal” group on Facebook, which was only created on Wednesday but already has almost 300,000 members (and is growing quickly), prompts new users to its page to navigate to a website off of Facebook to sign up for email updates “in the event that social media censors this group.”

The domain that the group pushes its members to, StolenElection.us, is registered to the Liberty Lab, a firm that offers digital services to various conservative clients, according to its website, and Scott Graves, who lists himself as the firm’s president on LinkedIn. 

It’s unclear if Graves and the Liberty Lab are running the site alone or were hired by a client. According to its website, the Liberty Lab has been employed by a range of organizations, with a notable track record of working on Republican projects, including Newt Gingrich’s 2012 campaign, a push to recall California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, and several pro-Trump projects.

The Facebook group and the website also appear to be linked to Women for America First, a group organized in 2019 to protest against Donald Trump’s impeachment. In StolenElection.us’s html code, “Women for America First” shows up repeatedly. Facebook displays a header on the “Stop the Steal” Facebook page showing that it was created by the “Women for America First” Facebook page. 

«

Facebook deleted the Group (when it was up to about 361,000 members), though perhaps not as quickly as it might have, on the basis that “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group.” No problem – now they’re all corralled off somewhere else. Will probably need careful work to ensure that you don’t get people who want to stop the counting mixed up with those who want to continue the counting.

Everything’s a data grab nowadays: these people will also be targets for all sorts of get-out-the-vote efforts in future.
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Florida mosquitoes: 750 million genetically modified insects to be released • BBC News

»

In May, the US Environmental Agency granted permission to the British-based, US-operated company Oxitec to produce the genetically engineered, male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which are known as OX5034.

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are known to spread deadly diseases to humans such dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Only female mosquitoes bite humans because they need blood to produce eggs. So the plan is to release the male, modified mosquitoes who will then hopefully breed with wild female mosquitoes.
However the males carry a protein that will kill off any female offspring before they reach mature biting age. Males, which only feed on nectar, will survive and pass on the genes.

Over time, the aim is to reduce the population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the area and thereby reduce the spread of disease to humans.

On Tuesday, officials in the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District (FKMCD) gave final approval to release 750 million of the modified mosquitoes over a two-year period.

The plan has many critics, including nearly 240,000 people who signed a petition on Change.org slamming Oxitec’s plan to use US states “as a testing ground for these mutant bugs”.

According to Oxitec’s website, the company has found positive results conducting field trials in Brazil. It also plans to deploy them in Texas beginning in 2021 and has gained federal approval, but not state or local approval, according to reports.

«

I was going to wonder which animals depend on Aedes aegypti, but then thought that other mosquito species will fill any ecological gap that’s left by them not reproducing.
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Australia almost eliminated the coronavirus by putting faith in science • The Washington Post

A. Odysseus Patrick:

»

As North America, Europe, India, Brazil and other regions and countries struggle to bring tens of thousands of daily infections under control, Australia provides a real-time road map for democracies to manage the pandemic. Its experience, along with New Zealand’s, also shows that success in containing the virus isn’t limited to East Asian states (Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) or those with authoritarian leaders (China, Vietnam).

Several practical measures contributed to Australia’s success, experts say. The country chose to quickly and tightly seal its borders, a step some others, notably in Europe, did not take. Health officials rapidly built up the manpower to track down and isolate outbreaks. And unlike the U.S. approach, every one of Australia’s states either shut their domestic borders or severely limited movement for interstate, and in some cases intrastate, travelers.

Perhaps most importantly, though, leaders from across the ideological spectrum persuaded Australians to take the pandemic seriously early on and prepared them to give up civil liberties they had never lost before, even during two world wars.

“We told the public: ‘This is serious; we want your cooperation,’ ” said Marylouise McLaws, a Sydney-based epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales and a World Health Organization adviser.

A lack of partisan rancour increased the effectiveness of the message, McLaws said in an interview.

The conservative prime minister, Scott Morrison, formed a national cabinet with state leaders, known as premiers, from all parties to coordinate decisions. Political conflict was largely suspended, at least initially, and many Australians saw their politicians working together to avert a health crisis.

«

26 million people; no cases there on Thursday, only seven since Saturday, 18 people in hospital. Sydney Opera House open again, 40,000 people going to the rugby league grand final. It helps that they’re moving into summer, but they’ve just come through winter.
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The American system is broken • The Atlantic

David Frum:

»

[US presidential] elections now systematically disfavor voting majorities. From 1892 through 1996, the person who won the most votes became president, every time. In 2000, the U.S. got its first minority-rule president since the aftermath of the Civil War. That outcome was seen as a freak at the time. Four elections later, it happened again. Today, Trump is looking to the courts to overrule the voting majority for a third time.

It should not take the largest voter turnout in U.S. history to guarantee that a president rejected by the majority of the American people actually stops being president.

Even given that turnout, assuming Trump steps down, the electoral system will produce a gridlocked government—not because “the voters” or “the American people” wanted it that way, but because strategically positioned voters in small states did. The unrepresentativeness of state governments is even more extreme because of gerrymandering. And Republicans seem to have done well enough at the state level in 2020 to thwart any systemwide move to fairer representation in 2021.

These unrepresentative state and federal governments seem less and less capable of coping with the problems of the modern world. In the span of 12 years, the U.S. has had the two worst economic collapses since the Great Depression. It has started and lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It cannot collect taxes it is owed—including from the current president. It cannot balance its books even in prosperity; in fact, it long ago ceased even to write annual budgets. It cannot police its borders against unauthorized immigration. It cannot act against existential environmental threats. It cannot protect its people from a disease that can be controlled by wearing a $5 mask.

«

Frum, it should be remembered, is a former speechwriter for George W Bush (the 2000-2008 one) who inspired the phrase “axis of evil”. He’s hardly one of your wild leftwing socialists. In fact, his former employer got into office on that failure around voting majorities.

Everyone (outside the US, and perhaps increasingly inside it) can see this problem. The question is, who’s going to change it? Who’s going to bell the cat?
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Can we finally agree to ignore election forecasts? • The New York Times

The always excellent Zeynep Tufecki:

»

In 2020, it was even harder to rely on polls or previous elections: On top of all the existing problems with surveys in an age of cellphones, push polls and mistrust, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. What would the unprecedented early voting numbers mean when polls don’t necessarily stop polling those who already voted? How would the early forecasts that run for many months before the election, and so are even more uncertain, affect those who vote early? Would the elderly, at great risk from the pandemic, avoid voting? How would voter suppression play out? Would Republicans end up flocking to the polls on Election Day? These were big unknowns that added great uncertainty to models, especially given the winner-takes-all setup in the Electoral College, where winning a state by as little as one-fourth of 1% can deliver all its electoral votes.

There’s an even more fundamental point to consider about election forecasts and how they differ from weather forecasting. If I read that there is a 20% chance of rain and do not take an umbrella, the odds of rain coming down don’t change. Electoral modeling, by contrast, actively affects the way people behave.

In 2016, for example, a letter from the F.B.I. director James Comey telling Congress he had reopened an investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails shook up the dynamics of the race with just days left in the campaign. Mr. Comey later acknowledged that his assumption that Mrs. Clinton was going to win was a factor in his decision to send the letter.

«

Even more useful: can we finally persuade people who make election forecasts to stop doing it?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Remember when opinion polls were reliable? Me neither. But the implications of their failure go beyond elections. CC-licensed photo by Marie Kendall on Flickr.

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

Rant: It’s 2020. Why do printers still suck? • WIRED

Simon Hill:

»

Three years and a couple of printers later, sick of being gouged for ink cartridges that always seem to run out at the worst moment, I optimistically signed up for a printing subscription plan. The idea is you are charged a flat fee based on how many pages you print each month, and the printer automatically orders ink refills when it’s running low. Reading this back, I can only cringe at my naivety.

Things were fine for the first few weeks. Then I made the mistake of turning the printer off. It doesn’t like to be turned off. It started emailing me, insisting that it needs to be turned on and connected to the internet so the subscription plan can work properly. Every time I turn it on, it prints an ink-heavy test page. It is incredibly good at printing test pages—it just won’t print the document you want.

Things got worse when I made the mistake of changing my internet service provider. I forgot about the printer for a while. Then I suddenly needed it (see step five). I didn’t have time to set up the Wi-Fi, so I plugged directly into the printer with a good old-fashioned cable. It refused to print. I refused to connect it to the internet, so it refused to print for me.

To get it working again I had to completely uninstall everything related to the printer, update my drivers, install three separate programs, carry it to another room to plug directly into my desktop, carry it back again, hold down the correct button sequence at the stroke of midnight, spin around three times, and recite the printer incantation into a mirror.

It’s finally connected and working … for now. But I know it’s only a matter of time before it betrays me again. One of these days, I will finally smash my nemesis to smithereens.

My printer shifts noisily in the background as I write this, mocking me, blissfully unaware of how close it teeters to oblivion.

«

My experience (with HP Officejet printers) has been pretty much entirely positive: remains connected to the internet, does print, doesn’t screw up the paper. I’d love it to know how many sheets of paper it has left, and not to continually tell me that its ink is low – it’s like a baby bird demanding to be fed – but otherwise? Printers are great. We just happen not to need them these days.
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The polling crisis is a catastrophe for American democracy • The Atlantic

David A. Graham:

»

Surveys badly missed the results, predicting an easy win for former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic pickup in the Senate, and gains for the party in the House. Instead, the presidential election is still too close to call, Republicans seem poised to hold the Senate, and the Democratic edge in the House is likely to shrink.

This is a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption, such as FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times’ Upshot, and The Economist’s election unit. They now face serious existential questions. But the greatest problem posed by the polling crisis is not in the presidential election, where the snapshots provided by polling are ultimately measured against an actual tally of votes: As the political cliché goes, the only poll that matters is on Election Day. The real catastrophe is that the failure of the polls leaves Americans with no reliable way to understand what we as a people think outside of elections—which in turn threatens our ability to make choices, or to cohere as a nation.

…In every swing state but Arizona, Trump outperformed the FiveThirtyEight polling average. This is not to pick on FiveThirtyEight, which went to unusual lengths to ensure that its averages were accurate, but simply to indicate how far off the polls as a whole were.

…When an election can give a definitive answer to a question, by telling us which candidate or policy Americans prefer, the problems with polling matter less, though they make vote-counting more stressful. But anything that happens outside of the quadrennial and midterm elections is now murky. Earlier this summer, Trump took a hard line against protests for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd. As I noted at the time, there was a quick and significant drop in the president’s polling, especially among white voters. Trump never recovered that support in polls, but if the polls were off, who knows whether that drop was real, or whether white attitudes about racial justice have really changed?

«

This does matter, as he points out. There’s a lot of schadenfreude about pollsters (especially from Trump supporters), but if you don’t know the public mood, what the hell can you rely on for that metric?
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California’s Proposition 24 on consumer privacy passes • SFChronicle.com

Dustin Gardiner and Shwanika Narayan:

»

California’s Proposition 24, which would expand the state’s landmark consumer privacy law, was passed by voters Tuesday night.

The initiative prohibits legislators from weakening the California Consumer Privacy Act, creates a state agency to enforce privacy protections, and gives people more control over how tech companies use their personal information, such as race or health data.

Privacy advocates led by Alastair Mactaggart, a wealthy San Francisco developer, proposed the measure because they say the existing law is at risk of being watered down in response to pressure from technology companies and business groups.

But Prop. 24’s key source of opposition was not tech firms. The measure was opposed by some privacy advocates, who said it was poorly written and would make it harder for low-income people to exercise their privacy rights.

The Legislature passed the California Consumer Privacy Act in 2018, though enforcement of the law didn’t start until July 2020. It allows consumers to tell businesses not to sell their data and to demand that they delete the information altogether.

Opponents of the law have pushed for numerous changes in the Legislature, without success. Mactaggart said he fears it could eventually be weakened.

“During these times of unprecedented uncertainty, we need to ensure that the laws keep pace with the ever-changing ways corporations and other entities are using our data,” Mactaggart said when the initiative qualified for the ballot.

Prop. 24 seeks to enshrine the state’s existing privacy law so legislators can make changes only to strengthen privacy.

«

Welcome to what Europe’s had for a few years, California. When is the rest of America joining?
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Kim Dotcom can be extradited to US but can also appeal • BBC News

»

A long-running effort to extradite file-sharing site mogul Kim Dotcom to the US has been left in limbo after a Supreme Court decision in New Zealand.

The court ruled that he can be returned to the US to face copyright charges – but has also overturned another lower court’s decision, effectively granting him the right to appeal.

Mr Dotcom himself described the ruling as a “mixed bag”. The legal wrangling is likely to continue.

The court ruled that Kim Dotcom and his three co-accused were liable for extradition on 12 of the 13 counts the FBI is seeking to charge them with.

But it also ruled that the Court of Appeal had erred in dismissing judicial review requests from Mr Dotcom, and granted him the right to continue with them.

The FBI alleges that Megaupload facilitated copyright infringement on a huge scale, but Mr Dotcom’s lawyers argue that the website was never meant to encourage copyright breaches.

If he is extradited, he faces a lengthy jail term.

«

Think he really should have worked on the pardon strategy rather than the not-getting-extradited strategy: the latter almost always fails, the former at least has some chance of paying off.
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Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus • The Local

Agence France-Presse:

»

Denmark, the world’s biggest producer of mink fur, said Wednesday it would cull all of the country’s minks after a mutated version of the new coronavirus was detected at its mink farms and had spread to people.

The mutation “could pose a risk that future (coronavirus) vaccines won’t work the way they should,” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told a press conference, adding: “It is necessary to cull all the minks.”

“The mutated virus could thereby have serious negative consequences for the whole world’s response to the ongoing pandemic,” she said.

Danish police estimated that between 15 and 17 million minks would need to be put down.

Twelve people are currently registered as infected with a mutated form of the coronavirus in Denmark, according to news wire Ritzau. The mutated virus is reported to respond weakly to antibodies.

Denmark’s mink industry is the largest of its kind in the world, normally producing 12-13 million skins annually.

Coronavirus has been detected at 207 Danish mink farms, Frederiksen said.

«

This feels like a weird and under-reported story. Coronavirus sequenced via minks doesn’t provoke a strong antibody response?
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All systems go for UK’s £55M fusion energy experiment • Culham Centre for Fusion Energy

»

One of the biggest challenges in fusion research has been to extract the amount of excess heat from the plasma. UKAEA’s scientists now plan to test a new exhaust system called the ‘Super-X divertor’ at MAST Upgrade.

This system is designed to channel plasma out of the machine at temperatures low enough for its materials to withstand – meaning that components can last much longer. The approximate tenfold reduction in heat arriving at the internal surfaces of the machine has the potential to be a game-changer for the long-term viability of future fusion power stations.

MAST Upgrade will be the forerunner of the UK’s prototype fusion power plant, Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (“STEP”), due for completion by 2040.

STEP – which UKAEA is designing in an initial £220m programme funded by the UK Government – will be based on MAST Upgrade’s ‘spherical tokamak’ fusion concept. The spherical tokamak could offer a route to a compact fusion power plant. The success of MAST Upgrade is another step along the way to designing future fusion power facilities, which could have an important role as part of a future portfolio of low-carbon energy.

«

We’re turning the corner on fusion power. Just like we’re turning the corner on coronavirus. There’s always the suspicion that we’re just going around in circles.
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Silk Road bitcoins worth $1bn change hands after seven years • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

A billion dollars worth of bitcoins linked to the shuttered darknet market Silk Road has changed hands for the first time in seven years, prompting renewed speculation about the fate of the illicit fortune.

Almost 70,000 bitcoins stored in the account which, like all bitcoin wallets, is visible to the public, had lain untouched since April 2013. The website was shut down by an FBI raid six months after they were deposited, and they have not moved since.

Late on Tuesday night, however, the full amount less a $12 (£9) transaction fee was transferred to a new bitcoin address, records show.

“Through blockchain analysis we can determine that these funds likely originated from the Silk Road,” said Tom Robinson, chief scientist at the cryptocurrency analysts Elliptic. “They left the Silk Road’s wallet back on 6 May 2012 when they were worth around $350,000 and then remained dormant for nearly a year, before being moved … in April 2013.”

From there, the funds have lain dormant. After the marketplace was shut down in late 2013, its founder and boss, 36-year-old San Franciscan Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to a double life sentence plus 40 years without possibility of parole. The FBI managed to seize 174,000 bitcoins, then worth about $100m, but an estimated 450,000 earned by the marketplace remain unaccounted for.

Robinson says it is unclear who moved the money. “The movement of these bitcoins today, now worth around $955m, may represent Ulbricht or a Silk Road vendor moving their funds,” he said. “However, it seems unlikely that Ulbricht would be able to conduct a bitcoin transaction from prison.”

One possibility is that an individual or group has managed to “crack” the wallet, effectively guessing its password and stealing the funds. A file that some claimed was an encrypted bitcoin wallet containing the keys to the funds has been circulated in cryptocurrency communities for the past year, and – if it is what it was claimed to be – then a combination of brute computing power and good luck could have successfully decrypted the wallet.

«

If you think about it, investing in a gigantic rig to try to crack the passphrase would make financial sense. You could benefit by a billion dollars. How much are you going to invest? Up to $999,999,999 (OK then $999,999,987). Your only problem is cashflow ahead of your success.
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Silicon Roundabout dream fades with COVID-19 and Brexit • Business Insider

Martin Coulter on the scheme that was boosted by the Cameron government in November 2010 (I was at the launch speech):

»

A change in Prime Minister in 2016 after the Brexit vote brought with it a rebranding: Tech City was redubbed “Tech Nation” in the months after Theresa May took power. But occupied by Brexit – which was supported by troublingly few in London’s elite business circles — May had to bat off accusations she “didn’t understand technology”.

The cluster around Silicon Roundabout has swollen, though perhaps not in the way originally intended. The area can boast homegrown fintech stars such as Monzo and Starling Bank, but that may really be down to the area’s proximity to London’s financial center, rather than its tech creds.

And while Google has established a startup hub in the area, the US giant’s main London campus is further north in Kings Cross. The only tech giant with a big presence in the area is Amazon.

It’s not clear what comes next for Silicon Roundabout

With the post-Brexit transition period looming and changes wrought by the coronavirus, Tech City may “never be the same again.”

Of the rumored tech IPOs set to come out of the UK in the next year – such as Darktrace, Deliveroo, and others – few are rooted near the Old Street roundabout.

One veteran CEO familiar with the area, who spoke to Business Insider on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending colleagues, said they felt the initiative had been a “waste of time and money.”

«

I don’t think that’s quite fair. It has helped give birth to loads of companies and inspired a lot of entrepreneurs. Just because it hasn’t become self-sustaining doesn’t mean that enormous value, both financial and personal, hasn’t come through. People now know it as a reference point; it’s somewhere to be near, to have worked at. (And a side note: among the speakers at that David Cameron launch speech was Boris Johnson, who extemporised a load of nonsense. Cameron gave him side-eye the entire time.)
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The United States’ contribution of plastic waste to land and ocean • Science Advances

Kara Lavender Law and others from various oceanographic groups:

»

Plastic waste affects environmental quality and ecosystem health. In 2010, an estimated 5 to 13 million metric tons (Mt) of plastic waste entered the ocean from both developing countries with insufficient solid waste infrastructure and high-income countries with very high waste generation.

We demonstrate that, in 2016, the United States generated the largest amount of plastic waste of any country in the world (42.0 Mt). Between 0.14 and 0.41 Mt of this waste was illegally dumped in the United States, and 0.15 to 0.99 Mt was inadequately managed in countries that imported materials collected in the United States for recycling.

Accounting for these contributions, the amount of plastic waste generated in the United States estimated to enter the coastal environment in 2016 was up to five times larger than that estimated for 2010, rendering the United States’ contribution among the highest in the world.

«

Well that’s another mess to clear up.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the late 1920s, shoe shops started offering foot X-rays. The radiation doses were immense. CC-licensed photo by Massie 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 8 links for you. Sure, like you’ll read them all today, of all days. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Inside Facebook 24 hours before the 2020 election • Buzzfeed News

Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman:

»

Roiled by months of internal scandals and high-profile failures, the social network giant heads into Election Day with employee morale cratering and internal political discussion muzzled on internal message boards.

While [former UK deputy prime minister, now chief Facebook flack Nick] Clegg took an optimistic tone in his post [thanking Facebook employees for their work leading up to Election day], Facebook released results of an internal survey on Monday that revealed a stark decline in employee confidence over the past six months. Its semi-annual “Pulse Survey,” taken by more than 49,000 employees over two weeks in October, showed workers felt strained by office shutdowns and were continuing to lose faith that the company was improving the world.

Only 51% of respondents said they believed that Facebook was having a positive impact on the world, down 23 percentage points from the company’s last survey in May and down 5.5 percentage points from the same period last year. In response to a question about the company’s leadership, only 56% of employees had a favorable response, compared to 76% in May and more than 60% last year. (A Facebook employee acknowledged in the announcement that the uptick in May’s Pulse results were “likely driven by our response to COVID-19,” which was widely praised.)

The external criticism leveled against Facebook for failing to completely stem hate and misleading information is weighing on employees.

«

That half of Facebook’s staff don’t think it’s having a positive impact on the world is pretty damning. As long as none of them include its top ranks, things won’t change, but if they ever do, it could all go south quite fast.
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The tech antitrust problem no one is talking about • WIRED

Tom Simonite:

»

The new fervor for tech antitrust has so far overlooked an equally obvious target: US broadband providers. “If you want to talk about a history of using gatekeeper power to harm competitors, there are few better examples,” says Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy.

Sohn and other critics of the four companies that dominate US broadband—Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T—argue that antitrust intervention has been needed for years to lower prices and widen internet access. A Microsoft study estimated last year that as many as 162.8 million Americans lack meaningful broadband, and New America’s Open Technology Institute recently found that US consumers pay, on average, more than those in Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in North America.

The coronavirus pandemic has given America’s gaping digital divide more bite. Children without reliable internet have been forced to scavenge bandwidth outside libraries and Taco Bells to complete virtual school assignments. In April, a Pew Research Center survey found that one in five parents with children whose schools had been closed by coronavirus believed it likely they would not be able to complete schoolwork at home because of an inadequate internet connection.

Such problems are arguably more material than some of the antitrust issues that have recently won attention in Washington. The Department of Justice complaint against Google argues that the company’s payments to Apple to set its search engine as the default on the iPhone make it too onerous for consumers to choose a competing search provider. For tens of millions of Americans, changing broadband providers is even more difficult—it requires moving. The Institute for Local Self Reliance, which promotes community broadband projects, recently estimated from Federal Communications Commission data that some 80 million Americans can only get high-speed broadband service from one provider.

“That is quite intentional on the part of cable operators,” says Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School. “These companies are extracting rent from Americans based on their monopoly positions.”

«

Always astonishing how much Americans pay for their broadband and their mobile plans. The lack of competition is utterly amazing, and the indifference of politicians just as weird. But then there are many peculiar things in America. You may have noticed.
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How Jeff Bezos is spending his $10bn Earth Fund • The Atlantic

Robinson Meyer:

»

Throughout the summer, Bezos—sometimes joined by his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, a television producer—met via phone with environmental nonprofits and other advisers in the field, according to two people who work in climate philanthropy and have knowledge of the situation. He is now ready to start giving.

But Bezos’s gifts indicate that he isn’t trying something new on climate so much as boosting an ancien régime. Bezos is prepared to give $100m each to four of the most established environmental groups in the country—the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund, according to my two sources, who were granted anonymity so that they could speak candidly about the small world of climate giving.

Bezos has also committed $100m to the World Resources Institute, a sustainability-research organization that operates globally, the two sources said.

And he has promised smaller amounts of $10m to $50m to four nonprofits that specialize in climate and energy research, the sources said. Those groups are the Energy Foundation, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the ClimateWorks Foundation, and the Rocky Mountain Institute.

These are large gifts, and they are going to large organizations. Each of the five groups receiving $100m already has annual expenses in the nine figures. The largest of them, the Nature Conservancy, had a budget exceeding $930m in 2018. Each has significant assets, offices and operations around the world, and enough heft to send experts to United Nations conferences.

Yet these gifts, even if spread over five years, will constitute a major portion of the groups’ revenues. And they put into perspective the mammoth size of the Earth Fund: These nine grants represent, at most, $700m—that is, 7% of Bezos’s initial commitment.

«

I wonder if the recipients of the grants will feel empowered to criticise people who launch rockets into space for fun, such as *checks notes* Jeff Bezos.

And Meyer’s right, this is very unambitious: there are far better, moonshot (ahem) projects that Bezos could be putting his money into, particularly real carbon capture and so on.
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When X-rays were all the rage, a trip to the shoe store was dangerously illuminating • IEEE Spectrum

Allison Marsh:

»

The [“fluoroscope”] machines [which were X-ray machines, which went on sale in the late 1920s] were heralded as providing a more “scientific” method of fitting shoes. Duffin and Hayter argue, however, that shoe-fitting fluoroscopy was first and foremost an elaborate marketing scheme to sell shoes. If so, it definitely worked. My mother fondly remembers her childhood trips to Wenton’s on Bergen Avenue in Jersey City to buy saddle shoes. Not only did she get to view her feet with the fancy technology, but she was given a shoe horn, balloon, and lollipop. Retailers banked on children begging their parents for new shoes.

Although the fluoroscope appeared to bring scientific rigor to the shoe-fitting process, there was nothing medically necessary about it. My mother grudgingly acknowledges that the fluoroscope didn’t help her bunions in the least. Worse, the unregulated radiation exposure put countless customers and clerks at risk for ailments including dermatitis, cataracts, and, with prolonged exposure, cancer.

The amount of radiation exposure depended on several things, including the person’s proximity to the machine, the amount of protective shielding, and the exposure time. A typical fitting lasted 20 seconds, and of course some customers would have several fittings before settling on just the right pair. The first machines were unregulated. In fact, the roentgen (R) didn’t become the internationally accepted unit of radiation until 1928, and the first systematic survey of the machines wasn’t undertaken until 20 years later. That 1948 study of 43 machines in Detroit showed ranges from 16 to 75 roentgens per minute. In 1946, the American Standards Association had issued a safety code for industrial use of X-rays, limiting exposure to 0.1 R per day.

«

That’s pretty hefty. Reminiscent, in its ignorance of the risks posed by close exposure to radiation, of the women who painted radium marks on wristwatch faces with paintbrushes – and sould lick the paintbrush to keep its shape. Some of the cancers of the tongue and chin and throat were awful.
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Apple adds new AR-enhanced ‘people detection’ accessibility feature to iOS 14.2 developer beta • Forbes

Steven Aquino:

»

Apple has included a new accessibility feature in today’s release of the iOS 14.2 beta called People Detection. The software, which is actually a subset of the Magnifier app introduced with iOS 10, uses augmented reality and machine learning to detect where humans and objects are in space. The addition was first spotted in a late September report by Juli Clover of MacRumors.

The purpose of People Detection is to aid blind and low vision users in navigation; this type of application is particularly well-suited for the LiDAR sensor in iPhone 12 Pro. The goal is to help the visually impaired understand their surroundings—examples include knowing how many people there are in the checkout line at the grocery store, how close one is standing to the end of the platform at the subway station, and finding an empty seat at a table. Another use case is in this era of social distancing; the software can tell you if you’re within six feet of another person in order to maintain courtesy and safety.

«

Very smart (though it doesn’t work in the dark – damn). And as Aquino points out, you can see how desirable that sort of system would be in AR glasses. (Though I have to admit that when I first read the headline, I thought it was a system that would tell you who people are, which would be so useful, and perfect in AR glasses.)
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YouTube will end full-day ‘masthead’ reservations like Trump used • CNBC

Jennifer Elias and Megan Graham:

»

President Donald Trump may dominate YouTube’s home page on Election Day. But that slot won’t be available for advertisers to buy in the same way again, according to a recent policy update by YouTube.

The Google-owned company confirmed to CNBC Monday that it will be “retiring” reservations for full-day advertisements on its coveted home page ad spot known as its masthead beginning in 2021, a change it said it communicated to advertisers earlier this year. Instead, advertisers will only be able to buy that spot on a per-impression basis, making it harder for a single advertiser to dominate the page for a day at a time.

“For years, advertisers asked us for more flexible options for appearing in the YouTube masthead, which is why we introduced the cost-per-thousand (CPM) Masthead in 2019 and earlier this year told advertisers that it would be our primary masthead reservation option in 2021,” the company said in an emailed statement. “This change gives advertisers more budget flexibility and applies across all verticals — not just political advertisers.”

Google says the change affects all advertisers, and is not connected “in any way” to the election or political advertising broadly.

The masthead costs approximately $2m a day, according to the New York Times. It’s not clear how many people see view the masthead or see that ad spot, but overall YouTube claims to deliver more than one billion hours of video every single day.

The company has come under scrutiny in recent weeks as the U.S. presidential election drew nearer, with President Donald Trump purchasing the masthead slot in the two days preceding Election Day, along with Election Day itself.

«

Depending on the result (which I’m writing ahead of), that’s $6m of money well spent/wasted by Trump. Though you could argue that maybe almost all of it is wasted, no matter which outcome: you aren’t going to change most peoples’ minds – only 6% of voters were thought to be “undecided”, and they probably weren’t heading for YouTube, and would an ad change their minds? Then again, you could argue that about any political advertising spend (except of course for the Trump Facebook campaign of 2016, which has taken on a sort of mythic status in all sorts of fields).
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Doubts over a ‘possible sign of life’ on Venus show how science works • Science News

Lisa Grossman:

»

real data are never that easy to read. In real life, other sources — from Earth’s atmosphere to the inner workings of the telescope itself — introduce wiggles, or “noise,” into that nice straight line. The bigger the wiggles, the less scientists believe that the dips represent interesting molecules. Any particular dip might instead be just a random, extra-large wiggle.

That problem gets even worse when looking at a bright object such as Venus with a powerful telescope like ALMA, says Martin Cordiner, an astrochemist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Cordiner uses ALMA to observe other objects in the solar system, like Saturn’s moon Titan, but was not involved in the Venus work.

“The reason those bumps and wiggles are here at all is because of the intrinsic brightness of Venus, which makes it difficult to get a reliable measurement,” Cordiner says. “You could think of it as being dazzled by a bright light: If there’s a bright light in your vision, then your ability to pick out fainter details becomes diminished.”

So astronomers do a few different things to smooth out the data and let real signals shine through. One strategy is to write an equation that describes the wiggles caused by the noise. Scientists can then subtract that equation from the data to highlight the signal they’re interested in, like fuzzing out the background of a photo to let a portrait subject pop. That’s a standard practice, says Cordiner.

But it’s possible to write an equation that fits the noise too well. The simplest equation one could use is just a straight line, also known as a first-order polynomial, described by the equation y=mx+b. A second-order polynomial adds a term with x squared, third-order with x cubed, and so on.

Greaves and colleagues used a twelfth-order polynomial, or an equation with twelve terms (plus a constant, the +b in the equation), to describe the noise in their ALMA data.

“That was a red flag that this needed to be looked at in more detail, and that the results of that polynomial fitting could be untrustworthy,” says Cordiner. Going all the way out to the power of 12 could mean a researcher subtracts more noise than is truly random, allowing them to find things in the data that aren’t really there.

«

Twelfth-order? That begins to feel like working back from the answer you want. So there’s a lot more doubt about whether that “phosphine on Venue” story is true at all.
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Two charged in SIM swapping, vishing scams • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

Two young men from the eastern United States have been hit with identity theft and conspiracy charges for allegedly stealing bitcoin and social media accounts by tricking employees at wireless phone companies into giving away credentials needed to remotely access and modify customer account information.

Prosecutors say Jordan K. Milleson, 21 of Timonium, Md. and 19-year-old Kingston, Pa. resident Kyell A. Bryan hijacked social media and bitcoin accounts using a mix of voice phishing or “vishing” attacks and “SIM swapping,” a form of fraud that involves bribing or tricking employees at mobile phone companies.

Investigators allege the duo set up phishing websites that mimicked legitimate employee portals belonging to wireless providers, and then emailed and/or called employees at these providers in a bid to trick them into logging in at these fake portals.

According to the indictment (PDF), Milleson and Bryan used their phished access to wireless company employee tools to reassign the subscriber identity module (SIM) tied to a target’s mobile device.

«

Still a lot easier than robbing a bank. Or defrauding people of their money.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess which non-social site has had to think about how the US election might lead to mayhem? CC-licensed photo by Moheen Reeyad 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. Uncounted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack • WIRED

Nicholas Thompson:

»

It’s usually easy to put a name to a corpse. There’s an ID or a credit card. There’s been a missing persons report in the area. There’s a DNA match. But the investigators in Collier County couldn’t find a thing. Mostly Harmless’ fingerprints didn’t show up in any law enforcement database. He hadn’t served in the military, and his fingerprints didn’t match those of anyone else on file. His DNA didn’t match any in the Department of Justice’s missing person database or in CODIS, the national DNA database run by the FBI. A picture of his face didn’t turn up anything in a facial recognition database. The body had no distinguishing tattoos.

Nor could investigators understand how or why he died. There were no indications of foul play, and he had more than $3,500 cash in the tent. He had food nearby, but he was hollowed out, weighing just 83 pounds on a 5’8″ frame. Investigators put his age in the vague range between 35 and 50, and they couldn’t point to any abnormalities. The only substances he tested positive for were ibuprofen and an antihistamine. His cause of death, according to the autopsy report, was “undetermined.” He had, in some sense, just wasted away. But why hadn’t he tried to find help? Almost immediately, people compared Mostly Harmless to Chris McCandless, whose story was the subject of Into the Wild. McCandless, though, had been stranded in the Alaska bush, trapped by a raging river as he ran out of food. He died on a school bus, starving, desperate for help, 22 miles of wilderness separating him from a road. Mostly Harmless was just 5 miles from a major highway. He left no note, and there was no evidence that he had spent his last days calling out for help.

The investigators were stumped. To find out what had happened, they needed to learn who he was. So the Florida Department of Law Enforcement drew up an image of Mostly Harmless, and the Collier County investigators shared it with the public.

«

Enter the internet. Which finds it’s not that good after all at this sort of thing.
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First Macs with Apple Silicon could be 13in MacBook Air and 13in MacBook Pro • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple’s 13in MacBook Air and 13in MacBook Pro could be some of the first Macs to get Apple Silicon chips with Apple perhaps announcing new versions of these machines at the Apple event set to take place in November.

Well-respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo back in July suggested that Apple would release new 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models with Apple Silicon chips before the end of the year, with those machines positioned to transition over to Apple Silicon first.

Today, shortly after Apple’s event announcements went out, leaker L0vetodream shared a tweet that says “13 inch x 2,” with no other contextual information, but it can be interpreted as meaning Apple plans to announce two 13-inch Apple Silicon Macs at the event. The tweet alone doesn’t mean much, but paired with the earlier and more extensive information from Kuo, it gives us a bit of insight into what we might expect to see announced next Tuesday.

Back in July, Kuo clarified that Apple is working on updated 14.1- and 16.1-inch MacBook Pro models that have a redesigned form factor and a mini-LED display, but he said that he does not expect these machines to launch until the second or third quarter of 2021.

There were some earlier rumors of a 24-inch iMac and speculation that it could launch before the end of the year, but L0vetodream’s tweet mentions no desktop model and rumors from the Chinese supply chain last week suggested that a new iMac won’t launch until the first half of 2021.

«

What you can predict is that whatever Apple announces won’t be sufficient for everyone; there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth because [insert Mac model] hasn’t been made available. Yet all the forecasts are that these things are going to be damn fast. I’m really interested in how Apple’s going to handle the rollout. (Bloomberg – aka Mark Gurman – has a report that Apple’s working on an Apple Silicon version of its top-end Mac Pro. Quite how long that will take to appear – well, two years?)
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Whale sculpture stops train from plunge in the Netherlands • The New York Times

Isabella Kwai and Claire Moses:

»

A train that went careening over the end of elevated tracks in the Netherlands on Monday was left teetering about 30 feet above the ground. But no one was injured or killed in the accident — thanks to a sculpture of a whale’s tail that stopped the train from plunging.

“It’s like the scene of a Hollywood movie,” said Ruud Natrop, a spokesman for safety in the Rotterdam-Rijnmond area, where the accident occurred. “Thank God the tail was there.”

The derailment, in the city of Spijkenisse, happened around 12:30 a.m. on Monday, according to local news outlets. The driver was the only person on the city train and was unharmed, Mr. Natrop said, and was taken to the hospital for an evaluation and then to the police station for questioning.

«

Look, it’s 2020, OK?
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How social media is preparing for US election chaos • BBC News

James Clayton:

»

There aren’t many in the US who are sure there’ll be an election result on the night.

Due to unprecedented numbers of postal votes, there could be days – possibly weeks – between the end of voting and the declared result.

And in that period of uncertainty there are fears of civil unrest.

Both sides could claim victory, and misinformation about the result could be rife.

The worry is that anger, fake news and hate speech on social media could inflame tensions.

So what is Big Tech planning to do about it?

The nuclear option would be to close down their apps for a period of time.

This is what we know social media companies intend to do to prevent that from happening.

«

Twitter: “direct people to resources” (ie: nothing much). Facebook: “lower the bar for what they remove”. Hm. Reddit: why are we bothering with Reddit? Google and YouTube: remove false claims (on YouTube. Yeah, GLWT). Snapchat: you can’t go viral on Snapchat, so lolwut. TikTok: “working with independent fact-checkers”. Aren’t we all.
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Wikipedia is better prepared for Election Day than Facebook or Twitter • Vox

Sara Morrison:

»

For the 2020 United States presidential election page, as well as the pages for presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, only editors whose accounts are at least 30 days old and who have made at least 500 edits can change the article. This is what Wikipedians, the editors who run the site, call “extended confirmed protection.”

The election page lock was put in place on October 21 by Molly White, who goes by the handle “GorillaWarfare” on the site. She’s been a Wikipedia editor for almost 15 years and also serves as an administrator. This gives her some additional abilities, like the power to lock pages. But White is not anticipating any major issues on Wikipedia with regard to the upcoming election.

“For the most part, things will be business as usual on Wikipedia,” White told Recode. “Wikipedia editors and administrators have plenty of tools at our disposal to ensure that our readers are only seeing accurate information, even as things are changing quickly behind the scenes.”

«

Smart move by Wikipedia, which is seen as a reliable source by a lot of the internet. Also: shows how the internet is maturing that sites now see that they have to harden themselves against calendar events. And that they know what form that hardening should take.
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It’s the end of an era for the media, no matter who wins the election • The New York Times

Ben Smith:

»

You aren’t the only one just barely hanging on until Election Day. Most of the top leaders of many name-brand American news institutions will probably be gone soon, too. The executive editor of The Los Angeles Times, Norm Pearlstine, is looking to recruit a successor by the end of the year, he told me. Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post, just bought a house out of town and two Posties said they expected him to depart next year. He hasn’t given notice, The Post’s spokeswoman, Kristine Coratti Kelly, said. And the executive editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet, is on track to retire by the time he turns 66 in 2022, two Times executives told me, dampening speculation that he might stay longer.

Over in big TV, Mr. Zucker, of CNN, has signaled that he’s frustrated with WarnerMedia, and broadcast television is overflowing with speculation about how long the network news chiefs will stay on, though no executives have suggested imminent departures. “Everyone is assuming there’s going to be turnover everywhere, and everyone is absolutely terrified about who is going to come in,” one television industry insider said.

This isn’t just the usual revolving door. Newsroom leaders face strong pulls in conflicting directions. Outlets all along the spectrum, from the staid BBC to the radical Intercept, have been moving to reassert final editorial control over their journalists. But newsroom employees — like a generation of workers across many industries — are arriving with heightened demands to be given more of a say in running their companies than in years past. New leaders may find opportunities to resolve some of the heated newsroom battles of the last year, or they may walk into firestorms.

Mr. Pearlstine, the only one talking openly of his departure, told me that the new “metrics for success might be different as well — issues such as inclusiveness, such as being anti-racist, such as really commanding some new platform, be it podcasts or video or newsletters, in addition to having journalistic credentials.”

«

Smith is consistently the best media journalist out there: only writing one article a week, but what an article it always turns out to be.
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Mississippi program to use door cameras to fight crime • The Fresno Bee

»

Mississippi’s capital city could begin using residents’ door security cameras in its effort to fight rising crime.

Recently, Jackson began a pilot program with two technology corporations to provide a platform for the police department to access private surveillance via Ring cameras.

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said if home and business owners allow, they could give the city permission to access those cameras through the platform, and the city could use the data collected to track criminal activity, WLBT-TV reported.

Lumumba said the city would only be able to access the devices when crimes occur in those areas.

“Ultimately, what will happen is residents and businesses will be able to sign a waiver, if they want their camera to be accessed from the Real Time Crime Center,” he said. “It would save (us) from having to buy a camera for every place across the city.”

The city council signed off on entering the pilot program at its Tuesday meeting. The equipment needed to allow the center access to cameras is being provided by corporations PILEUM and Fusus.

PILEUM, an information and technology consulting company founded in 2002, is based in Jackson, according to its website. Fusus, a Georgia-based company, provides cloud services to allow real-time crime centers to extract video information, its website states.

“Fusus allows us to connect into cameras,” Lumumba said. “If someone says, ‘I want my Ring door camera to be used,’ we’ll be able to use it.”

Under the program, Lumumba said, once a crime is reported, crime center officials will be able to access cameras in the area to determine escape routes, look for getaway vehicles and the like.

“We’ll be able to get a location, draw a circle around it and pull up every camera within a certain radius to see if someone runs out of a building,” he said. “We can follow and trace them.”

«

It’s very Minority Report, isn’t it? Your camera being used (somewhat with your consent, though what if the camera on someone else’s property has a view of what you do?) to sort-of fight crime. It’s always justified on the fighting crime thing, and the city council is always eager to approve it. Beyond that…?
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Raspberry Pi 400: the $70 desktop PC • Raspberry Pi

Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi project:

»

here is Raspberry Pi 400: a complete personal computer, built into a compact keyboard.

Raspberry Pi 4, which we launched in June last year, is roughly forty times as powerful as the original Raspberry Pi, and offers an experience that is indistinguishable from a legacy PC for the majority of users. Particularly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen a rapid increase in the use of Raspberry Pi 4 for home working and studying.

But user friendliness is about more than performance: it can also be about form factor. In particular, having fewer objects on your desk makes for a simpler set-up experience. Classic home computers – BBC Micros, ZX Spectrums, Commodore Amigas, and the rest – integrated the motherboard directly into the keyboard. No separate system unit and case; no keyboard cable. Just a computer, a power supply, a monitor cable, and (sometimes) a mouse.

We’ve never been shy about borrowing a good idea. Which brings us to Raspberry Pi 400: it’s a faster, cooler 4GB Raspberry Pi 4, integrated into a compact keyboard. Priced at just $70 for the computer on its own, or $100 for a ready-to-go kit, if you’re looking for an affordable PC for day-to-day use this is the Raspberry Pi for you.

«

The idea that you build the computer into the keyboard must have felt like one of those forehead-slapping moments: there’s all that wasted space inside there! Though I do wonder about quite what people will use it for. It runs Linux, which isn’t going to be everyone’s taste. The usefulness of the Pi Zero was that it was so tiny, you could program it, leave it running and forget it. This seems different.
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Covid Is Airborne petition • Covid Is Airborne

»

We, citizens of the world, demand the World Health Organization (WHO) recognize the compelling scientific evidence that SARS-CoV-2 spreads by aerosol transmission (“airborne”) and urge the WHO to immediately develop and initiate clear recommendations to enable people to protect themselves.

In the early stages of the pandemic, WHO forcefully communicated that COVID-19 was not transmitted through the air, and called it “misinformation” (March 28, “FACT: COVID-19 is NOT airborne”). That message was heard loud and clear around the world and became entrenched in many people’s understandings of the virus’ transmission pathways. It still influences mitigation strategies, despite that WHO has since softened this position and now acknowledges that airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 may be possible, albeit not very important.

«

Amazing that this needs a petition to get WHO to change its position. The people behind it are mainly European, though none from the UK.
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Facebook’s fact-checking favors conservatives in election lead-up • The Washington Post

Isaac Stanley-Becker and Elizabeth Dwoskin:

»

In the final months of the presidential campaign, prominent associates of President Trump and conservative groups with vast online followings have flirted with, and frequently crossed, the boundaries set forth by Facebook about the repeated sharing of misinformation.

From a pro-Trump super PAC to the president’s eldest son, however, these users have received few penalties, according to an examination of several months of posts and ad spending, as well as internal company documents. In certain cases, their accounts have been protected against more severe enforcement because of concern about the perception of anti-conservative bias, said current and former Facebook employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

These people said the preferential treatment has undercut Facebook’s own efforts to curb misinformation, in particular the technologies put in place to downgrade problematic actors. Toward the end of last year, around the time Facebook-owned Instagram was rolling out labels obscuring fact-challenged posts and directing users to accurate information, the company removed a strike against Donald Trump Jr. for a fact-check on the photo-sharing service that would have made him a so-called repeat offender, fearing the backlash that would have ensued from the accompanying penalties, according to two former employees familiar with the matter.

These penalties can be severe, including reduced traffic and possible demotion in search. One former employee said it was among numerous strikes removed over the past year for the president’s family members.

«

You have to feel there’s going to be a reckoning. But as we keep learning, the world is an unkind place, which treats us unfairly and doesn’t mete out justice as it should.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Now you can generate slick QR-based SSID/password combos for visitors to your home. (NB due to lockdown, no visitors allowed.) CC-licensed photo by Iain on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Unelectable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook quietly suspended political group recommendations ahead of the US presidential election • Buzzfeed News

Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman:

»

During a contentious presidential election in the US, Facebook quietly stopped recommending that people join online groups dealing with political or social issues.

Mentioned in passing by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a Senate hearing on Wednesday, the move was confirmed to BuzzFeed News by a Facebook spokesperson. The company declined to say when exactly it implemented the change or when it would end.

“This is a measure we put in place in the lead-up to Election Day,” said Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois, who added that all new groups have been filtered out of the recommendation tool as well. “We will assess when to lift them afterwards, but they are temporary.”

Confirmation of the move, which Facebook did not publicly announce, comes after members of the Senate’s Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee grilled Zuckerberg about Facebook Groups and the possibility for polarization and radicalization within them.

«

The obvious question, as Mac and Silverman point out, is when (and why) it would re-enable this. If you think a scheme is having negative effects (which numerous internal studies and external events have shown) then why would you continue with it at all?

The “get everyone into Groups” was Zuckerberg’s brainstorm – or maybe brainfart – in early 2017, which he felt was the solution to the “Bowling Alone” problem of people not being social in person or online enough. It’s actually been bad, many times over.
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Half of Slovakia’s population tested for coronavirus in one day • The Guardian

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Nearly half of Slovakia’s entire population took Covid-19 swabs on Saturday, the first day of a two-day nationwide testing drive the government hopes will help reverse a surge in infections without a hard lockdown.

The scheme, a first for a country of Slovakia’s size, is being watched by other nations looking for ways to slow the virus spread and avoid overwhelming their health systems.

The defence minister, Jaroslav Naď said on Sunday 2.58 million Slovaks had taken a test on Saturday, and 25,850 or 1% tested positive and had to go into quarantine.

The EU country has a population 5.5 million and aims to test as many people as possible, except for children under 10.

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That’s bloody impressive. You have to hope they didn’t all have to gather in giant gyms for hours to get it done (the tests were done at 5,000 sites) or this will have been one of the most fabulous superspreader events ever.
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Public-health experts are rewriting pandemic rules for governments—and their gyms • WSJ

Louise Radnofsky and Ben Cohen:

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A spin studio in Canada and a dance-fitness class in South Korea are among the crowded indoor spaces, filled with people breathing heavily and expelling respiratory droplets, that have been linked to coronavirus outbreaks. Even the gyms that tried to adhere to pandemic rules of sanitizing everything in sight and keeping people six feet apart needed to do more.

“Six feet is not enough,” Marr said. “You should definitely maintain distance—and either everyone’s wearing a mask or you have just enormous ventilation.”

Many indoor facilities still dispatch armies of employees to spray, swipe and scrub their walls, seats and equipment. Marr says much of that energy is misplaced. “We should be spending more than half of our time, resources and efforts on cleaning the air,” she said.

There is at least one gym following her advice: her own.

Minnick learned from Marr’s Twitter feed how aerosol transmission fueled a Washington state choir’s outbreak. The description was so vivid that Minnick felt like she was watching a play—and that she never wanted to go inside unmasked again.

Months after Minnick reopened her CrossFit box, Marr texted her about the outbreak at the Canadian spin studio. “OMG,” Minnick recalled texting back, realizing that the studio had lived out a fitness facility’s nightmare.

“It just blew my mind,” Minnick said. “They thought they were doing what the rules are. That guidance is not enough, you need extra layers.”

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It is utterly amazing that nine months after we became aware of this, people are still walking around like robots spritzing surfaces and wiping things, when what is needed is more replacement of (potentially) infected air. It’s completely obvious that this is spread via lingering aerosol. Just as with masks, we’re seeing gigantic hysteresis in the response from the authorities: slow, bad response.
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No, Sean Connery did not write a mean letter to Steve Jobs • The Verge

Kim Lyons:

»

A fake letter from Sean Connery to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is making the rounds on social media following the actor’s death on Saturday. Just to reiterate: it’s fake, the product of humor site Scoopertino, which posts satirical articles about Apple and goings-on at its Cupertino (get it that’s the name) headquarters.

The typewritten letter dated 1998 purports to show Connery’s outrage over Jobs asking him to appear in an Apple commercial. “I do not sell my soul for Apple or any other company. I have no interest in ‘changing the world’ as you suggest,” it states. “You are a computer salesman, I am fucking JAMES BOND!”

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I do think Connery should have got some sort of double Oscar for playing the only Chicago Irish cop with a Scottish accent.
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Scientists discover how a common mutation leads to ‘night owl’ sleep disorder • University of California

»

A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows how a genetic mutation throws off the timing of the biological clock, causing a common sleep syndrome called delayed sleep phase disorder.

People with this condition are unable to fall asleep until late at night (often after 2 a.m.) and have difficulty getting up in the morning. In 2017, scientists discovered a surprisingly common mutation that causes this sleep disorder by altering a key component of the biological clock that maintains the body’s daily rhythms. The new findings, published October 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal the molecular mechanisms involved and point the way toward potential treatments.

“This mutation has dramatic effects on people’s sleep patterns, so it’s exciting to identify a concrete mechanism in the biological clock that links the biochemistry of this protein to the control of human sleep behavior,” said corresponding author Carrie Partch, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz.

Daily cycles in virtually every aspect of our physiology are driven by cyclical interactions of clock proteins in our cells. Genetic variations that change the clock proteins can alter the timing of the clock and cause sleep phase disorders. A shortened clock cycle causes people to go to sleep and wake up earlier than normal (the “morning lark” effect), while a longer clock cycle makes people stay up late and sleep in (the “night owl” effect).

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This effect is believed to kick in hard on the first Wednesday in November every four years for many people in the western world.
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The black hole information paradox comes to an end • Quanta Magazine

George Musser:

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In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years. Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. If you jump into one, you will not be gone for good. Particle by particle, the information needed to reconstitute your body will reemerge. Most physicists have long assumed it would; that was the upshot of string theory, their leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. But the new calculations, though inspired by string theory, stand on their own, with nary a string in sight. Information gets out through the workings of gravity itself — just ordinary gravity with a single layer of quantum effects.

…authors of the new studies …have found additional semiclassical effects — new gravitational configurations that Einstein’s theory permits, but that [Stephen] Hawking did not include. Muted at first, these effects come to dominate when the black hole gets to be extremely old. The hole transforms from a hermit kingdom to a vigorously open system. Not only does information spill out, anything new that falls in is regurgitated almost immediately. The revised semiclassical theory has yet to explain how exactly the information gets out, but such has been the pace of discovery in the past two years that theorists already have hints of the escape mechanism.

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And you say there’s never any good news? Well I for one will sleep easier knowing that if I happen to fall into a black hole the information needed to reconstitute me (not quite sure what that means, but anyway) will eventually be emitted. It’s like a long cut to being immortal.
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Dwight Schrute was a warning • The Atlantic

Megan Garber:

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I’m one of the people who have found new solace in old episodes of The Office, but I have a slightly different reason for watching. That reason is Dwight Schrute.

Dwight, Dunder Mifflin’s best-performing paper salesman and its worst-performing person, is a category error in human form. He is a beet farmer in a corporate park, a survivalist selling office products, a 19th-century spirit in a 21st-century timeline. He is arrogant. He is, relatedly, a buffoon. “INCORRECT,” he will say about something that is true. “FACT,” he will say about something that is not. He listens to metal but plays the recorder. He defers to the rules right up until he breaks them. Dwight is Darwinism with a desk job. He is anarchy in the guise of law. He is tragedy and he is comedy, and because of that he is intensely cathartic to watch. Many fictions speak to this moment. Dwight K. Schrute, however, inhabits it.

…To succeed with an American audience, one of The Office’s truisms goes, the U.S. version of the show had to be a little bit kinder—a little bit softer—than the acerbic British original. Dwight, modeled after the U.K. show’s Gareth, is the character who most directly challenges that idea. He is humor that, at times, hints at horror. Jim spends an episode convincing Dwight that (1) the bat they’ve discovered in the office is vampiric, and (2) Jim has been bitten by it. This provides an occasion for Dwight to brag about his experience with werewolves. “I shot one once,” he says. He pauses. “But by the time I got to it, it had turned back into my neighbor’s dog.”

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Simply wonderful writeup (like the series itself, which is a work of extended genius).
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From 2010: No pay, no spray: firefighters let home burn • NBC News

(Note: this story appeared in October 2010)

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Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground last week because the homeowner hadn’t paid a $75 fee.

Gene Cranick of Obion County and his family lost all of their possessions in the Sept. 29 fire, along with three dogs and a cat. 

“They could have been saved if they had put water on it, but they didn’t do it,” Cranick told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

The fire started when the Cranicks’ grandson was burning trash near the family home. As it grew out of control, the Cranicks called 911, but the fire department from the nearby city of South Fulton would not respond.

“We wasn’t on their list,” he said the operators told him.

Cranick, who lives outside the city limits, admits he “forgot” to pay the annual $75 fee. The county does not have a county-wide firefighting service, but South Fulton offers fire coverage to rural residents for a fee.

Cranick says he told the operator he would pay whatever is necessary to have the fire put out.

His offer wasn’t accepted, he said.

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The impulse for this story is the wonderful tale that I linked to last time I was around of the town of Grafton, where libertarians decided they could make their philosophy work. It couldn’t, and the bears in the area weren’t susceptible to declamations about individual rights either. The book itself, “A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear”, is available now.
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Resetting online commerce • Benedict Evans

Evans points out that financial results covering the lockdown months in Europe and the US suggest substantial growth in e-commerce, but big questions for physical retailers:

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a shift to working remotely might be a permanent change for many retail areas in big cities. Even if people now work from home only one day a week, how many retailers will experience that as a 20% decline in footfall, and how many cannot survive that? In some areas that might also be a vicious circle: more people working from home means less retail, and less retail in Canary Wharf or Hudson Yards might mean more people working from home. I’ve seen people call this a ‘donut’ effect – office districts of a city are hollowed out. 

Then, what gets sold in those shops? In the last couple of years there’s been an explosion and arguable a bubble in so-called direct to consumer or ‘D2C’ brands. The bubble burst at the beginning of this year (ironically just before everyone had to buy everything online), partly prompted by the realisation that if you’re not renting a store on Fifth Avenue, that money doesn’t go to the bottom line – you’ll almost certainly have to spend it on delivery, advertising, Amazon placement or returns instead (in other words, there are no free lunches). But the reasons why that explosion had happened remain: you can now make and sell a consumer product without the same kind of fixed cost and upfront capital investment in a national retail footprint, inventory and marketing that would have been necessary 20 years ago. But what does that mean? What is a sustainable customer acquisition model? For how many brands, and what aggregation and discovery models? Is there any role for ‘software’ or is this really entirely a CPG and marketing story?

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From experience, I can tell you that the retail in Canary Wharf (a big office space with some attached chains of shops) is utterly disposable. It’s expensive fashion and similar (emphasis on the “expensive”). But not essential: if you needed a hammer and a bag of nails, say to fix something when you got home, you’re out of luck. It’s hard to see how retailers like that can survive its occasional shoppers being told to stay away.
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Pure Javascript WiFi QR Code Generator

Evgeni Golov:

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Ever wanted to create a cool QR code for your guests? But never wanted to type your Wi-Fi credentials into a form that submits them to a remote webserver to render the QR code? QiFi for the rescue! It will render the code in your browser, on your machine, so the WiFi stays as secure as it was before (read the code if you do not trust text on the internet :-))!

If you use the Save-button to store a code, this is still secure, as the data is stored in HTML5 localStorage and is never transmitted to the server (in contrast to cookie-based solutions).

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The iOS Camera App can handle these automatically (as of 2017, so from iOS 11) and Android has a few QR-to-WiFi translators. (See the page for more.) Very neat! And as he says, you don’t have to worry about some random person on the internet having the password to your Wi-Fi. (If you’re REALLY worried, then put in a fake password with the real SSID, and generate it, and then the real password and your SSID. Or do it multiple times, “hiding” the true password amid the multiples.)
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AI camera ruins soccer game for fans after mistaking referee’s bald head for ball • IFLScience

James Felton:

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Fans of Scottish football team Inverness Caledonian Thistle FC experienced a new hilarious technological glitch during a match last weekend, but in all honesty, you’d be hard-pressed to say it didn’t improve the viewing experience dramatically. 

The club announced a few weeks ago it was moving from using human camera operators to cameras controlled by AI. The club proudly announced at the time the new “Pixellot system uses cameras with in-built, AI, ball-tracking technology” and would be used to capture HD footage of all home matches at Caledonian Stadium, which would be broadcast directly to season-ticket holders’ homes.

Cut to last Saturday, when the robot cameras were given a new challenge that hadn’t been foreseen: A linesman with a bald head.

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The snatches of film with the story are hilarious. But also: what a mess. And of course fans weren’t allowed in because of Covid.
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Geothermal energy is poised for a breakout • Vox

David Roberts:

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after approximately 15 years of reporting on energy, I finally took the time to do a deep dive into geothermal and I am here to report: This is a great time to start paying attention!

After many years of failure to launch, new companies and technologies have brought geothermal out of its doldrums, to the point that it may finally be ready to scale up and become a major player in clean energy. In fact, if its more enthusiastic backers are correct, geothermal may hold the key to making 100% clean electricity available to everyone in the world. And as a bonus, it’s an opportunity for the struggling oil and gas industry to put its capital and skills to work on something that won’t degrade the planet.

Vik Rao, former chief technology officer at Halliburton, the oil field service giant, recently told the geothermal blog Heat Beat, “geothermal is no longer a niche play. It’s scalable, potentially in a highly material way. Scalability gets the attention of the [oil services] industry.”

In this post, I’m going to cover technologies meant to mine heat deep from the Earth, which can then be used as direct heat for communities, to generate electricity, or to do both through “cogeneration” of heat and electricity. (Note that ground-source heat pumps, which take advantage of steady shallow-earth temperatures to heat buildings or groups of buildings, are sometimes included among geothermal technologies, but I’m going to leave them aside for a separate post.)

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As used in Boise, Idaho and with lots of potential in the western US. (And pretty popular in some Scandinavian countries, I think.) As ever, we’re only using a tiny fraction of the potential energy there; and it is, of course, carbon-neutral.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There is just one country where Apple will supply EarPods for free with an iPhone 12. CC-licensed photo by Pablo Asekas 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. Well, you should have stayed on mute. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

•• Please note: The Overspill will be on holiday next week. 

How Apple is organized for innovation • Harvard Business Review

Joel Polodny and Morten Hansen, from the Apple University group, explain – in a remarkable insight – how Apple is organised and functions:

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Apple is not a company where general managers oversee managers; rather, it is a company where experts lead experts. The assumption is that it’s easier to train an expert to manage well than to train a manager to be an expert. At Apple, hardware experts manage hardware, software experts software, and so on. (Deviations from this principle are rare.) This approach cascades down all levels of the organization through areas of ever-increasing specialization. Apple’s leaders believe that world-class talent wants to work for and with other world-class talent in a specialty. It’s like joining a sports team where you get to learn from and play with the best.

Early on, Steve Jobs came to embrace the idea that managers at Apple should be experts in their area of management. In a 1984 interview he said, “We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and thought, Oh, we’re gonna be a big company, let’s hire professional management. We went out and hired a bunch of professional management. It didn’t work at all….They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to do anything. If you’re a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can’t learn anything from? And you know what’s interesting? You know who the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be…because no one else is going to…do as good a job.”

…One principle that permeates Apple is “Leaders should know the details of their organization three levels down,” because that is essential for speedy and effective cross-functional decision-making at the highest levels. If managers attend a decision-making meeting without the details at their disposal, the decision must either be made without the details or postponed. Managers tell war stories about making presentations to senior leaders who drill down into cells on a spreadsheet, lines of code, or a test result on a product.

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Some great anecdotes, especially about Steve Jobs culling general managers, and the development of the portrait camera function.
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The next economic crisis: empty retail space • POLITICO

Katy O’Donnell:

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Commercial real estate is in trouble, and turbulence in the $15 trillion market is threatening to bleed over into the broader financial system just as the U.S. struggles to emerge from a recession.

The longer the pandemic paralyzes hotels, retailers and office buildings, the more difficult it is for property owners to meet their mortgage payments — raising the specter of widespread downgrades, defaults and eventual foreclosures. As companies like J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus and Pier 1 file for bankruptcy, retail properties are losing major tenants with no clear plan to replace them, while hotels are running below 50% occupancy.

Seven months into the crisis, the industry’s pleas for relief to Congress and the Federal Reserve have been in vain: Lawmakers are at odds over even the most basic details of an economic relief package for individuals, let alone businesses, and the Fed, leery of taking on more risk, is hoping the trillion-dollar market for securities backed by commercial mortgages will heal itself.

There’s also the fear that directing significant relief to the industry would be seen as a “handout to the president’s friends” since Donald Trump made his fortune in commercial real estate, said one lobbyist frustrated with the lack of traction the issue is getting with policymakers.

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Second-order effects: they’re coming unless a lot of stuff gets sorted out quickly. Such as a stimulus package, or commercial rent forgiveness.
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Huawei Mate 40 phones launch despite chip freeze • BBC News

Leo Kelion:

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Huawei has unveiled its Mate 40 smartphones claiming they feature a more “sophisticated” processor than Apple’s forthcoming iPhones.

The component was made using the same “five nanometre” process as its US rival’s chip, but contains billions more transistors. As a result, the Chinese firm claims its phones are more powerful.

However, Huawei has had its supply of the chips cut off because of a US trade ban that came into effect in September.

That means that once its stockpile of the new Kirin 9000 processors runs out, it faces being unable to make more of the Mate 40 handsets in their current form.

At present, only Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung have the expertise and equipment to manufacture 5nm chips, and both are forbidden to supply Huawei with them or any other semiconductor product whose creation involves “US technology and software”.

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The analysts Canalys produced some figures on Friday which said that Huawei shipped 55.8m units in the second quarter of 2020 (yes, I know we’re in the fourth quarter now), and that its shipments outside China had reduced only from 21.4m in Q2 2019 to 15.6m in the same period in 2020. That’s not as big as I expected. But perhaps things have got worse in the past few months.
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Doctors may have found secretive new organs in the center of your head • The New York Times

Katherine Wu:

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After millenniums of careful slicing and dicing, it might seem as though scientists have figured out human anatomy. A few dozen organs, a couple of hundred bones and connective tissue to tie it all together.

But despite centuries of scrutiny, the body is still capable of surprising scientists.

A team of researchers in the Netherlands has discovered what may be a set of previously unidentified organs: a pair of large salivary glands, lurking in the nook where the nasal cavity meets the throat. If the findings are confirmed, this hidden wellspring of spit could mark the first identification of its kind in about three centuries.

Any modern anatomy book will show just three major types of salivary glands: one set near the ears, another below the jaw and another under the tongue. “Now, we think there is a fourth,” said Dr. Matthijs Valstar, a surgeon and researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and an author on the study, published last month in the journal Radiotherapy and Oncology.

The study was small, and examined a limited patient population, said Dr. Valerie Fitzhugh, a pathologist at Rutgers University who wasn’t involved in the research. But “it seems like they may be onto something,” she said. “If it’s real, it could change the way we look at disease in this region.”

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Oh 2020, you really do keep them coming. But this is important for things such as radiotherapy: you don’t want to hit them by accident. Which you would do if you don’t know they’re there.
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End child food poverty – no child should be going hungry • UK Petitions

Marcus Rashford:

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End child food poverty – no child should be going hungry

Government should support vulnerable children & #endchildfoodpoverty by implementing 3 recommendations from the National Food Strategy to expand access to Free School Meals, provide meals & activities during holidays to stop holiday hunger & increase the value of and expand the Healthy Start scheme

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If you live in the UK, please sign this petition. Children aren’t responsible for their failings of their parents, but they need to eat like everyone else.

It’s amazing that it takes a Premier League footballer (who himself grew up going hungry, and so knows what these children are going through) to do this. But we are where we are, it seems
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Facebook: Constitution before statutes • BuzzMachine

Jeff Jarvis:

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What is missing, I have argued, is a Constitution for Facebook: a statement of why it exists, what kind of community it wants to serve, what it expects of its community, in short: a north star. That doesn’t exist.

But the Oversight Board might — whether it and Facebook know it or not — end up writing that Constitution, one in the English model, set by precedent, rather than the American model, set down in a document. That will be primarily in Facebook’s control. Though the Oversight Board can pose policy questions and make recommendations, it is limited by what cases come its way — from users and Facebook — and it does not set policy for the company; it only decides appeals and makes policy recommendations.

It’s up to Facebook to decide how it treats the larger policy questions raised by the Oversight Board and the cases. In reacting to recommendations, Facebook can begin to build a set of principles that in turn begin to define Facebook’s raison d’être, its higher goals, its north star, its Constitution. That’s what I’ve told people at Facebook I want to see happen.

The problem is, that’s not how Facebook or any of the technology companies think. Since, as Larry Lessig famously decreed, code is law, what the technologists want is rules — laws — to feed their code — their algorithms — to make consistent decisions at scale.

The core problem of the technology companies and their relationship with society today is that they do not test that code and the laws behind it against higher principles other than posters on the wall: “Don’t be evil.” “Move fast and break things.” Those do not make for a good Constitution.

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Laudable aim, but translating a constitution of any sort into code is not an enterprise to be taken lightly. And Facebook already has so much code that its law is essentially set. Though it can be tweaked – witness Holocaust denial a week or so ago.
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Republican lawmakers are furious after Twitter asks users to read stories before retweeting • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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Twitter announced last month that it would roll out the feature across its mobile apps, describing it as a way to “help promote informed discussion.” When you hit the retweet button on a link you haven’t visited, Twitter adds a label above the confirmation menu, warning that “headlines don’t tell the full story” and offering a chance to check the story out.

This is optional; you can ignore it and simply confirm the retweet if you want, and it doesn’t add any extra taps. But some conservative Twitter users expressed fury at the warning. Former PJ Media editor David Steinberg claimed that Twitter “placed a headline warning label” on a Wall Street Journal article about Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik, saying the prompt “should disturb every American.” The label appears if you try to retweet many other WSJ articles on a variety of topics as well as stories from The Verge and other media outlets.

The claim was amplified by Republican members of Congress. Collins claimed that Twitter was “censoring” all tweets from Sean Hannity, citing labels on links to Hannity.com. The Twitter account for Judiciary Committee Republicans made a similar claim about a Hannity article, insinuating that Twitter had specifically added the warning to a story about allegedly leaked emails from Hunter Biden.

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It’s amazing that elected representatives, who you’d hope would be smarter than average, wouldn’t even be able to read an onscreen instruction. The read-before-you-tweet scheme is a good one (though it doesn’t occur on third-party apps such as Tweetbot). Twitter is finally getting there.
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French iPhone boxes come packed in an outer box with separate EarPods • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

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After the news that France would be the only territory to continue to include EarPods with the iPhone, it seems that Apple is not packing the earbuds within the iPhone ‘s box (via iGeneration).

The French iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro does not have a different retail box to accommodate EarPods, meaning that all iPhone boxes are consistent worldwide. Since the new iPhone boxes are slimmer without a tray for EarPods or a power adapter below the iPhone , in France the EarPods are in the bottom of a separate box that is large enough to also contain the standard iPhone ‘s box. The additional box appears to be much larger than the new, slimmed-down iPhone boxes.

Apple is continuing to include EarPods with iPhones in France due to legal obligations. French law demands that manufacturers provide a hands-free accessory with smartphones due to concerns about the effect of electromagnetic waves on the brains.

In addition to the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro, the iPhone 11, iPhone XR, and iPhone SE no longer include EarPods outside of France.

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What a fabulous quiz question in a year or so. Something like “in which country was the iPhone 12 legally required to come with EarPods?” (Oh, those French and zee waves.)
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Security researcher claims to have hacked Trump’s Twitter account • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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A security researcher claims he hacked President Donald Trump’s Twitter account earlier this month, guessing that his password was “maga2020!” and possibly posting a tweet where Trump appeared to take a satirical article seriously. Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant and magazine Vrij Nederland reported the news earlier today, citing screenshots and interviews with the researcher, Victor Gevers.

But when reached for comment, both Twitter and the White House vigorously denied the claim.

“We’ve seen no evidence to corroborate this claim, including from the article published in the Netherlands today,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge. “We proactively implemented account security measures for a designated group of high-profile, election-related Twitter accounts in the United States, including federal branches of government.”

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Seems to have been a joke – a pretty poor one – by the researcher. You’d also hope that such an account would have two-factor turned on at the very least, and designated devices that can be used as a another layer of protection. Though of course this White House could deny anything, including where the sun will rise, and people would ignore it as probably false until checked.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Tales of WeWork’s demise may have been overblown – it’s aiming for profitability next year. 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 10 links for you. You’re on mute. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The town that went feral • The New Republic

Patrick Blanchfield reviews A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear, a book by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling about what happened when a bunch of libertarians descended on Grafton in New Hampshire and attempted to turn it into a libertarian paradise:

»

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1m by 30%, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits.

Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right.

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Ah yes, the bears: black bears, which are the sort that will eat you if you play dead (that works for grizzlies and brown bears; I don’t know how you ask a bear what sort of bear it is). So you’d better either fight them or run like hell:

»

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem.

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As Blanchfield says, it’s “simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling”. It’s a metaphor, a parable, an object lesson. Improve your day: go and read the whole review. And then you could could order the book, like me.
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Google meddling with URLs in emails, causing security concerns • Hackaday

Lewin Day:

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Despite the popularity of social media, for communication that actually matters, e-mail reigns supreme. Crucial to the smooth operation of businesses worldwide, it’s prized for its reliability. Google is one of the world’s largest e-mail providers, both with its consumer-targeted Gmail product as well as G Suite for business customers [Jeffrey Paul] is a user of the latter, and was surprised to find that URLs in incoming emails were being modified by the service when fetched via the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) used by external email readers.

This change appears to make it impossible for IMAP users to see the original email without logging into the web interface, it breaks verification of the cryptographic signatures, and it came as a surprise.

For a subset of users, it appears Google is modifying URLs in the body of emails to instead go through their own link-checking and redirect service. This involves actually editing the body of the email before it reaches the user.

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This only applies in G Suite (the corporate thing – what used to be called Google Apps For Your Domain), not the consumer version, and I’m guessing is a “protect paying corporate users from phishing and malware” thing.

And guess what: Google simply turned it on one day without consultation. There is an off switch buried in one of the G Suite settings, but the ordinary user can’t get at it.
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Kick Google all you like, Mozilla tells US government, so long we keep getting our Google-bucks • The Register

Simon Sharwood:

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Mozilla has responded to news of the US government’s antitrust lawsuit against Google by saying it welcomes it … provided it doesn’t get hurt.

Mozilla has weighed in on two fronts, firstly as an organisation that likes an open web.

“Like millions of everyday internet users, we share concerns about how Big Tech’s growing power can deter innovation and reduce consumer choice,” wrote chief legal officer Amy Keating, before getting to the hear of the matter: Mozilla has a deal to funnel search traffic to Google and the resulting royalties represent over 90% of the Mozilla revenue.

Mozilla’s second position is as an organisation that has a recently renewed deal to send search traffic to Google that is thought to see around $400m a year flow from the ad giant to the browser contender. That’s around 90% of Mozilla’s income.

Which is where things get complex, because as Keating noted: “In this new lawsuit, the DOJ referenced Google’s search agreement with Mozilla as one example of Google’s monopolization of the search engine market in the United States.”

So what’s a not-for-profit to do when it worries about Big Tech, but is also utterly dependent on it for revenue?

Keating has recommended the USA kick Google as hard as it wants, so long as Mozilla still gets paid by … someone.

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Got to hope someone at Mozilla has a very fruity Plan B. As previously noted, VPNs aren’t a bad idea.
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The Google suit: we’re all anti-monopolists now • BIG by Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller:

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the Google suit is a stunning change in the consensus underpinning American politics. The complaint itself a tight, well-reasoned, and nicely framed case, and the scope will likely broaden over the next few months. What the DOJ is arguing is basically a carbon copy of the Microsoft case of the late 1990s, where the government accused Microsoft of illegally tying Internet Explorer to Microsoft Windows. Today, the DOJ is accusing Google of illegally tying Search to its mobile phone operating system Android and its browser Chrome. And the government is seeking to break up Google.

The details of the case aren’t particularly important for the purpose of this essay, but if you want to know them, you can read the complaint here or read my colleague Sarah Miller’s write-up in the Guardian.

Ideologically, this complaint is just a stunning victory for anti-monopolists, who largely congregated on the progressive and Democratic side of the aisle. Republicans have been traditionally hostile to antitrust doctrine, but are now shifting. Take the words of Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who said in response to the suit, “I commend the Department for finally holding Google accountable. When it comes to big tech, this is just the beginning. Winter is coming.” It’s an aggressive comment from any political leader, and it’s coming from a conservative Republican.

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Background: Stoller and Miller were among a group of people who were fired from a part-Google-funded think tank after they wrote an article praising the EC’s action against Google on Android. He’s very anti-monopoly, as is evident. But I don’t think this is a “carbon copy” of the IE case. In that, Microsoft was using its Windows monopoly to annex the new, fast-growing browser market. Here, Google is using its search monopoly to… continue its search monopoly?

There may be some room to argue that Android OEMs should be allowed to let rival search engines bid to be the default. Guess who would have the money to win the bids? Maybe instead you could institute a “search choice” screen, as happens in Europe. Guess which one people would choose?

I still think this is going after the wrong targets, and the fact that a conservative Republican backs the lawsuit doesn’t give it any legitimacy. They’re just mad because they think, wrongly, that Google’s censoring them. The right targets would be blocking Google’s destructive scraping and its strongarm tactics in AMP and other technologies.
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The WeWork arc • The Diff

Byrne Hobart argues that WeWork wasn’t that bad a business, and that Adam Neumann wasn’t actually bad at spotting a gap in the market:

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[the] greater-fool explanation [for WeWork’s growth] doesn’t quite hold water. WeWork’s initial capital came from the founders’ successful real estate dealings, and the first outside money came from another real estate investor. And they raised venture money from some sophisticated counterparties—even Softbank, which offered them a ridiculous valuation, was careful to structure the deal so it protected them from some downside risk.

And, strangest of all, the company didn’t go to zero. They fired Neumann (proximate cause: adverse PR from smoking marijuana on the company plane while traveling internationally; actual cause: inability to complete an IPO). [The marijuana wasn’t news to WeWork staff.] They laid off thousands of employees and sold some assets. And WeWork’s new CEO says it will be profitable in 2021 ($, FT), the most impressive transition from disaster to smooth landing since Apollo 13.

WeWork’s skill at fundraising turned out to be great for the early investors, and only a disaster for the last and biggest. Its talent strategy changed from underpaying at a small scale to overpaying at a large scale, so the company’s economics when they filed their prospectus overstated how unprofitable the undelrying business was. And while a coworking company is a terrible business in the middle of a pandemic, it’s a great business for a post-pandemic world where, as in the early 2010s, most companies are cautious about committing to space and willing to accept unconventional office arrangements.

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Media narratives often don’t capture the truth of something, but that’s because – as the saying goes – it’s the first draft of history. When others come along to correct it, that doesn’t mean that the first draft was intentionally wrong, but that everyone tends to hide a few things.
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Administration officials alarmed by White House push to fast track lucrative 5G spectrum contract, sources say • CNNPolitics

Jake Tapper:

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Senior officials throughout various departments and agencies of the Trump administration tell CNN they are alarmed at White House pressure to grant what would essentially be a no-bid contract to lease the Department of Defense’s mid-band spectrum — premium real estate for the booming and lucrative 5G market — to Rivada Networks, a company in which prominent Republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump have investments.

The pressure campaign to fast track Rivada’s “Request for Proposal” (RFP) by using authorities that would preclude a competitive bidding process intensified in September, and has been led by White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was acting at Trump’s behest, sources with knowledge tell CNN. To push his case, Meadows has sometimes used as his proxy an individual identified by sources in the telecommunications industry as a top financial management official in the US Army.
Sources tell CNN that Trump was encouraged to help Rivada by Fox News commentator and veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove, a lobbyist for, and investor in, Rivada.

Untold billions are at stake. A government auction of 70MHz of spectrum in August went for more than $4.5bn. The Rivada bid would be for 350MHz of spectrum – five times that amount.

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Got to get that grift in place before January.
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Covid: no safety concerns found with Oxford vaccine trial after Brazil death • BBC News

:

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Trials of a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University will continue, following a review into the death of a volunteer in Brazil.

Brazil’s health authority has given no details about the death, citing confidentiality protocols. Oxford University said a “careful assessment” had revealed no safety concerns.

The BBC understands that the volunteer did not receive the vaccine.

Only around half the volunteers in the trial are given the actual Oxford University Covid-19 vaccine. The second group are being given an existing licensed vaccine for meningitis.

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Sure that the anti-vaxxers will go wild even so, but always useful to have the facts.
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Girl, 8, pulls a 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in Sweden • BBC News

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An eight-year-old found a pre-Viking-era sword while swimming in a lake in Sweden during the summer.

Saga Vanecek found the relic in the Vidostern lake while at her family’s holiday home in Jonkoping County.
The sword was initially reported to be 1,000 years old, but experts at the local museum now believe it may date to around 1,500 years ago.

“It’s not every day that you step on a sword in the lake!” Mikael Nordstrom from the museum said.

The level of the water was extremely low at the time, owing to a drought, which is probably why Saga uncovered the ancient weapon.

“I felt something in the water and lifted it up. Then there was a handle and I went to tell my dad that it looked like a sword,” Saga told the broadcaster Sveriges Television.

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I think this means she’s now in charge of Britain? Suits me fine. Can’t do a worse job than the current bunch.
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To understand Facebook today, read its earliest critics • OneZero

Joanne McNeil:

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Zuckerberg has every incentive to convince people that Facebook was once “glowingly” received. If the company had been a universally celebrated project several years ago, it would mean that simple reforms and regulations could rein it in — that with just the right policy, the social network could return to the benevolent path it once tread on.
But the truth is Facebook has always been a problem. There is no good Facebook that Facebook can return to being.

This mistaken belief that Facebook had few detractors years ago erases the groundbreaking work of its early critics — a circle that includes David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin. The Social Network (2010), which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, won three Academy Awards and earned $224.9 million at the box office—it’s hardly an obscure example. The film was The Social Dilemma of its time: It picked the right target but with the wrong approach. The movie focused on Zuckerberg’s character — he’s depicted as a backstabbing genius — while the script barely touched on anything unique about Silicon Valley as an industry or the risks that the company posed to society. Nevertheless, the mere existence of The Social Network should dispel any notion that users and the general public were naive about Facebook’s growing power and influence.

Much better criticism from scholars, journalists, and even former employees was published long before the company had amassed two billion users. For anyone who wants a more complete picture of what the company is and has always been, I can think of no better place to begin than these four books that illuminate the problems inherent in Facebook’s culture and business model.

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Quibi is shutting down as problems mount • WSJ

Benjamin Mullin and Joe Flint:

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Quibi Holdings is shutting itself down, according to people familiar with the matter, a crash landing for a once-highflying entertainment startup that raised $1.75bn in capital.

The streaming service has been plagued with problems since it launched in April, facing lower-than-expected viewership, disappointing download numbers and a lawsuit from a well-capitalized foe.

On Wednesday, Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg called investors to tell them he is shutting the service down, some of the people said.

Quibi’s shutdown marks a disappointing turn of events for Mr. Katzenberg, who pitched the streaming service as a revolutionary new entrant to the video-streaming wars.

The service served up shows in 5-minute to 10-minute “chapters” formatted to fit a smartphone screen, targeting subscribers who wanted entertainment in a hurry. It was primarily aimed at mobile viewers, but the coronavirus pandemic forced would-be subscribers away from the kinds of on-the-go situations Quibi executives envisioned for its users.

Quibi attracted blue-chip advertisers including PepsiCo Inc., Walmart Inc. and Anheuser-Busch InBev SA, securing about $150m in ad revenue in the run-up to its launch. Those deals came under strain earlier this year amid lower-than-expected viewership for Quibi’s shows, prompting advertisers to defer their payments.

«

Come on. This failure was never about Covid, although it’s true that Quibi did launch in the US in April, a calamitously unfortunate piece of timing. But if you have a service that’s compelling, no matter what for, then people will take an interest. Everyone had their smartphone with them all the time over the past six months. That’s not why they didn’t watch Quibi.

And yet, as Maya Kosoff points out, Quibi’s dedication to shortform content extended even to its lifespan.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Yesterday’s labelling of Google’s blogpost about the DOJ’s lawsuit should have called the lawsuit a lawsuit rather than a blogpost (thanks to many who pointed this out), though I’d argue the DOJ’s work is closer in quality to a blogpost than a lawsuit.

YouTube upgraded to show 60 frames per second recently – and put top-quality video out of reach for half of UK households. CC-licensed photo by Sean MacEntee on Flickr.

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

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

US accuses Google of illegally protecting monopoly • The New York Times

David McCabe, Cecilia Kang and Daisuke Wakabayashi:

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The Justice Department accused Google of illegally protecting its monopoly over search and search advertising in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation.

In a 57-page complaint, filed in the US District Court in the District of Columbia, the agency accused Google of locking out competition in search by obtaining several exclusive business contracts and agreements. Google’s deals with Apple, mobile carriers and other handset makers to place its search engine as the default option for consumers accounted for most of its dominant market share in search, the agency said, a figure that it put at around 80 percent.

“For many years,” the suit said, “Google has used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising and general search text advertising — the cornerstones of its empire.”

The lawsuit signals a new era for the technology sector. It reflects pent-up and bipartisan frustration toward a handful of companies — Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook in particular — that have morphed from small and scrappy companies into global powerhouses with outsize influence over commerce, speech, media and advertising. Conservatives like President Trump and liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren have called for more restraints over Big Tech.

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Here’s the lawsuit. And here’s Google’s blogpost in response, titled “A deeply flawed blogpost that would do nothing to help consumers”.

So. A little history. When Google was being sued by the EC in 2010 over its suppression of shopping comparison sites – beginning with the British company Foundem – I thought the EC was making the right move, and focusing on the correct topic: that Google was manipulating search to favour its own products over what consumers evidently wanted. Effectively, that’s annexation: using your power in the market to push others out of an adjacent market.

I thought the EC lawsuit against Google over tying Google services to Android was reasonable, too. It’s a slightly different situation – an effective monopsony: Google’s the only useful supplier for Android that people want outside China. (Ask Huawei.) The OEMs would all have to defect from Google to have any effect; and defection back would be more profitable.

But this? This is nonsense. There’s no law against being a monopoly in the US. The 1998 lawsuit against Microsoft was about tying the provision of Windows to the use of Internet Explorer – when browsers were a new technology. IBM nearly missed out on the whole Windows95 launch because it resisted.

The FTC had an excellent chance to act on this right back in 2013 but whiffed it. If the DoJ and the states really want to make their case work, they should revisit that casework. But it wasn’t about being a monopoly. It was about suppressing rivals in shopping search.

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Apple iPhone 12 Review: superfast speed, if you can find it • The New York Times

Brian Chen spent ages trying to find 5G, and when he did it was basically to try out the Speedtest app; there’s no real use for 5G. Then there’s the rest of the phone:

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Apple also said it had strengthened the display glass, making it four times less likely to break. It’s difficult to test that scientifically, but I dropped the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro several times by accident on hard surfaces. They survived without any scuffs.

Also new is a charging mechanism that Apple calls MagSafe. It’s basically a new standard to support faster charging via magnetic induction. The new standard will open doors to other companies to make accessories that magnetically attach to iPhones, such as miniature wallets.

I tested both the MagSafe charger and Apple’s MagSafe wallet. But I preferred charging with a normal wire because it was faster, as well as carrying my own wallet, because it can hold more cards.

There’s a major downside to all of the new features: We have to pay a lot for these phones. Apple is also no longer including charging bricks or earphones with the new iPhones since so many people already own power bricks and fancy wireless earbuds. While that will lead to less waste, this shift and the price jump may annoy plenty of people.

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There’s also Nilay Patel’s review at The Verge, which looks in more detail at the camera quality. He and his video producer are enthusiastic.
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Sweden bans Huawei, ZTE From new 5G infrastructure • Bloomberg

Niclas Rolander and Veronica Ek:

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Sweden has banned Huawei Technologies and ZTE from gaining access to its fifth-generation wireless network, adding to the increasing number of European governments forcing local telecom companies to shift away from Chinese suppliers.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority said in a statement Tuesday that the “influence of China’s one-party state over the country’s private sector brings with it strong incentives for privately owned companies to act in accordance with state goals and the communist party’s national strategies.”

The authority said that the two Chinese technology giants’ equipment must be removed from existing infrastructure used for 5G frequencies by January 2025.

The US has described Huawei as the “backbone” of surveillance efforts by the Chinese communist party, and is pressuring European governments to block the technology company from gaining access to 5G networks. The UK has already imposed an outright ban on Huawei’s 5G equipment, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel has so far hesitated to follow suit.

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Another domino falls. Significant that it’s banning ZTE as well. Though of course Sweden doesn’t have to look far to find a network supplier: Ericsson is home-grown. Or it can give Nokia, in neighbouring Finland, a call.
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Bug of the Day: Youtube broke for 40% of the UK population after rolling out 60 FPS videos • The HFT Guy

“The HFT guy” is a developer in London:

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This week we’re going to talk about how YouTube broke HD for me and about 40% the UK population, give or take.

I moved to a newer home earlier this year and like most places in the UK (even in London) it only had broadband internet aka slow ADSL over copper. It’s pushing a good 4.2 Mbps, sometimes up to 4.6 Mbps on a good day.

YouTube decided to rollout 60 FPS videos by default to everyone. It came in effect automatically for most videos published over the past couple years.

Have a look at quality setting and see what pops up. If the video is relatively recent the options are usually limited to: 1080p60, 720p60, 480p …

There’s no setting and there’s no opt-out to get back to 30 FPS. Like all software updates lately, the switch happened and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Problem: 60 FPS video requires roughly 50% more bandwidth than 30 FPS video.

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Problem arising from the fact that about 45% of UK households have a connection speed lower than 8Mbps, and you need above that for 1080p60fps; but only half that (which would work with most of the country) for 1080p30fps. It would be good if Google allowed a fallback to 30fps, but it doesn’t seem to be doing that.
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My chatbot is dead, and why yours should probably be too • Adrian Z

Adrian Zumbrunnen:

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let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment: when did you actually ever enjoy talking to a chat bot? And I’m not talking about the type of bots you talk to when you’re bored, but about those that provide a deeper purpose.

It turns out that the answer is, at least for most of us, almost never.

I love you Intercom, except when I don’t. 99% of time I don’t want to talk to a silly and obtrusive avatar popping up from some corner of the screen before I even had a chance to check out what’s going on. Somehow, I can’t help but think others feel the same.

In fact, we do know that others feel the same. Chat heads jumping at us unasked, are the quintessential equivalent of the infamous sales clerk who eagerly talks to us upon entering a store.

To further add to the challenges: as soon as users go off-script, chat bot’s don’t just become awkward and unpredictable—they turn into little sociopaths that might rub users the wrong way.

The moment you create a chat bot is the moment you allow customers to have a conversation with your brand. Not with yourself, not with your friend, but with an uber entity—a symbol—that represents everything you and your team stand for. That’s not a step to be taken lightly.

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Personally, I never ever ever wanted to talk to a chatbot. You know that it’s only an intermediate step towards dealing with a real human, or using a website with an interface you can navigate with your eyes, rather than an Adventure-style guessing game.

But they seem to be on the way out, so that’s something.
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Expanding AI’s impact with organizational learning • MIT Sloan Review

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Organizations that learn with AI have three essential characteristics:

1. They facilitate systematic and continuous learning between humans and machines. Organizational learning with AI isn’t just machines learning autonomously. Or humans teaching machines. Or machines teaching humans. It’s all three. Organizations that enable humans and machines to continuously learn from each other with all three methods are five times more likely to realize significant financial benefits than organizations that learn with a single method.

2. They develop multiple ways for humans and machines to interact. Humans and machines can and should interact in different ways depending on the context. Mutual learning with AI stems from these human-machine interactions. Deploying the appropriate interaction mode(s) in the appropriate context is critical. For example, some situations may require an AI system to make a recommendation and humans to decide whether to implement it. Some context-rich environments may require humans to generate solutions and AI to evaluate the quality of those solutions. We consider five ways to structure human-machine interactions. Organizations that effectively use all five modes of interaction are six times as likely to realize significant financial benefits compared with organizations effective at a single mode of interaction.

3. They change to learn, and learn to change. Structuring human and machine interactions to learn through multiple methods requires significant, and sometimes uncomfortable, change. Organizations that make extensive changes to many processes are five times more likely to gain significant financial benefits compared with those that make only some changes to a few processes. These organizations don’t just change processes to use AI; they change processes in response to what they learn with AI.

Organizational learning with AI demands, builds on, and leads to significant organizational change.

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This sounds to me, without knowing the detail of the organisations, like they’re obliged to change to fit with the demands of the AI, rather as organisations had to become more computer-like to better adjust to the broader use of computers. How many people in a day do you hear say “just got to enter a few details into the computer, be with you in a minute…”
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Are we reaching peak streaming subscriptions? • Billboard

Will Page:

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Have we reached “peak subscription streaming” in the way that some scientists fear that we’re approaching “peak oil,” the theoretical point at which more oil has been extracted from the earth than remains in it? The streaming situation is far less grim — peak oil assumes that production will decline, while streaming-subscription numbers will presumably stop growing but not decrease — but there’s one important parallel. Just as we’re running out of “easy oil” and the price of a barrel increases as we move from drilling wells to more expensive extraction methods like fracking, we’re also running out of what we might call “easy subscribers”: young, tech-savvy music fans, many of whom have smartphones with iOS, which makes commerce easy. Finding more will require marketing, whether that means courting more Android users, selling skeptics on the value of music streaming or trying to take subscribers from other companies — which costs money. It could also put pressure on services to lower prices, at precisely the point when they also have an incentive to raise them in order to show bottom-line growth.

To get a sense of what’s ahead, it’s worth looking at two markets that adapted to streaming early, Sweden and Norway, which make some of these concerns look a bit like the boy who cried wolf. Since 2015, when analysts first began predicting that music streaming services were running out of potential subscribers, the music business consultancy MIDiA estimates subscription numbers are up 85% in Sweden and 78% in Norway.

Then again, remember what happened to that boy who cried wolf in the end? It could be that the predator is still on his way — he just hasn’t quite arrived yet.

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In possibly related news, Netflix said subscriber growth slowed in the most recent quarter. (Via Benedict Evans’s newsletter.)
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Democratic super PAC Future Forward and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz are spending $100 million against Trump • Vox

Theodore Schleifer:

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A little-known Democratic super PAC backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest donors is quietly unleashing a torrent of television spending in the final weeks of the presidential campaign in a last-minute attempt to oust President Donald Trump, Recode has learned.

The barrage of late money — which includes at least $22m from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz — figures among one of the most expensive and aggressive plays yet by tech billionaires, who have spent years studying how to maximize the return they get from each additional dollar they spend on politics. Moskovitz is placing his single biggest public bet yet on the evidence that TV ads that come just before Election Day are the best way to do that.

The super PAC, called Future Forward, has remained under the radar but is spending more than $100m on television and digital in the final month of the campaign — more than any other group — on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden outside of the Biden campaign itself.

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What better way, when you deeply desire your advertising spend to have a meaningful effect, than to demonstrate the targeting power of advertising on the platform that you’ve helped create by *checks notes* using a completely different one.
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The mystery of the immaculate concussion • GQ

Julia Ioffe:

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[US CIA official in charge of blocking Russian counterintel work, Marc] Polymeropoulos was stunned by how unabashedly combative his Russian counterparts were. He had spent his career in a region where people were exceedingly polite, rolling out banquets and plying him with tea, even as he knew they were plotting to kill him. He knew the Russians didn’t like him, but “I would have expected them to be a little more polite,” Polymeropoulos told me.

Nonetheless, he figured that this was little more than bluster. He knew he had to be careful in Russia and to be wary of Russian agents trying to entrap him in compromising situations—for example, the beautiful young women at the rooftop bar of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton who seemed determined to chat up him and his colleague. But Polymeropoulos figured he had no reason to fear for his physical safety. Even after that awful night in the Marriott, Polymeropoulos did not immediately suspect anything malicious. By morning, the worst of the symptoms had passed and he seemed to be doing better, confirming his suspicion that it had just been something he’d eaten. Just a few hours after he’d been incapacitated, he managed to get on a train to St. Petersburg, where he felt well enough to walk for miles, duck into more dive bars, and even glimpse the famous troll factory. He even did some Christmas shopping for his wife and kids. That miserable, terrifying night in his Moscow hotel room receded in his memory.

Two days before the end of his trip, Polymeropoulos and his colleagues were eating dinner at Pushkin, a posh Moscow restaurant, when he suddenly felt the room begin to spin again, just as it had in the hotel room that night. A wave of nausea hit, and he was suddenly drenched in sweat. He barely made it back to his hotel room, where, having canceled all his meetings, he stayed for the rest of his trip, unable to move. His body was in revolt, and he had no idea why. “I made it back on the airplane somehow,” Polymeropoulos said.

It wasn’t until Polymeropoulos got home to the Virginia suburbs that it occurred to him that what had happened in Moscow was possibly the result of something far more sinister that what he’d originally suspected. In February, after a few weeks of relative normalcy, he started feeling an intense and painful pressure that started in the back of his head and radiated forward into his face.

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Given Russians’ proclivities, wonder if this and other cases was very low-grade chemical poisoning, not some sort of radiation.
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Attack-dog journalism is bad for democracy • UnHerd

Sarah Ditum on the popular response to New Zealand TV journalist Tova O’Brien demolishing failed political candidate Jami-Lee Ross:

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Perhaps it doesn’t matter very much in the case of Ross. Advance got less than 1% of the vote, so you can hardly think of him as the representative of New Zealand’s Covid-denying left-behinds. More worrying is the idea that O’Brien is some kind of role model for journalists — “the way it should be done”. What she offers is the stupefaction of a cheap pleasure, which is fine once in a while, but nothing you can live on. Turn this approach on an actually popular populist, rather than a sadsack failure content to soak up the last moments of his dead career, and you’d quickly have a polarised nightmare.

Rather than attack people as liars or presume their bad faith, Ripley suggests journalists should look for ways to open conversations: instead of telling people what they think, ask them about why they believe the things they do. Often, the things that people seem to be at odds over are just proxies for underlying issues; and sometimes, those underlying issues are more tractable than you ever expected.

It’s even possible that the questioner could be the one to change their mind about something.

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I think this is wrong. Take Jonathan Swann’s interview with Trump: while Swann didn’t cut Trump off for talking nonsense, he absolutely did call him on his nonsense because he knew the indisputable facts. Ditto Chris Wallace, who had been wily enough to take the mental aptitude test that Trump was going to boast about, and so could contradict Trump from a position of knowledge.

The common thread in all three: being prepared with knowledge of what the facts are, and not being prepared to take dissembling crap around it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified