Apple’s Fitness+ service will have something much more (or less) strenuous from Monday. CC-licensed photo by Underway In Ireland 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. Fit! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook profits as users are ripped off by scam ads • Buzzfeed News

Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac:

»

Two years ago, a handful of Facebook employees began to raise internal alarms about a series of advertisements appearing in their news feeds. Purchased by a then up-and-coming lip-synching app called Musical.ly — now known as TikTok — the ads featured teenage girls provocatively gyrating to music in short video clips.

Curious as to why he and his colleagues were seeing ads ostensibly meant for young girls, one Facebook employee, who was also a father, dug into the company’s advertising system at the time to determine what was going on. What he discovered wasn’t an error, but Facebook’s advertising system working as intended. The social network’s algorithms had been optimizing the ads for the audience interacting with them the most: middle-aged men.

Initial complaints about the ads, which continued after Musical.ly was acquired and turned into TikTok, were rebuffed. TikTok, which reportedly spent $1 billion on advertising in 2018, was a valued business partner, one employee was told by higher-ups. Another person in a position to know told BuzzFeed News that a Facebook manager’s response to the concerns was to restrict access to data about the ads’ targeting.

The ads persisted for at least a year and a half — long after they had been publicly flagged in Facebook’s Workplace forum. Following publication of this story company spokesperson Joe Osborne disputed this timeline, saying “This isn’t accurate, we first learned about this is in 2019, not 2017.”

“It’s so weird that I only hear my 8-year old nieces talk about tiktok, but then see these ads with voluptuous young ladies targeted to men over 35 years old,” one Facebook data scientist wrote on the company’s internal message board last year. “Are we indeed making sure Facebook is not creating a predator’s paradise?”

«

This is quite a creepy story altogether.
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Apple’s Jay Blahnik on how Fitness+ can make exercise easier • Fast Company

Mark Sullivan:

»

with Apple’s new Fitness+ subscription workout service, the [Apple] Watch’s exercise heritage extends off the wrist and onto the larger screens of iPads and TVs, and adds 21 human instructors whose workout sessions are available on demand. The Apple Watch is central to Fitness+; the service doesn’t work nearly so well without it.

“We feel like this is an iteration of the things we’ve been doing since the very beginning, which is to try to make it easier for people to be motivated and inspired to be more active and more fit, and so it fits right into that,” Apple’s head of fitness tech Jay Blahnik tells me. Blahnik is known for developing fitness devices and apps at Nike, and for his work on the Nike+ Running app in the mid-2000s. He now leads the development of Fitness+ at Apple.

The on-demand workouts, which you view on your iPhone, iPad, or home TV, feature a wide array of exercises from 10 disciplines, including strength training, HIIT (high-intensity interval training), cycling, yoga, dancing, rowing, and others. Some of the workouts, like rowing and strength training, require you to bring your own equipment. Others, like yoga, need only a mat.

The watch, which connects to your iPhone, iPad, or AppleTV via Bluetooth, transmits biometric data (like heart rate) and workout timers to the screen so you can see them while you’re moving. There’s also a “burn bar” that rates your performance against other people who have done the workout (you can turn this off if that doesn’t motivate you).

…If there’s a secret sauce to Fitness+, it’s the way Blahnik and company designed the service to appeal to a broad swath of users, from fitness buffs to people with no exercise habits.

Unlike other exercise apps which offer different workouts for different experience levels, Fitness+ tries to address every fitness level within its various workouts. To do so, each video includes three different trainers on screen at the same time, and at least one of them—Blahnik calls them “modifiers”—is doing a simpler or less-taxing version of the activity.

«

For people who are going slightly stir crazy and need some sort of inspiration, this might actually turn out to be just what they want. If you’ve got an Apple Watch, there’s a free month (counting down to being paid – £10/month or £80/yr). And it’s shareable. Apple had a sort-of go at this a few years ago with its yoga workouts on the Apple TV (and, hence, TV set). That seemed to go quiet, but maybe fed into this. Though it looks like it needs plenty of equipment to use it well.
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Facebook hit with antitrust probe for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

Germany’s Federal Cartel Office (aka, the Bundeskartellamt) said today that it’s instigated abuse proceedings against Facebook to examine the linkage between Oculus VR products and its eponymous social network.

In a statement, its president, Andreas Mundt, said:

»

In the future, the use of the new Oculus glasses requires the user to also have a Facebook account. Linking virtual reality products and the group’s social network in this way could constitute a prohibited abuse of dominance by Facebook. With its social network Facebook holds a dominant position in Germany and is also already an important player in the emerging but growing VR (virtual reality) market. We intend to examine whether and to what extent this tying arrangement will affect competition in both areas of activity.

«

The FCO has another “abuse of dominance proceeding” ongoing against Facebook — related to how it combines user data for ad profiling in a privacy-hostile way, which the authority contends is an abuse of Facebook’s market dominance.

«

Germany getting well ahead of the curve in trying to curb a potential abuse of dominance for a market that’s absolutely tiny. This is essentially what the FTC in the US, and those 48 states suing Facebook, wish they had thought of years ago. But that was a different time.
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What’s the point of Gigabit broadband? • Terence Eden’s Blog

Terence had a problem:

»

My yearly contract with my ISP has just come to an end, so it was time to shop around for a better deal. They presented me with the following monthly options:

• Drop to 100Mbps for the same price I’m paying today (£44)
• Keep at 350Mbps for a tenner more (£55)
• Rise to 500Mbps for a fiver more (£49)
• Go to GIGABIT for a lot more (£60)
•

Mmmmmm GIGABIT…!

Obviously it’s classic anchor pricing. And obviously I fell for it. And obviously I negotiated a £50 bill credit for signing a new contract. But I only went with the half-gig option. Even then, I feel like I’ve bought a sports car and use it to pootle to the village shop and back.

Netflix reckons that 25Mbps is good enough for its 4K service. Even if my wife and I are both watching super-high-def-hdr-surround-sound-smellovision – what do we do with the other 450Mbps?

Once in a while we might download a 60GB video game (!!!). At 350Mbps, that’ll take 22 minutes. At 500Mpbs, 16 minutes. That’s six whole minutes saved (!!!). Going to 1Gbps means the game is downloaded in 8 minutes. But that’s assuming the game company’s CDN can sustain that speed. It probably can’t.

Now we’re in the land on constant video calling, the faster upload that we get is nice. Sadly it’s hard to get symmetric speeds in the UK – so we’re stuck with “only” 40Mbps up. But, again, even with both of us streaming 720p laptop-cam footage, it’s not really taxing the connection.

«

As he concedes, “This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.” (I’ve done a couple of those about broadband speeds.) I do think though that once you’re past 200Mbps, you struggle to find any benefit, because you’re throttled by the response of distant servers and the routers in the middle. It’s the upload speed that’s more useful now.
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Cydia, the original app store, sues Apple on antitrust grounds • The Washington Post

Reed Albergotti:

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A new lawsuit brought by one of Apple’s oldest foes seeks to force the iPhone maker to allow alternatives to the App Store, the latest in a growing number of cases that aim to curb the tech giant’s power.

The lawsuit was filed on Thursday by the maker of Cydia, a once-popular app store for the iPhone that launched in 2007, before Apple created its own version. The lawsuit alleges that Apple used anti-competitive means to nearly destroy Cydia, clearing the way for the App Store, which Cydia’s attorneys say has a monopoly over software distribution on iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system.

“Were it not for Apple’s anticompetitive acquisition and maintenance of an illegal monopoly over iOS app distribution, users today would actually be able to choose how and where to locate and obtain iOS apps, and developers would be able to use the iOS app distributor of their choice,” the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Northern California and Cydia is represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan.

Apple is facing an onslaught of lawsuits and scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators around the world for the way it allegedly uses its power to maintain its dominant position over its App Store. Epic Games, the maker of “Fortnite,” sued Apple in August for allegedly monopolistic behavior, and a coalition of software developers taking on Apple’s power has been growing in membership.

…In 2010, [Cydia founder Jay] Freeman told The Washington Post that Cydia had 4.5 million people searching for apps every week.

«

This could be interesting. Freeman’s argument is that it’s your phone, so you should be able to root it just like a computer – or at least jailbreak it. (I suspect Apple’s response would be that you’re free to try, but it doesn’t have to make it easy.)
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Visa and Mastercard will stop processing payments to Pornhub • Vice

Samantha Cole:

»

On Thursday, both Visa and Mastercard announced that they would cut ties with Pornhub. Mastercard cited “unlawful content” on the site. 

The decision comes after Visa and Mastercard said on Monday that they would investigate allegations of child sexual abuse imagery on Pornhub, and their relationship to MindGeek, Pornhub’s parent company.   

“Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site,” Mastercard said in a statement to Bloomberg on Thursday. “We instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance.”

Following that news, an official Visa account tweeted: “Given the allegations of illegal activity, Visa is suspending Pornhub’s acceptance privileges pending the completion of our ongoing investigation. We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network.”

“These actions are exceptionally disappointing, as they come just two days after Pornhub instituted the most far-reaching safeguards in user-generated platform history,” Pornhub said in a statement. “Unverified users are now banned from uploading content – a policy no other platform has put in place, including Facebook, which reported 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material over the last three years.

«

Pornhub has a point here. It is covered by Section 230, same as Facebook. Has it really been abusing (um) its privilege for such a long time that Visa and Mastercard got sick of it? You’d think there might have been rumblings that they weren’t happy. Still, quite the week for Nick Kristof.
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Part human, part machine: is Apple turning us all into cyborgs? • The Guardian

Alex Hern with a big read about the coming of smartglasses:

»

“Apple and Facebook are planning to launch consumer smartglasses over the next two years, and will expect to succeed where their predecessors could not,” [Rupantar] Guha [at the analysts GlobalData] adds.

If Apple pulls off that launch, then the cyberpunk – and cyborg – future will have arrived. It’s not hard to imagine the concerns, as cultural questions clash with technological: should kids take off their glasses in the classroom, just as we now require them to keep phones in their lockers? Will we need to carve out lens-free time in our evenings to enjoy old-fashioned, healthy activities such as watching TV or playing video games?

“It’s a fool’s errand to imagine every use of AR before we have the hardware in our hands,” writes the developer Adrian Hon, who was called on by Google to write games for their smartglasses a decade ago. “Yet there’s one use of AR glasses that few are talking about but will be world-changing: scraping data from everything we see.” This “worldscraping” would be a big tech dream – and a privacy activist’s nightmare. A pair of smartglasses turns people into walking CCTV cameras, and the data that a canny company could gather from that is mindboggling.

…“We won’t be able to opt out from wearing AR glasses in 2035 any more than we can opt out of owning smartphones today,” Hon writes. “Billions have no choice but to use them for basic tasks like education, banking, communication and accessing government services. In just a few years time, AR glasses do the same, but faster and better.”

«

I still wonder how it’s going to manage for those of us who, sigh, wear reading glasses. How will smartglasses cope with presenting text to eyes that can’t focus on something that close? Can it somehow seem to be projected so it hovers in the air some feet away? These aren’t arcane questions; lots of people have some form of presbyopia or myopia.
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Amazon’s Halo Band wearable tracks your voice and body fat, but isn’t helpful • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler and Heather Kelly:

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Amazon has a new health-tracking bracelet with a microphone and an app that tells you everything that’s wrong with you.

You haven’t exercised or slept enough, reports Amazon’s $65 Halo Band. Your body has too much fat, the Halo’s app shows in a 3-D rendering of your near-naked body.

And even: Your tone of voice is “overbearing” or “irritated,” the Halo determines, after listening through its tiny microphone on your wrist.

And even: Your tone of voice is “overbearing” or “irritated,” the Halo determines, after listening through its tiny microphone on your wrist.

We hope our tone is clear here: We don’t need this kind of criticism from a computer. The Halo collects the most intimate information we’ve seen from a consumer health gadget — and makes the absolute least use of it. This wearable is much better at helping Amazon gather data than at helping you get healthy and happy.

Since August, the Halo has been listed by Amazon as an “early access” product that requires an “invitation” to buy. (It will cost $100 plus a $4 monthly fee once it’s sold widely.) We’re reviewing the Halo now because Amazon’s first digital wellness product offers a glimpse of how one of tech’s most influential companies thinks about the future of health. And what could be better to do when we’re lonely during a pandemic than have an always-listening device point out our flaws? (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, but we review all technology with the same critical eye.)

«

TL;DR it’s sexist, inaccurate and very judgey.
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Physicists solve 150-year-old mystery of equation governing sandcastle physics • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

»

Building sandcastles at the beach is a time-honored tradition around the world, elevated into an art form in recent years thanks to hundreds of annual competitions. While the basic underlying physics is well-known, physicists have continued to gain new insights into this fascinating granular material over the last decade or so. The latest breakthrough comes from Nobel Laureate Andre Geim’s laboratory at the University of Manchester in England, where Geim and his colleagues have solved a mathematical puzzle—the “Kelvin equation”—dating back 150 years, according to a new paper just published in Nature.

All you really need to make a sandcastle is sand and water; the water acts as a kind of glue holding the grains of sand together via capillary forces. Studies have shown that the ideal ratio for building a structurally sound sandcastle is one pail of water for every eight pails of sand, although it’s still possible to build a decent structure with varying water content. But if you want to build the kind of elaborate, towering sandcastles that win competitions, you’d be wise to stick with that ideal ratio.

Back in 2008, physicists decided to delve a little deeper into why sand becomes sticky when it gets wet. Using X-ray microtomography, they took 3D images of wet glass beads of similar shape and size as grains of sand. When they added liquid to dry beads, they observed liquid “capillary bridges” forming between individual beads.

…For this latest work, Geim’s team painstakingly constructed molecular-scale capillaries by layering atom-thin crystals of mica and graphite on top of each other, with narrow strips of graphene in between each layer to serve as spacers. With this method, the team built capillaries of varying height, including capillaries that were just one atom high—just enough to fit one layer of water molecules, the smallest such structure possible.

Geim et al. found that the Kelvin equation is still an excellent qualitative description of capillary condensation at the molecular scale—contradicting expectations, since the properties of water are expected to become more discrete and layered at the 1nm scale.

«

Science never sleeps. Vaccines, sandcastles, they’ve got it covered.
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Facebook outage disrupted Messenger and Instagram DMs • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

»

The outage appears to have started around 4:30AM ET and gotten worse (or, at least, more widely noticed) in the following hours. The website Downdetector, which monitors website outages, showed a spike in users reporting issues with these services that peaked around 8:30AM.

Facebook says the disruptions have since been resolved. “Earlier today, some people have experienced trouble sending or receiving messages on Messenger, Instagram or Workplace Chat. The issue has since been resolved and we apologize for any inconvenience,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote in an email to The Verge.

Service outages happen every now and then, but the breadth of this latest disruption is in many ways Facebook’s own doing. The company has been integrating Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs.

«

You see, if Facebook were broken up then this cost – the inconvenience! – wouldn’t be imposed on users. At least that would be an argument that the FTC and 48 states can make now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Thinking of building a high-end gaming PC? You might have to wait a few months. CC-licensed photo by D%u0101vis Mos%u0101ns on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Unmerged. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook accused of breaking antitrust laws • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang and Mike Isaac:

»

The Federal Trade Commission and more than 40 states accused Facebook on Wednesday of buying up its rivals to illegally squash competition, and they called for the deals to be unwound, escalating regulators’ battle against the biggest tech companies in a way that could remake the social media industry.

Federal and state regulators of both parties, who have investigated the company for over 18 months, said in separate lawsuits that Facebook’s purchases, especially Instagram for $1bn in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19bn two years later, eliminated competition that could have one day challenged the company’s dominance.

Since those deals, Instagram and WhatsApp have skyrocketed in popularity, giving Facebook control over three of the world’s most popular social media and messaging apps. The applications have helped catapult Facebook from a company started in a college dorm room 16 years ago to an internet powerhouse valued at more than $800bn.

The prosecutors said Facebook should break off Instagram and WhatsApp, and that new restrictions should apply to the company on future deals, some of the most severe penalties regulators can demand.

…“The most important fact in this case, which the commission does not mention in its 53-page complaint, is that it cleared these acquisitions years ago,” Jennifer Newstead, Facebook’s general counsel, said in a statement. “The government now wants a do-over, sending a chilling warning to American business that no sale is ever final.”

«

It’s absolutely the weakest part of the suit that the FTC previously cleared the acquisition. Then again, AT&T was forced to disgorge the “Baby Bells” that it already owned in the 1982 antitrust decision. So there is a sort of precedent. Zuckerberg’s worried that this is an existential threat. And he might be right. Although, also, AT&T eventually survived the breakup… and gradually swallowed up what had been the Baby Bells.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai pledges to investigate exit of top AI ethicist Timnit Gebru • Axios

Ina Fried:

»

Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized Wednesday for the company’s handling of the departure of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru and said he would investigate the events and work to restore trust, according to an internal memo sent companywide and obtained by Axios.

Gebru’s exit has provoked anger and consternation within Google as well as in academic circles, with thousands of people signing an open letter urging Google to reexamine its practices.

In the note, Pichai acknowledged the depth of the damage done by the company’s actions and said the company would look at all aspects of the situation, but stopped short of saying the company made a mistake in removing Gebru.

“I’ve heard the reaction to Dr. Gebru’s departure loud and clear: it seeded doubts and led some in our community to question their place at Google,” Pichai said in the memo. ” I want to say how sorry I am for that, and I accept the responsibility of working to restore your trust.”

«

Pichai clearly sees this as a huge PR problem both internally and externally; it was inevitable that the memo (which is reproduced in full in the story) would leak. However, he’s not making any commitment to re-hiring Gebru, or actually change anything at all. It’s all couched as “must continue to make progress” and “challenging questions”. There isn’t a single actionable statement in the whole thing, except about assessing the circumstances of Gebru’s departure.
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Brian Roemmele’s answer in September 2016 to ‘How well will Apple AirPods sell?’ • Quora

Roemmele is a sort of trendspotter and futurist:

»

I had 9 researchers at 9 lines formed at 7 a.m. PDT. The research concluded at 2 p.m. PDT. This is part of an ongoing study I am conducting for a group of private parties centered around my Voice First hypothesis [1].

The early results are:

• On average one out of three iPhone 7 purchasers would purchase AirPods today if available (700 person sample)• 80% of iPhone 7 purchasers at the Apple Store at The Grove near Beverly Hills would purchase AirPods if available today (131 person sample)

AirPods were not available for purchase or pre-order on the release date of the iPhone 7 and may become available in October. Based on this early sampling I think the trend line will point to a few conclusions:

• AirPods will likely sell out for the holiday season of 2016
• AirPods will likely become a most coveted consumer item
• AirPods will become available in a wide range of colors made from a wide range of materials including Jet Black, Matte Black, Gold, Rose Gold, Silver, Translucent, etc.

«

He was right about the first two, and there’s no reason the third shouldn’t come true in time. (Copycats already do that, I think.)

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AirPods in the shower: accident or innovation? • WSJ

Kenny Wassus:

»

When the home becomes the gym, office and classroom, a kind of cognitive dissonance can occur, resulting in forgotten-in-the-ears AirPods, said Martin Wiener, an assistant professor of cognitive and behavioral neuroscience at George Mason University. “The transitions between those places,” he said, and the cues associated with them, such as taking off headphones when leaving the gym or office, “are effectively gone.”

Beata Stopka, 24, made the mistake one evening in March. She had been attending graduate school from home in Oak Lawn, Ill., and regularly listening to lectures and true-crime podcasts on her AirPods.

“When I started washing my hair, I felt it in my ear and was, like, ‘Oh my God,’ ” she recalls. She quickly pulled the forgotten AirPod out of her ear and flung it over the shower curtain, narrowly missing the toilet.

Now, when she listens to lectures, the audio in the left earbud occasionally cuts out.

Apple has two truly wireless earbud offerings. The entry-level model isn’t water resistant. The AirPods Pro are water and sweat resistant, meaning they should survive heavy perspiration or a splash, though Apple tells users not to place them “under running water, such as a shower or faucet.”

Jasmine Ali didn’t want that to stop her shower jam sessions. The 23-year-old student at Florida State University has two roommates whom she didn’t want to disturb by using a waterproof Bluetooth speaker.

“I didn’t want to play music loud,” she said. “Plus when I go home, my mom hates when I play music.”

Her solution: Cover her AirPods with a $1 shower cap from Walmart.

«

Apple really missed a trick there. The Apple Shower Cap. A case for your head. Imagine what it could charge for that.
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The hottest campaign ads on Twitter didn’t really work: study • Daily Beast

Sam Stein:

»

At various junctures during the 2020 campaign an attack ad would pop online that had observers on Twitter buzzing about how devastating for Donald Trump it would be. Except, more often than not, the ads weren’t effective, at least not for the nominal point of the election: persuading on-the-fence voters to back Joe Biden.

That’s the conclusion the Democratic Party’s top super PAC reached after doing analytical research into a handful of spots that went viral on Twitter.

The PAC, Priorities USA, spent a good chunk of the cycle testing the effectiveness of ads, some 500 in all. And, along the way, they decided to conduct an experiment that could have potentially saved them tons of money. They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain—the Lincoln Project—and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump voters towards Joe Biden. A control group saw no ad at all. Five different treatment groups, each made up of 683 respondents, saw one of the five ads. Afterwards they were asked the same post-treatment questions measuring the likelihood that they would vote and who they would vote for.

The idea wasn’t to be petty or adversarial towards the Lincoln Project, which drew both fans and detractors for the scorched-earth spots it ran imploring fellow Republicans to abandon Trump. It was, instead, to see if Twitter virality could be used as a substitute for actual ad testing, which took funds and time. If it turned out that what the Lincoln Project was doing was proving persuasive, the thinking went, then Priorities USA could use Twitter as a quasi-barometer for seeing how strong their own ads were.

«

This will no doubt taste like ashes to the Lincoln Project people (a set of ex-Republicans furious with Trump), but I didn’t think at the time that the ads would have much impact beyond Twitter – and perhaps with Trump, who was the one they were really targeted at. A useful reminder that Twitter isn’t the real world, which Biden’s team was very careful to bear in mind.
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YouTube will now remove videos disputing Joe Biden’s election victory • The Verge

Makena Kelly:

»

On Wednesday, YouTube announced that it will begin removing any content alleging widespread voter fraud influenced the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election.

In the immediate aftermath of the November 3rd election, YouTube came under fire for allowing channels to publish videos making false claims about election results. In one instance, One America News Network, a verified YouTube channel, published a video declaring that “Trump won” the election. At the time, YouTube defended its decision to let the video stand, saying in a statement, “Like other companies, we’re allowing these videos because discussion of election results & the process of counting votes is allowed on YouTube.”

The company went on to say that content from “authoritative news organizations” were “the most popular videos about the election.”

In its Wednesday blog, YouTube said that its decision to begin removing misleading election videos follows the US’s safe harbor deadline and that “enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect.” Starting Wednesday, YouTube will begin removing any new content that misleads viewers about the outcome of the 2020 election.

«

Which raises the question: if OANN publishes a video disputing it (or reporting people disputing it, or with a news segment disputing it) will that be removed? Will that happen if Fox runs such a segment? Does “news” get a different treatment? When does a news organisation slip from (or into) being “authoritative”? Meanwhile, Google is going to allow political adverts in the US again, because all 50 states have certified their votes. (Which is why YouTube is doing this.)
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This is a bad time to build a high-end gaming PC • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

»

the current GPU market makes building a gaming system much above lower-midrange to midrange a non-starter. Radeon 6000 GPUs and RTX 3000 GPUs are both almost impossible to find, and the older, slower, and less feature-rich cards that you can buy are almost all selling for more today than they were six months ago. Not every GPU has been kicked into the stratosphere, but between the cards you can’t buy and the cards you shouldn’t buy, there’s a limited number of deals currently on the market. Your best bet is to set up price alerts on specific SKUs you are watching with the vendor in question.

There is some limited good news, though: DRAM and SSDs are both still reasonably priced. DRAM and SSD prices are both expected to decline 10-15% through Q4 2020 compared with the previous quarter, and there are good deals to be had on both. DDR4-3600 is available for a fairly small premium over DDR4-3000, and 2TB M.2 NAND PCIe 3.0 SSDs are now under $200 for a lot of models. 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSDs are broadly around this price point as well — personally, I’d rather have PCIe 3.0 and 2TB than PCIe 4.0 and 1TB, but both are options right now. Power supply prices look reasonable, too, and motherboard availability looks solid.

If you don’t need to buy a GPU right now and you’re willing to or prefer to use Intel, there’s a more reasonable case to be made for building a system. But if you need a high-end GPU and/or want a high-end Ryzen chip to go with it, you may be better off shopping prebuilt systems or waiting a few more months.

«

You’d be pushing it trying to do that so close to Christmas in a year when there has been such disruption to supply chains. GPUs are in short supply – and so worth it that $330,000 worth were stolen from a factory.
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Apple and Google to stop X-Mode from collecting location data from users’ phones • WSJ

Byron Tau:

»

Apple and Alphabet’s Google will ban the data broker X-Mode Social from collecting any location information drawn from mobile devices running their operating systems in the wake of revelations about the company’s national-security work.

The two largest mobile-phone platforms told developers this week that they must remove X-Mode’s tracking software from any app present in their app stores or risk losing access to any phones running Apple’s or Google’s mobile operating systems.

Both Apple and Google disclosed their decision to ban X-Mode to investigators working for Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), who has been conducting an investigation into the sale of location data to government entities.

In a statement provided by a spokesman, Google said developers had seven days to remove X-Mode or face a ban from Google’s Play store, adding that some developers could ask for an extension of up to 30 days. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but told developers they had two weeks to remove the company’s trackers, according to one notice sent to a developer and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

«

That’s going to make life interesting for X-Mode. Best guess is it will try to sneak its framework into apps under another name, or perhaps inveigle its framework into an open-source framework that everyone uses.
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The world smartphone market in Q3 • Counterpoint Research

»

Some quick observations from the smartphone market:
• Global smartphone market shipments declined 4% YoY but grew 32% QoQ to reach 366m units in Q3 2020.
• India smartphone market surpassed the pre-Covid levels growing at 9% YoY and 188% QoQ to reach 53m units, followed by MEA (2% YoY).
• Samsung regained the top spot, shipping 80.4m units with 48% QoQ and 3% YoY growth with highest-ever shipments in the last three years.
• Realme shipments grew 132% QoQ, becoming the world’s fastest brand to hit 50m shipments since inception.
• Xiaomi grew 75% QoQ, contributing 13% in the total smartphone shipments. Notably, this was the first time when Xiaomi surpassed Apple to capture the third spot in the global smartphone market.
• Apple iPhone shipments declined 7% YoY during Q3 2020 as the company delayed its annual iPhone launch from Q3 to Q4 in 2020

«

Apple’s fall in sales was because it didn’t release its new phones until October, ie Q4. Xiaomi’s rise is quite a thing, though, and its rise surely due to India growing so quickly.
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The next phase of social? Listen closely • Andreessen Horowitz

Andrew Chen:

»

there’s a lot more to audio than podcasts and smart assistants. In fact, we anticipate that the audio innovation of the next decade will rival what we’ve seen in video apps over the past few years.

The draw of audio apps over other traditional formats is obvious to any podcast (and music) devotee: the ease. That lean-back, hands-free experience means that audio apps generally don’t compete with a vast competitive library of other startups. Instead, they compete with washing dishes, working out, driving. This dynamic is akin to the competitive landscape for mobile apps 10 years ago. Early entrants were competing with waiting in line, sitting in bed, and staring at the ceiling while riding a bus—and achieved hypergrowth, as a result. Easy competition! Today, traditional apps are just one notification or swipe away from losing users to Instagram, iMessage, or thousands of other engaging apps. In contrast, audio startups face a less crowded and less competitive landscape.

Unlike much of social media, which just shows the highlights—the amazing travel adventures, the huge mansions and cars, fitness influencers, or people with amazing dance skills—audio hits different. Listening to someone’s voice is personal, and hearing unedited audio is the opposite of seeing the highlights. It’s about ideas, not the visuals, so it emphasizes a different kind of content that can often feel deeper and more intellectually stimulating. When you listen to Elon Musk get interviewed by Joe Rogan for two hours, you may begin to develop a deeper understanding of how he thinks—beyond the headlines. When you listen to a comedian like Tina Fey read her autobiographical audiobook over multiple hours, you start to feel an emotional bond with the person. When you listen to a live conversation on Clubhouse and hear people talk over each other, all the “ums,” and sometimes awkward silences, it reminds you—in a shelter-in-place era—what a lively dinner conversation is supposed to feel like.

«

I faintly get the idea of a “Twitter for voice”, which is what Clubhouse seems to be, but not why you’d want that rather than something (semi-)professional.
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Apple shifts leadership of self-driving car unit to AI chief • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

Apple Inc. has moved its self-driving car unit under the leadership of top artificial intelligence executive John Giannandrea, who will oversee the company’s continued work on an autonomous system that could eventually be used in its own car.

The project, known as Titan, is run day-to-day by Doug Field. His team of hundreds of engineers have moved to Giannandrea’s artificial intelligence and machine-learning group, according to people familiar with the change. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Previously, Field reported to Bob Mansfield, Apple’s former senior vice president of hardware engineering. Mansfield has now fully retired from Apple, leading to Giannandrea taking over.

Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 as its vice president of AI Strategy and Machine Learning before being promoted to Apple’s executive team as a senior vice president later that year. He ran Google’s machine-learning and search teams before that. At Apple, in addition to the car project, he is in charge of Siri and machine-learning technologies across Apple’s products.

«

I wonder if Giannandrea had this in mind all the time from when he joined Apple. His skills and knowledge are such a fit with the problem that self-driving vehicles pose. Siri, maybe, is harder.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Big radiators by easily opened windows in American blocks of flats? The result of the 1918 pandemic. CC-licensed photo by Smithsonian American Art Museum on Flickr.

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

How Joe Biden’s digital team tamed the MAGA internet • The New York Times

Kevin Roose:

»

after I wrote about Mr. Biden’s comparatively tiny internet presence last spring, I heard from legions of nervous Democratic strategists who worried that using “heal the nation” messaging against the MAGA meme army was like bringing a pinwheel to a prizefight.

But in the end, the bed-wetters were wrong. Mr. Biden won, and despite having many fewer followers and much less engagement on social media than Mr. Trump, his campaign raised record amounts of money and ultimately neutralized Mr. Trump’s vaunted “Death Star” — the name his erstwhile campaign manager, Brad Parscale, gave to the campaign’s digital operation.

Figuring out whether any particular online strategy decisively moved the needle for Mr. Biden is probably impossible. Offline factors, such as Mr. Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and the economic devastation it has caused, undoubtedly played a major role. But since successful campaigns breed imitators, it’s worth looking under the hood of the Biden digital strategy to see what future campaigns might learn from it.
After the election, I spoke with Mr. Flaherty, along with more than a dozen other people who worked on the Biden digital team. They told me that while the internet alone didn’t get Mr. Biden elected, a few key decisions helped his chances.

Influencers, low-level grassroots efforts, ignoring Twitter (but focusing on Facebook), not trying to stamp out all the misinformation. A fascinating counter-example to 2016.
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Our commitment to trust and safety • Pornhub

»

We have worked to create comprehensive measures that help protect our community from illegal content. In recent months we deployed an additional layer of moderation. The newly established “Red Team” will be dedicated solely to self-auditing the platform for potentially illegal material.

The Red Team provides an extra layer of protection on top of the existing protocol, proactively sweeping content already uploaded for potential violations and identifying any breakdowns in the moderation process that could allow a piece of content that violates the Terms of Service. Additionally, while the list of banned keywords on Pornhub is already extensive, we will continue to identify additional keywords for removal on an ongoing basis.

We will also regularly monitor search terms within the platform for increases in phrasings that attempt to bypass the safeguards in place. Pornhub’s current content moderation includes an extensive team of human moderators dedicated to manually reviewing every single upload, a thorough system for flagging, reviewing and removing illegal material, robust parental controls, and utilization of a variety of automated detection technologies.

«

Looks like Nicholas Kristof’s article has had some effect.
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Revealed: Mark Zuckerberg threatened to pull UK investment in secret meeting with Matt Hancock • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Matthew Chapman:

»

Mark Zuckerberg threatened to pull Facebook’s investment from the UK in a private meeting with Matt Hancock, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

The minutes, from May 2018, show that an obsequious Hancock was eager to please, offering “a new beginning” for the government’s relationship with social media platforms. He offered to change the government’s approach from “threatening regulation to encouraging collaborative working to ensure legislation is proportionate and innovation-friendly”.

Hancock sought “increased dialogue” with Zuckerberg, “so he can bring forward the message that he has support from Facebook at the highest level”.

The meeting took place at the VivaTech conference in Paris. It appears to have been arranged “after several days of wrangling” by Matthew Gould, the former culture department civil servant that Hancock later made chief executive of NHS X.

Zuckerberg attended the meeting only days after Hancock – then the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) – had publicly criticised him for dodging a meeting with MPs.

…These details can finally be made public after a two-year battle that culminated in the Information Commissioner’s Office ordering the department to release the minutes. The newly released notes represent the first public airing of Mark Zuckerberg’s views regarding the UK’s proposed legislation on internet safety and regulation.

«

Unsurprisingly, the Tory MP Damian Collins (who had been leading the committee trying to get Zuckerberg to testify) is fuming about this.
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The curious history of steam heat and pandemics • Bloomberg

Patrick Sisson:

»

The battle against pathogens reshaped the inner working of buildings, too. Take that familiar annoyance for New Yorkers: the clanky radiator that overheats apartments even on the coldest days of the year. It turns out that the prodigious output of steam-heated buildings is the direct result of theories of infection control that were enlisted in the battle against the great global pandemic of 1918 and 1919. 

The Spanish Influenza, which caused just over 20,000 deaths in New York City alone, “changed heating once and for all.” That’s according to Dan Holohan, a retired writer, consultant, and researcher with extensive knowledge of heating systems and steam heating. (Among his many tomes on the topic: The Lost Art of Steam Heating, from 1992.) Most radiator systems appeared in major American cities like New York City in the first third of the 20th century. This golden age of steam heat didn’t merely coincide with that pandemic: beliefs about how to fight airborne illness influenced the design of heating systems, and created a persistent pain point for those who’ve cohabitated with a cranky old radiator. 

Health officials thought (correctly) that fresh air would ward off airborne diseases; then as now, cities rushed to move activities outdoors, from schools to courtrooms. When winter came, the need for fresh air didn’t abate. According to Holohan’s research, the Board of Health in New York City ordered that windows should remain open to provide ventilation, even in cold weather. In response, engineers began devising heating systems with this extreme use case in mind. Steam heating and radiators were designed to heat buildings on the coldest day of the year with all the windows open. Anybody who’s thrown their windows open in January, when their apartment is stifling, is, in an odd way, replicating what engineers hoped would happen a century ago. 

«

Ironic that the miasma (bad air/smells) theory still had a hold then – though it was only 70 years since the classic “disease map” of cholera in London tracing it not to bad air but infected water. Viruses weren’t widely known about in 1918; the first (in plants) had only been identified in 1898. In fact Alexander Fleming was trying to discover the bacterium that was believed to be behind the Spanish flu when he accidentally discovered penicillin.
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He pretended to be Trump’s family. Then Trump fell for it • The New York Times

Jack Nicas:

»

Last month, between tweets disputing his election loss, President Trump posted an article from a conservative website that said his sister Elizabeth Trump Grau had just joined Twitter to publicly back her brother’s fight to overturn the vote.

“Thank you Elizabeth,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “LOVE!”

But the Twitter account that prompted the article was not his sister’s. It was a fake profile run by Josh Hall, a 21-year-old food-delivery driver in Mechanicsburg, Pa.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. He actually thinks it’s his sister,’” Mr. Hall, a fervent Trump supporter, said in an interview last week.

It was a surreal coda to nearly a year of deception for Mr. Hall. Since February, he had posed as political figures and their families on Twitter, including five of the president’s relatives. He had pretended to be Robert Trump, the president’s brother; Barron Trump, the president’s 14-year-old son; and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. The accounts collectively amassed more than 160,000 followers.

Using their identities, he gained attention by mixing off-color political commentary with wild conspiracy theories, including one that the government wanted to implant Americans with microchips, and another that John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, was alive and about to replace Mike Pence as vice president.

“There was no nefarious intention behind it,” Mr. Hall said. “I was just trying to rally up MAGA supporters and have fun.”

«

Nicas has an accompanying article about why it’s so hard for social networks to spot handmade (as opposed to bot-generated) fakes. When it comes to Hall, Nicas points out that he ran a crowdfunding scam which pulled in thousands of dollars. Hall says he didn’t collect. GoFundMe says he did.
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US cybersecurity firm FireEye discloses breach, theft of internal hacking tools • Reuters

Christopher Bing:

»

FireEye, one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the United States, said on Tuesday that is has been hacked, possibly by a government, leading to the theft of an arsenal of internal hacking tools typically reserved to privately test the cyber defenses of their own clients.

The hack of FireEye, a company with an array of business contracts across the national security space both in the United States and its allies, is among the most significant breaches in recent memory.

The FireEye breach was disclosed in a blog post authored by CEO Kevin Mandia. The post said “red team tools” were stolen as part of a highly sophisticated, likely “nation-state” hacking operation. It is not clear exactly when the hack initially took place.

Beyond the tool theft, the hackers also appeared to be interested in a subset of FireEye customers: government agencies.

“We hope that by sharing the details of our investigation, the entire community will be better equipped to fight and defeat cyber attacks,” Mandia wrote.

The company itself has partnered in recent weeks with different software makers to share defensive measures.

«

Obvious suspects: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea.
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Economics is going through an intellectual revolution on public debt • The Washington Post

Charles Lane:

»

Right now, economics is going through a mind-change on public-sector debt that borders on intellectual revolution.

Government debt accumulation was once considered inherently risky: By competing with private investors for investible funds, it would trigger ruinous interest-rate spikes. The new consensus is that debt is, if not quite the proverbial free lunch, then such a good deal that the United States and its fellow industrialized democracies can’t afford not to borrow. And this applies not only to the Covid-related crisis but also to the more normal times ahead.

What happened? Mainly, the gap between theory and fact became too large to ignore. The Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year forecast of US government debt as a share of total output grew from a mere 6% in 2000 to 109% in 2020. Yet in that same decade, real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates on benchmark US government bonds fell from 4.3% to negative 0.1%, as two top former Obama administration economists, Jason Furman and Lawrence H. Summers, point out in a new paper that’s attracting attention in pre-Biden Washington.

In fiscal 2020, the U.S. government borrowed a staggering 15% of gross domestic product, yet the 10-year government bond still pays less than 1%.

…the prime suspect is a mismatch between abundant private savings around the world and scarce profitable opportunities for private investment — the latter of which, in turn, partly reflects slow labor supply growth in industrialized countries.

Under such circumstances, holders of wealth see no alternative to parking their money with governments. There’s no private investment to “crowd out”; to the contrary, financial markets are actually signaling that the highest and best use of the funds may be a public one.

«

This is a quiet but epochal moment. If governments can borrow with abandon, it upends all the thinking that used to be in place about debt, repayment, borrowing and especially budgets.
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Second judge says Trump can’t ban TikTok • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction that should keep the US Commerce Department from banning transactions with TikTok.

The Trump administration issued an executive order on August 6th that would have blocked transactions between US companies and TikTok and WeChat’s Chinese parent companies, ByteDance and Tencent. Trump declared TikTok and WeChat a “national emergency,” citing privacy and security concerns. That order invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a law that allows Trump to ban transactions between the US and foreign entities.

However, in his opinion accompanying today’s decision, US district judge Carl Nichols said that “the government likely exceeded IEEPA’s express limitations.” He granted TikTok’s motion for a preliminary injunction against each item the Commerce Department was attempting to prohibit.

Nichols also previously granted a preliminary injunction on September 27th that allowed people to continue downloading the app in the US. At that time, he didn’t rule on the Commerce Department’s other restrictions.

«

The Trump administration is just going to run the clock out on this one – they’ve all completely lost interest in it. Trump’s distracted and bored, the DOJ knows the case won’t succeed, all the people in the administration are looking for new jobs. So the judge actually did them a favour here.
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Samsung’s no-charger-in-box future may be here sooner than expected • SamMobile

“Asif S”:

»

Remember when Apple said that it wouldn’t include a charger in the box with its new iPhones and Samsung mocked the company’s decision? Well, it looks like the South Korean company might take a U-turn and follow Apple in that regard. It is being reported that the Galaxy S21 series might not come with a charger and earphones in the box, at least in some regions.

The Galaxy S21, Galaxy S21+, and the Galaxy S21 Ultra have recently been certified by Anatel, Brazil’s regulatory agency. The certification documents specifically say that the upcoming phones won’t be marketed with a charger or earphones. You can see the relevant text highlighted in Portuguese in the image below. Apple seems to have started one more trend that other companies, including Samsung, might follow soon.

We first heard about the possibility of Samsung removing the charger one month ago, but it was just a rumor back then. Now, it appears that the company has taken the final decision. Even with the Galaxy Note 20 and Galaxy S20 series, Samsung didn’t bundle earphones in the US. However, people who wanted them could request Samsung for free AKG earphones.

«

Given all the much bigger things going on, it feels a bit wearying to point to the hypocrisy involved in criticising something you then go and do yourself, but if we let this go then everything starts to slide.
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Announcing the CSAM scanning tool, free for all Cloudflare customers • Cloudflare

Justin Paine and John Graham-Cumming:

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The hard cases are when a customer of ours runs a service that allows user generated content (such as a discussion forum) and a user uploads CSAM [child sexual abuse material – often wrongly called “kiddie porn”], or if they’re hacked, or if they have a malicious employee that is storing CSAM on their servers. We’ve seen many instances of these cases where services intending to do the right thing are caught completely off guard by CSAM that ended up on their sites. Despite the absence of intent or malice in these cases, there’s still a need to identify and remove that content quickly.

Today we’re proud to take a step to help deal with those hard cases. Beginning today, every Cloudflare customer can login to their dashboard and enable access to the CSAM Scanning Tool. As the CSAM Scanning Tool moves through development to production, the tool will check all Internet properties that have enabled CSAM Scanning for this illegal content. Cloudflare will automatically send a notice to you when it flags CSAM material, block that content from being accessed (with a 451 “blocked for legal reasons” status code), and take steps to support proper reporting of that content in compliance with legal obligations.

«

This is good; this is what Parler isn’t doing, and is likely to get walloped for as a result. (Tumblr has had problems with CSAM more recently.)

Calling it “child sexual abuse material” might seem like being pernickety, but it’s actually important to make the distinction: adult pornography is (almost always) consensual, but children cannot give consent, which automatically makes this abuse.
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Christchurch shooter was radicalized on YouTube, New Zealand report says • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

The Australian white supremacist who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand was radicalized by YouTube, according to a 792-page report on the March 2019 shooting.

“What particularly stood out was the statement that the terrorist made that he was ‘not a frequent commentator on extreme right-wing sites and YouTube was a significant source of information and inspiration’,” said Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, according to The Guardian. “This is a point I plan to make directly to the leadership of YouTube.”

This is not the first time YouTube has been linked to radicalization and white supremacist content. There has been an ongoing argument about whether YouTube’s algorithm pushes people toward more extreme views over time. Although this is not a universal conclusion, some researchers say that the combination of a business model that rewards edgy content and a personalized algorithm meant to keep viewers hooked is a recipe for radicalization.

YouTube has made “significant progress” in curtailing hate speech since the 2019 Christchurch attack, says Alex Joseph, a YouTube spokesperson. YouTube strengthened its hate speech policy, terminated the channels mentioned in the report, and has altered its recommendations system to limit the spread of “borderline content.”

«

The report is remarkable in its calm tone; the killer is simply called “the individual” (always lower case) in order not to give any oxygen to him. It’s evident that he became radicalised through his use of the web, though much of the detail is lost: he took the hard drive out of his computer and it has not been found.
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LG shakes up loss-making phone business, to outsource lower-end models • Reuters

Joyce Lee:

»

LG’s mobile communications business, which has reported an operating loss for 22 consecutive quarters, has created a new management title for original design manufacture (ODM), a spokeswoman for the South Korean company said.

This refers to the outsourcing of design and manufacture of smartphones, with LG putting its label on the product.

It has also abolished some research and production positions and reshuffled others, the spokeswoman said, as part of an effort to focus its in-house R&D and production on premium smartphones, with low and mid-end ones to be produced by ODM.

Although ranked No. 3 in global smartphone market in the first quarter of 2013 by Strategy Analytics, LG is not even among the top seven in the third quarter of this year after losing ground to Chinese smartphone makers like Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, research firm Counterpoint says.

“It knows it is competing with Chinese competitors, not Apple or Samsung, and it is trying to add to its lower-end models’ value for the price, by using original design manufacturers that Chinese firms use,” Tom Kang, an analyst at Counterpoint, said.

“But even if LG sources its products, without marketing ability, it cannot win against Chinese firms who are good at it,” Kang added.

«

People look at that 22 quarters thing, but it’s even worse than it seems. I checked back on the records, and since Q1 2010, LG’s phone division has been profitable in just nine quarters. Nine out of 40. It’s been a money pit for ten years, and the management is only just now getting round to doing something about it. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Nearly one-fifth of Cadillac dealers have given up rather than convert to selling electric cars. CC-licensed photo by Tony Donnelly 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. Tariff-free. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Indian is an Indian phone? • Rest of World

Nilesh Christopher:

»

Anti-China sentiment had already been rising in India’s heartlands before a skirmish in June in a disputed Himalayan border region left 20 Indian soldiers dead. Nationalists started smashing Chinese-made televisions; one minister called for shutting down Chinese restaurants. A few weeks after the skirmish, the Indian government banned TikTok, along with hundreds of Chinese apps, and, in August, passed an unofficial order to phase out dependence on Chinese telecom equipment, including 5G networks. Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a special appearance on television encouraging Indians to be “vocal” in their support for “local” products, creating the #vocalforlocal slogan. 

Chinese smartphone makers like Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi — who made up 81% of the Indian market — were left in a precarious position after the clash. Right-wing groups gathered outside Oppo’s factory in the outskirts of Delhi and burnt effigies of Xi Jinping, as they demanded that the plant be closed. Some companies battened down the hatches, suspending their prime-time advertising campaigns. Vivo pulled out as the title sponsor of the country’s biggest sporting event, the Indian Premier League cricket competition, after an aggressive campaign against it on social media. Stray protests took place outside some Xiaomi stores, as threats of vandalism loomed large and mobile shipments from China were stalled for manual inspection at Indian ports.

But while other Chinese brands retreated from the limelight, Xiaomi pursued a unique — and potentially high-risk — strategy: It presented itself as not being Chinese after all, but Indian.

«

Fascinating piece about an audacious move by a (definitely Chinese) phone and gadget maker. What’s easy to overlook (but Christopher notes) is how well it has catered to its local market – such as this: “One feature, Smart SMS, identifies the cluttered text messages that Indian Railways sends to its customers and extracts booking information, turning it into a ticket-like document.” Knowing the importance of railways is obvious to Indians, not so much to those outside.
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Apple preps next Mac chips with aim to outclass top-end PCs • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Ian King:

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Chip engineers at the Cupertino, California-based technology giant are working on several successors to the M1 custom chip, Apple’s first Mac main processor that debuted in November. If they live up to expectations, they will significantly outpace the performance of the latest machines running Intel chips, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t yet public. Intel’s shares slid 2.9% in New York Monday after the news. Apple shares were up 1.3% at 9:46 a.m.

…While Intel gets less than 10% of its revenue from furnishing Apple with Mac chips, the rest of its PC business is liable to face turbulence if the iPhone maker is able to deliver demonstrably better-performing computers. It could accelerate a shakeup in an industry that has long been dependent on Intel’s pace of innovation. For Apple, the move sheds that dependency, deepens its distinction from the rest of the PC market and gives it a chance to add to its small, but growing share in PCs.

…The current M1 chip inherits a mobile-centric design built around four high-performance processing cores to accelerate tasks like video editing and four power-saving cores that can handle less intensive jobs like web browsing. For its next generation chip targeting MacBook Pro and iMac models, Apple is working on designs with as many as 16 power cores and four efficiency cores, the people said.

While that component is in development, Apple could choose to first release variations with only eight or 12 of the high-performance cores enabled depending on production, they said. Chipmakers are often forced to offer some models with lower specifications than they originally intended because of problems that emerge during fabrication.

For higher-end desktop computers, planned for later in 2021 and a new half-sized Mac Pro planned to launch by 2022, Apple is testing a chip design with as many as 32 high-performance cores.

With today’s Intel systems, Apple’s highest-end laptops offer a maximum of eight cores, a high-end iMac Pro is available with as many as 18 and the priciest Mac Pro desktop features as much as a 28-core system. Though architecturally different, Apple and Intel’s chips rely on the segmentation of workloads into smaller, serialized tasks that several processing cores can work on at once.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which has been gaining market share at Intel’s expense, offers standard desktop parts with as many as 16 cores, with some of its high-end chips for gaming PCs going as high as 64 cores.

«

I have to say, Bloomberg’s writing is prolix as hell. Other sites, rewriting this, focus on the meat – Apple is looking at a 32-core Pro, and 16-core MacBook Pros, and that’s making Intel investors a wee bit edgy and Apple investors optimistic. The question is, where’s the upside for PC makers? Windows on ARM is a disaster, and Microsoft doesn’t seem inclined to change that.
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Current x86 vs. Apple M1 performance measurements are flawed • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska joins those looking for a controversial take:

»

The “flaw” we’re going to talk about isn’t a problem with any specific benchmark or reviewer. It’s a difference in how the Apple M1 allocates and assigns resources versus how x86 CPUs work.

x86 CPUs from AMD and Intel are designed to use a technique known as Symmetric Multi-Threading (SMT; Intel calls this Hyper-Threading). AMD and Intel implement the feature somewhat differently, but in both cases, SMT-enabled CPUs are able to schedule work from more than one thread for execution in the same clock cycle. A CPU that does not support SMT is limited to executing instructions from the same thread in any given cycle.

Modern x86 CPUs from AMD and Intel take advantage of SMT to improve performance by an average of 20-30% at a fraction of the cost or power that would be required to build an entire second core. The flip side to this is that a single-threaded workload is unable to take advantage of the performance advantage SMT offers.

Apple’s 8-wide M1 doesn’t have this problem. The front-end of a RISC CPU allows generally higher efficiency in terms of instructions decoded per single thread. (WCCFTech has a bit more on this).

This is not some just-discovered flaw in the guts of Intel and AMD CPUs — it’s the entire reason Intel built HT and the reason why AMD adopted SMT as well. An x86 CPU achieves much higher overall efficiency when you run two threads through a single core, partly because they’ve been explicitly designed and optimized for it, and partly because SMT helps CPUs with decoupled CISC front-ends achieve higher IPC overall.

In any given 1T performance comparison, the x86 CPUs are running at 75% to 80% of their effective per-core performance. The M1 doesn’t have this issue.

«

Except, as he admits, the reality is clear: the M1 delivers far better performance per watt than Intel chips, and only struggles a bit when emulating x86 code. There’s going to be plenty more struggling around to find ways in which the M1 “isn’t really better” until those 32-core machines appear and stomp on the best AMD and Intel have to offer.
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Op-Ed: New York Times fights Pornhub with emotional pornography • XBIZ.com

XBIZ (which you may not know is “the world’s leading source for adult industry news and information”, where by “adult” they mean “porn”) has an opinion about Nicholas Kristof’s piece in the NYT about abuse on Pornhub:

»

• [Nicholas] Kristof claims that out of the 6.8 million new videos posted on Pornhub yearly, “many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence.” The “many” is tendentious here given that Kristof does not provide any concrete data of what percentage it is, how it compares to other adult or mainstream tube sites where bad actors may upload criminal content, or why he is singling out Pornhub for what appears to be an internet-wide issue for any company hosting massive amounts of third-party content

• One of several creepy searches Kristof has performed as “research” for his censorship manifesto, yielded “more than 100,000 videos,” of which he says, apparently by his own viewing and estimation “most aren’t of children being assaulted but too many are”

• Kristof protests that “the issue is not pornography but rape” and accuses Pornhub of “promoting” “assaults on children or on anyone without consent,” before likening the tube site to “Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein”

• Kristof in his “research” claims that he “came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.” At no point in his article does Kristof clarify whether he reported theses videos to the authorities or the site’s moderators or if he followed up with the company’s response to such a report

«

This piece, which has a tone that’s both defensive and grumpy, seems to want Kristof not to have done his research (as in the second bullet above) but also to have gone above and beyond just researching to actually moderating pretty much everything he found. But I read Kristof’s piece as pointing out that there’s a colossal moderation problem on Pornhub, because just as with sites like YouTube there’s no incentive for those who find bad material (terrorism, incitement) to report it if they search for it, there isn’t on Pornhub. But Kristof’s point is that the implications of this content on Pornhub are far worse than on YouTube, say. Unsurprisingly, Xbix doesn’t really grapple with this point. But it is definitely worried about what might happen to Section 230. (Thanks Droidboxx for the link.)
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Uber sells ATG self-driving unit to Aurora • CNBC

Jessica Bursztynsky:

»

Uber’s self-driving unit, Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), is being acquired by its start-up competitor Aurora Innovation, the companies announced Monday.

The deal, expected to close in the first quarter of 2021, values ATG at approximately $4bn. The unit was valued at $7.25bn in Apr. 2019 when Softbank, Denso and Toyota took a stake.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will join the company’s board, and the ride-sharing giant will invest $400m into the company.

Overall, Uber and ATG investors and employees are expected to own a 40% stake in Aurora, according to a regulatory filing accompanying the deal; Uber alone will hold a 26% stake. The start-up is being valued at $10bn in the transaction, according to a person familiar with the terms of the deal.

“With the addition of ATG, Aurora will have an incredibly strong team and technology, a clear path to several markets, and the resources to deliver,” Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora, said in a statement. “Simply put, Aurora will be the company best positioned to deliver the self-driving products necessary to make transportation and logistics safer, more accessible, and less expensive.”

«

This isn’t about Aurora, it’s about Uber – which is clearly giving up on the idea of making (and possibly running) self-driving systems. The problem with that is that without self-driving systems, Uber has no path to profitability that doesn’t involve raising its prices, and thus becoming uncompetitive against normal taxi services which don’t have its gigantic overheads.
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About 150 [of 880] US Cadillac dealers to exit brand, rather than sell electric cars • WSJ

Mike Colias:

»

About 150 General Motors dealers have decided to part ways with Cadillac, rather than invest in costly upgrades required to sell electric cars, according to people familiar with the plans, indicating some retailers are skeptical about pivoting to battery-powered vehicles.

GM recently gave Cadillac dealers a choice: Accept a buyout offer to exit from the brand or spend roughly $200,000 on dealership upgrades—including charging stations and repair tools—to get their stores ready to sell electric vehicles, these people said.

The buyout offers ranged from around $300,000 to more than $1m, the people familiar with the effort added. About 17% of Cadillac’s 880 US dealerships agreed to take the offer to end their franchise agreements for the luxury brand, these people said.

Most dealers who accepted the buyout also own one or more of GM’s other brands—Chevrolet, Buick and GMC—and sell only a handful of Cadillacs a month, the people familiar with the effort said.

The skepticism from some Cadillac dealers underscores that, even as investors bid up the value of electric vehicles, questions persist about interest among consumers and the retailers who serve them.

Tesla has become an electric-vehicle juggernaut by selling directly to customers, without franchise dealers, a model several startups intend to follow. Traditional auto makers, on the other hand, are tasked with overlaying their electric-car plans on dealer networks that today make their money selling gasoline-powered vehicles.

«

I test drove a Tesla, out of overwhelming curiosity, the other day. Compared to a fossil fuel car, it’s like being inside a computer: sensors on everything, everywhere. Readings of all sorts, and silence (apart from the radio). Opening the bonnet, the salesman explained that I’d have to keep the windscreen washer fluid topped up. Change the tyres occasionally. But nothing else. A mechanic’s nightmare.

Yet the dealers exiting seem to show a huge failure of imagination. Why not become a charging destination? An update destination? You can’t hang on to the past. (Via John Naughton, again.)
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Setting the record straight #ISupportTimnit #BelieveBlackWomen • Medium

Google Walkout For Real Change:

»

Dr. Gebru did not resign, despite what Jeff Dean (Senior Vice President and head of Google Research), has publicly stated. Dr. Gebru has stated this plainly, and others have meticulously documented it.

Dr.Gebru detailed conditions she hoped could be met. Those conditions were for
1) transparency around who was involved in calling for the retraction of the paper,
2) having a series of meetings with the Ethical AI team, and
3) understanding the parameters of what would be acceptable research at Google. She then requested a longer conversation regarding the details to occur post-vacation. In response, she was met with immediate dismissal, as she details in this tweet.

Dr. Gebru’s dismissal has been framed as a resignation, but in Dr. Gebru’s own words, she did not resign. All reports under her management received a letter from Megan Kacholia (Vice President of Engineering for the Google Brain organization), stating that Megan had accepted Timnit’s resignation. Megan went around Dr. Gebru’s own manager, Samy Bengio (lead of Google Brain) in sending these emails, which he has stated publicly.

«

Essentially, there’s now an insurgent group within Google which is fighting elements of Google’s management. This can’t end well for Google.
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Google adds Apple Music support to Assistant smart speakers and displays • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

»

Google has announced that Apple Music is now available on smart speakers and displays that use the Google Assistant, including Google’s own line of Nest products, such as the new Nest Audio. Owners of Assistant smart speakers or displays will be able to set Apple Music as the default service on the speakers and use their voice to play songs, albums, or playlists from it, much like they can do with Spotify, Pandora, or YouTube Premium.

This addition broadens the appeal of Assistant smart speakers and displays to a wider market, and it catches Google’s smart speaker line up to Amazon’s, which has supported Apple Music through Alexa on Echo smart speakers since 2018. As with the other services available on Google smart speakers, you can play Apple Music on multiple speakers at the same time for whole home audio.

With Apple Music on board, the only major services left that aren’t full supported on Google’s smart speakers are Amazon Music and Tidal, both of which are compatible with Echo speakers (which don’t support Google’s YouTube Music service).

«

More interesting is that this puts Apple Music on all the major ecosystems – Apple, Amazon, Google. And of course Sonos. Another little victory for the Services team there.
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Ikea ends publication of iconic printed catalog • The Verge

Thomas Ricker:

»

After a 70-year run, Ikea is discontinuing the publication of its printed catalog.

Ikea’s decision comes as catalog readership is in decline and the company becomes increasingly more digital. After initially resisting online shopping, the company was forced to embrace it during the pandemic. Ikea says its online retail sales increased by 45% worldwide last year with ikea.com reporting four billion visits. The company has also improved its suite of apps to make discovering and buying products easier, while opening smaller stores located in city centres meant to reach people where they live.

At its peak in 2016, Ikea says that 200 million catalogs were distributed in 32 languages. A BBC documentary once claimed that the Ikea catalog was the largest publication in the world, with more copies printed than either the Bible or the Quran. The first Ikea catalog was put together by Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad in 1951.

«

I have to say that browsing a physical catalogue is far more satisfying than browsing an app – even an iPad (or tablet) app. You can go as fast as you like, take in much more per (double) page, mark multiple things to compare. Of course Ikea’s online sales have risen like crazy in the past ten months – but so has everyone’s.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new filling station in Essex won’t offer petrol – just electrons. CC-licensed photo by JCT 600 on Flickr.

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

The Children of Pornhub • The New York Times

Nicholas Kristof:

»

Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty, the website that buys a billboard in Times Square and provides snow plows to clear Boston streets. It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality and offers steamy content free to get people through Covid-19 shutdowns.

That supposedly “wholesome Pornhub” attracts 3.5 billion visits a month, more than Netflix, Yahoo or Amazon. Pornhub rakes in money from almost three billion ad impressions a day. One ranking lists Pornhub as the 10th-most-visited website in the world.

Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.

After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.

Pornhub is like YouTube in that it allows members of the public to post their own videos. A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence. Because it’s impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal.

…The issue is not pornography but rape. Let’s agree that promoting assaults on children or on anyone without consent is unconscionable. The problem with Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein was not the sex but the lack of consent — and so it is with Pornhub.

I came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.

«

Kristof spent months on this article, which is as horrifying as you expect.
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We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says • MIT Technology Review

Karen Hao:

»

Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. She also cofounded the Black in AI affinity group, and champions diversity in the tech industry. The team she helped build at Google is one of the most diverse in AI, and includes many leading experts in their own right. Peers in the field envied it for producing critical work that often challenged mainstream AI practices.

…Online, many other leaders in the field of AI ethics are arguing that the company pushed her out because of the inconvenient truths that she was uncovering about a core line of its research—and perhaps its bottom line.

…Titled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” the paper lays out the risks of large language models—AIs trained on staggering amounts of text data. These have grown increasingly popular—and increasingly large—in the last three years. They are now extraordinarily good, under the right conditions, at producing what looks like convincing, meaningful new text—and sometimes at estimating meaning from language. But, says the introduction to the paper, “we ask whether enough thought has been put into the potential risks associated with developing them and strategies to mitigate these risks.”

…because the [language] training datasets are so large, it’s hard to audit them to check for… embedded biases. “A methodology that relies on datasets too large to document is therefore inherently risky,” the researchers conclude. “While documentation allows for potential accountability, […] undocumented training data perpetuates harm without recourse.”

The researchers summarize the third challenge as the risk of “misdirected research effort.” Though most AI researchers acknowledge that large language models don’t actually understand language and are merely excellent at manipulating it, Big Tech can make money from models that manipulate language more accurately, so it keeps investing in them. “This research effort brings with it an opportunity cost,” Gebru and her colleagues write. Not as much effort goes into working on AI models that might achieve understanding, or that achieve good results with smaller, more carefully curated datasets (and thus also use less energy).

The final problem with large language models, the researchers say, is that because they’re so good at mimicking real human language, it’s easy to use them to fool people. There have been a few high-profile cases, such as the college student who churned out AI-generated self-help and productivity advice on a blog, which went viral.

«

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Google workers mobilize against firing of top Black female executive • NBC News

Olivia Solon and April Glaser:

»

Nearly 800 Google employees have joined a solidarity campaign in support of one of the company’s top female executives, a known advocate for diversity in the industry who said she was fired after what her boss described as a dispute over a research paper.

The executive, Timnit Gebru, technical co-lead of Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team, announced on Twitter late Wednesday that she had been fired after sending an email to co-workers stating that the company’s leadership had forced her to retract a paper focusing on ethical problems involving the kind of artificial intelligence systems used to understand human language, including one that powers Google’s search engine.

The email also detailed her frustration with the company’s efforts to create a more inclusive workspace. She said that she feels “constantly dehumanized” at Google.

Google would not provide comment on Gebru’s firing, but pointed to an email from Google’s head of research, Jeff Dean, to employees, published by the technology newsletter Platformer, in which he said that Gebru had resigned.

«

By the time the story had been published, the number in the campaign was over a thousand. There’s a significance between being fired (Gebru’s line) and resigning: with the latter, you don’t qualify for unemployment and similar benefits. So the difference matters, a lot.
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How to become a best-selling author on Amazon in five minutes with three dollars • Quartz

Brent Underwood:

»

I would like to tell you about the biggest lie in book publishing. It appears in the biographies and social media profiles of almost every working “author” today. It’s the word “best seller.”

This isn’t about how The New York Times list is biased (though it is). This isn’t about how authors buy their way onto various national best-seller lists by buying their own books in bulk (though they do). No, this is about the far more insidious title of “Amazon Best Seller”—and how it’s complete and utter nonsense.

Here’s what happened in the book industry over the last few years: As Amazon has become the big dog in the book world, the “Amazon Best Seller” status has come to be synonymous with being an actual best seller. This is not true, and I can prove it.

A while ago, I put up a fake book on Amazon. I took a photo of my foot, uploaded it as a book to Amazon, and in a matter of hours had achieved “№1 Best Seller” status, complete with the orange banner and everything.

How many copies did I need to sell to be able to call up my mother and celebrate my newfound authorial achievements? Three. Yes, a total of three copies to become a best-selling author. And I bought two of those copies myself!

The reason people aspire to call themselves “best-selling author” is because it dramatically increases your credibility and “personal brand.” It can establish you as a thought leader. You’re able to show that you not only wrote a book, but that the market has judged it to be better than other books out there.

«

Though this was written in 2017, I doubt any of its truth has changed. There are so many categories that any ebook can become a best-seller (given a few friends) very quickly. The problem of too much, again.
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Police drones are starting to think for themselves • The New York Times

Cade Metz:

»

Each day, the Chula Vista police respond to as many as 15 emergency calls with a drone, launching more than 4,100 flights since the program began two years ago. Chula Vista, a Southern California city with a population of 270,000, is the first in the country to adopt such a program, called Drone as First Responder.

Over the last several months, three other cities — two in California and one in Georgia — have followed suit. Police agencies from Hawaii to New York have used drones for years, but mostly in simple, manually flown ways. Officers would carry a drone in the trunk of a car on patrol or drive it to a crime scene before launching it over a park or flying it inside a building.

But the latest drone technology — mirroring technology that powers self-driving cars — has the power to transform everyday policing, just as it can transform package delivery, building inspections and military reconnaissance. Rather than spending tens of millions of dollars on large helicopters and pilots, even small police forces could operate tiny autonomous drones for a relative pittance.

That newfound automation, however, raises civil liberties concerns, especially as drones gain the power to track vehicles and people automatically. As the police use more drones, they could collect and store more video of life in the city, which could remove any expectation of privacy once you leave the home.

“Communities should ask hard questions about these programs. As the power and scope of this technology expands, so does the need for privacy protection,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology. “Drones can be used to investigate known crimes. But they are also sensors that can generate offenses.”

«

I’m not sure I follow the logic in “generate offences”. Either you’re committing an offence or you’re not, and the presence of a drone won’t change that. The drones are essentially police dogs that can fly wearing a camera on their chest. I think we’d like them a lot more if they were represented like that.
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The light of the charge brigade? • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

»

The British county of Essex is often the butt of jokes here, since it has a few notably unappealing areas, but this is unfair. In general it’s a lovely county with some particularly pretty spots. Just at the moment, though, it has a different kind of jewel in its crown, at least from my point of view, because it’s also home to what looks like one of the coolest car-charging areas on the planet. If you want to see what the future of car travel might be, the place to go is probably the Gridserve Electric Forecourt near Braintree, which opens formally next week.

It has no fewer than 36 rapid chargers, and most of them are very rapid; there are a dozen that can supply 350kW (which almost nothing can actually consume, yet, but they’re future-proofing). 350kW, to give you an idea, would gain you about 25-30 miles of range for every minute you’re plugged in. There’s a bank of the Tesla v3 superchargers, too, which can do up to 250kW.

Now, you might well ask, how can you supply this quantity of electricity, even with that many solar panels? Well, the answer is that, as well as a good grid connection, they have an enormous battery pack next door and a solar farm just down the road. While you’re charging, there are cafes, loos and shops available.

I haven’t visited yet, but it just so happens I’ll be in that area next week, so I may well take a look.

Oh, and they’re hoping to build 100 of these.

«

This is absolutely what the electric car industry needs – though it also needs chargers to be in supermarket car parks, and in ordinary car parks, and in ordinary streets. Electric cars are still too hard to use reasonably for most people. (Via John Naughton.)
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Denmark to end oil, gas extraction in North Sea • Associated Press

Jan Olsen:

»

The Danish Parliament voted late Thursday to end offshore gas and oil extraction, which had started in 1972 and made the country the largest producer in the European Union. Non EU-members Norway and Britain are larger producers, with a bigger presence in the North Sea.

Denmark is this year estimated to pump a bit over 100,000 barrels of crude oil and oil equivalents a day, according to the government.

That is relatively little in a global context. The U.K. produces about ten times that amount while the US, the world’s largest producer, pumped over 19 million barrels of oil a day last year. Environmental activists nevertheless said the move was significant as it shows the way forward in the fight against climate change.

Greenpeace called it “a landmark decision toward the necessary phase-out of fossil fuels.”

“This is a huge victory for the climate movement,” said Helene Hagel of Greenpeace Denmark. Wealthy Denmark has “a moral obligation to end the search for new oil to send a clear signal that the world can and must act to meet the Paris Agreement and mitigate the climate crisis.”

The 2015 landmark Paris climate deal asks both rich and poor countries to take action to curb the rise in global temperatures that is melting glaciers, raising sea levels and shifting rainfall patterns. It requires governments to present national plans to reduce emissions to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Denmark has been an early adopter of wind power, with more than a third of its electricity production deriving from wind turbines. They are considered key in the transformation of the energy system and should enable Denmark to no longer be dependent on fossil fuels in 2050 for electricity production.

«

Might not be big in absolute terms, but as Greenpeace says, it’s a significant decision because it’s a whole country. To a large extent, this is how action has to be taken: at governmental level.
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TikTok sale deadline on hold as talks with US continue • Bloomberg

Kurt Wagner, Shelly Banjo, and Jennifer Jacobs:

»

A deadline set by the Trump administration for the forced sale of TikTok’s US assets will come and go Friday without a final deal, according to people familiar with the discussions.

While the deadline has been extended multiple times, TikTok isn’t expected to receive a new one, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the decision isn’t yet public. TikTok is still in talks with the US government about a sale that satisfies the administration’s national security concerns, but Friday’s deadline will be allowed to lapse while the discussions continue.

The US Treasury Department told TikTok and Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd. that they won’t face a fine or other punishment for missing the deadline because the sides are still negotiating. The deal, which has been in the works for months, is close to being finished, and the administration is eager to complete it before President-elect Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20, according to one of the people.

«

The Trump admininstration has either lost interest (as Trump seems to have done in absolutely everything) or hopes to to create some sort of screwup that it will leave in fire in an envelope on the doorstep of the Biden administration.
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Recovering passwords from pixelized screenshots • LinkedIn

Sipke Mellema:

»

Images can be obfuscated in many ways, which is generally referred to as blurring. Pixelization with box filters can be seen as a subset of blurring techniques. Most blurring algorithms tend to spread out pixels as they try to mimic natural blurs caused by shaky cameras or focusing issues.

These exist many deblurring tools for common tasks, such as sharpening blurry photographs. Unfortunately, the pixelated passwords I’m working with are only a couple of blocks in height, so there is nothing to sharpen.

Recent developments in AI have raised fancy headlines such as “Researchers Have Created a Tool That Can Perfectly Depixelate Faces”. However, the AI does no such thing. This recent PULSE algorithm is similar to Google’s RAISR algorithm from 2016. The AI generates faces that result in the same image when pixelized, but the face it recovers is not the original.

Algorithms such as PULSE seem new, but they stem from a long lineage of deblurring tools. M. W. Buie wrote a tool in 1994 (!) to generate ‘Plutos’, blur them, and match them with observed images.

In a widely known article from 2006, D. Venkatraman explains an algorithm for recovering a pixelized credit card number. The idea is simple: generate all credit card numbers, pixelize them, and compare the result to the pixelized number.

…If not enough information is available to properly smooth the image back together, the technique-of-choice is to pixelize similar data and check if it matches. This is also the basis for my algorithm for recovering passwords from screenshots.

«

And his tool for discovering passwords from blurred images is on Github. Better find a different way to blur them than box filters in future.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

South Africans are exercised over a surprising outcome from a lottery draw earlier this week. How likely was it? CC-licensed photo by Tomasz Krawczak on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not refrigerated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Covid-19: Facebook to take down false vaccine claims • BBC News

Alistair Coleman:

»

Facebook says it will start removing false claims about Covid-19 vaccines to prevent “imminent physical harm”.

The company says it is accelerating its plans to ban misleading and false information on its Facebook and Instagram platforms following the announcement of the first vaccine being approved for use in the United Kingdom.

Among already-debunked claims that won’t be allowed are falsehoods about vaccine ingredients, safety, effectiveness and side-effects. Also banned will be the long-running false conspiracy theory that coronavirus vaccines will contain a microchip to control or monitor patients.

Facebook has come under fire for what’s been seen as a patchy approach to fake news and false claims, and misleading content about the pandemic is still widely available on its platforms.

…This is a continuation of the policy “to remove misinformation about the virus that could lead to imminent physical harm”, the company said. “This could include false claims about the safety, efficacy, ingredients or side effects of the vaccines [and] false claims that Covid-19 vaccines contain microchips, or anything else that isn’t on the official vaccine ingredient list.

“We will also remove conspiracy theories about Covid-19 vaccines that we know today are false.” However, Facebook warned that these policies, which the BBC understands have been brought forward following the approval of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine by the British medicines regulator, will take some time to come into effect. “We will not be able to start enforcing these policies overnight,” a Facebook statement said.

«

This is unusual because usually Facebook just makes content harder to share. Removing it goes against its general ethos. The evolution of its position has been dramatic this year: from hands-off around medical matters, including anti-vaxx nonsense, at the start of the year, to removal of content now.
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South Africa’s lottery probed as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 drawn and 20 win • BBC News

»

An unusual sequence of numbers drawn in South Africa’s national lottery has sparked accusations of fraud after 20 people won a share of the jackpot.

Tuesday’s PowerBall lottery saw the numbers five, six, seven, eight and nine drawn, while the PowerBall itself was, you have guessed it, 10.

The organisers say the sequence is often picked. But some have alleged a scam and an investigation is under way.

It is extremely rare for multiple winners to share the jackpot.

The organisers said 20 people purchased a winning ticket and won 5.7m rand ($370,000; £278,000) each.
Another 79 ticketholders won 6,283 rand each for guessing the sequence from five up to nine but missing the PowerBall.

The chances of winning South Africa’s PowerBall lottery are one in 42,375,200 – the number of different combinations when selecting five balls from a set of 50, plus an additional bonus ball from a pool of 20.

«

You can find the results here – it’s the December 1 draw. The order that they actually came out was 8, 5, 9, 7, 6 and then 10. Not quite as weird (to our sense). Can’t find a film of it, though. Who’d have thought that a lottery might throw up a chance sequence?
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Half of bridges on England’s busiest roads in ‘poor condition’ • The Times

George Greenwood and Graeme Paton:

»

Nearly half the bridges on England’s busiest roads have key sections in a poor or very poor condition, prompting concerns about traffic chaos while vital repairs are carried out.

An investigation by The Times found that 4,000 of about 9,000 bridges and large culverts on motorways or A-roads showed evidence of defects or damage that may significantly affect their capacity.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act from Highways England, the government-owned company that maintains motorways and major A-roads, show that 858 structures had at least one load-bearing or otherwise crucial section in “very poor condition” as of April 2019. Fourteen bridges and culverts were given the worst possible score of zero, the data shows.

According to official guidance, sections deemed to be in a very poor condition are at risk of failure, with weight restrictions and other measures possibly being imposed to limit further damage. In the case of bridges, this could mean limiting traffic to a single lane and banning heavy vehicles.

In all, there were 141 bridges with very poor parts on the M6. A further 90 were given the lowest rating on the M1, 51 on the M62 and 50 on the M5.

Highways England attempted to keep the data secret and released it only after an 18-month freedom of information battle. A separate disclosure by Transport for London (TfL) shows that about 200 out of 500 bridges and other structures that it maintains in the capital – 40% – also had key sections in poor or very poor condition.

«

Gantries, highway spans and masts are all doing well, but bridges are a definite concern. Can we borrow Infrastructure Week? Except that never sorted out infrastructure in the US.
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Computer latency: 1977-2017 • Danluu

Dan Luu:

»

I”ve had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices I’ve run into in the past few months.

…Almost every computer and mobile device that people buy today is slower than common models of computers from the 70s and 80s. Low-latency gaming desktops and the iPad Pro can get into the same range as quick machines from 30 to 40 years ago, but most off-the-shelf devices aren’t even close.

If we had to pick one root cause of latency bloat, we might say that it’s because of “complexity”. Of course, we all know that complexity is bad. If you’ve been to a non-academic non-enterprise tech conference in the past decade, there’s a good chance that there was at least one talk on how complexity is the root of all evil and we should aspire to reduce complexity.

Unfortunately, it’s a lot harder to remove complexity than to give a talk saying that we should remove complexity. A lot of the complexity buys us something, either directly or indirectly. When we looked at the input of a fancy modern keyboard vs. the apple 2 keyboard, we saw that using a relatively powerful and expensive general purpose processor to handle keyboard inputs can be slower than dedicated logic for the keyboard, which would both be simpler and cheaper. However, using the processor gives people the ability to easily customize the keyboard, and also pushes the problem of “programming” the keyboard from hardware into software, which reduces the cost of making the keyboard. The more expensive chip increases the manufacturing cost, but considering how much of the cost of these small-batch artisanal keyboards is the design cost, it seems like a net win to trade manufacturing cost for ease of programming.

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The table showing latency is really quite surprising – both for what’s at the top, and what isn’t.
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Post-Brexit Britain will have to do better than this to curb the power of big tech • The Guardian

Michelle Meagher:

»

Last week the government said it was setting up the Digital Markets Unit (DMU) to address the multiple challenges and threats that tech platforms pose. This is part of a flurry of initiatives: the government has also launched a Digital Markets Taskforce to help the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) design better policy, and commissioned a broader review of UK competition policy under John Penrose, which is due to report by the year’s end.

Will these initiatives deliver? Early signs indicate that the government does not yet appreciate the scale of the problem. Secretary of state for digital Oliver Dowden prefaced his diplomatic reference to a “consensus” of concerns about the sector by saying he is “unashamedly pro-tech”. The report accompanying the DMU announcement confidently promotes the “huge benefits” and economic contribution of the tech firms, while equivocating on “potential harms”. What we’re seeing, broadly, is the spell that a free-market, “tech solutionist” ideology casts over our authorities, allowing monopoly power to run wild, encouraging waves of mergers and paying little attention to questions of power, democracy or inequality.

The latest UK government initiatives are the fruit of last year’s Furman review to protect digital markets – and already some of its strongest proposals seem to have been kicked into the long grass. A recommendation that has survived is a “code of competitive conduct” to govern companies with “strategic market status” (likely to include Facebook and Google). This code, they say, will be “mandatory” and “enforceable”, which is surely the least we might expect.

No code of conduct ever reshaped a market. The new code promises “clear expectations over what represents acceptable behaviour”. This sounds like a very British approach towards companies that are busy smashing up our small businesses, newspapers and high streets, remaking markets for their own benefit.

«

(Meagher is is a competition lawyer and author of Competition is Killing Us: How Big Business is Harming Our Society and Planet – and What to do About it.)
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Justice Dept. suit says Facebook discriminates against US workers • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang and Mike Isaac:

»

The Department of Justice on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Facebook for hiring discrimination against U.S. workers, in the Trump administration’s latest action against large tech companies.

In the complaint, the department’s civil rights division said Facebook “refused to recruit, consider or hire qualified and available U.S. workers” for more than 2,600 positions, with an average salary of $156,000. Those jobs instead went to immigrant visa holders, according to the complaint.

The action followed a two-year investigation into whether Facebook intentionally favored so-called H1-B visa and other temporary immigrant workers over U.S. workers, the Justice Department said.

“Our message to workers is clear: If companies deny employment opportunities by illegally preferring temporary visa holders, the Department of Justice will hold them accountable,” said Eric S. Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division. “Our message to all employers — including those in the technology sector — is clear: You cannot illegally prefer to recruit, consider or hire temporary visa holders over U.S. workers.”

Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, said, “Facebook has been cooperating with the D.O.J. in its review of this issue, and while we dispute the allegations in the complaint, we cannot comment further on pending litigation.”

«

H1-B workers are often effectively indentured workers – they can’t change employer because the employer is the one guaranteeing their visa. So companies like having them more than indigenous workers who could feel free to move on. There’s still some distance to go on this.
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It’s time for movie theatres to die so movies can live again • Input

Joshua Topolsky:

»

over the last two decades or so, the movie-going experience has been degraded by turns, both in terms of the physical reality of packing hundreds of people into a shared experience with a world of increasing distractions, and in the quality of the “blockbuster” fare being peddled by studios. This pandemic has made us all take a long, hard look at what has really been working for humanity and what hasn’t, and I think the theater experience — at least the massive, multi-screen one we’ve been living with — might be dying at just the right time.

There are myriad contributors to this realization. For me, it starts with the basic reality that a truly epic film-watching experience can now be had in your house, with all the big-screen bombast and overwhelming audio that theaters have long touted as their domain alone. A fairly cheap, big-screen 4K TV, and an accompanying surround sound setup will put you right back in the theater recliner, except you have full control over the experience. Whether that means being able to pause for bathroom and snack breaks, having the option to just switch the film if you don’t like what you’re seeing, or being able to return to something over a period of time, watching at home can not only be as good as watching in a theater — it can be better.

…Would Tenet have been a more successful film if we all could have paid a premium to watch it [at home] on opening day? The numbers suggest yes.

«

All he says may be true, but there are very strong vested interests which want movie theatres to stay open – principally, the theatres. Which have a strong relationship with the studios. But the decision by Warner Bros to debut all of its 2021 films on HBO Max and in theatres simultaneously is going to test that to the limit.

Very doubtful that you’d make back $200m from streaming. You need movies and their big ticket prices.
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Drone footage shows the shocking collapse of the Arecibo Observatory • The Verge

Loren Grush:

»

The video, captured on December 1st, shows the moment when support cables snapped, causing the massive 900-ton structure suspended above Arecibo to fall onto the observatory’s iconic 1,000-foot-wide dish.

The videos of the collapse were captured by a camera located in Arecibo’s Operations Control Center, as well as from a drone located above the platform at the time of collapse. The operator of the drone was able to adjust the drone camera once the platform started to fall and capture the moment of impact. NSF, which oversees Arecibo, had been doing hourly monitoring of the observatory with drones, ever since engineers warned that the structure was on the verge of collapsing in November. “I think we were just lucky and the drone operator was very adept to see what was happening and be able to turn the camera,” Ashley Zauderer, the NSF program manager for Arecibo Observatory, said during a press conference.

The footage highlights the moment when multiple cables snapped, causing the platform to swing outward and hit the side of the dish. The collapse also brought down the tops of the three support towers surrounding Arecibo, where the cables had been connected to keep the platform in the air.

«

The whole thing happens over the seconds from 0:55 to 1:05; one of the (relatively) thin outer wires abruptly explodes at 1:00, and then there’s a pause before the entire cable fails. It’s like a scene from Gravity.
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Google illegally spied on and retaliated against workers, Feds say • Ars Technica

Kate Cox:

»

Google fired several different workers late last year amid apparent efforts to organize company employees. Four former employees who were let go last November—Laurence Berland, Paul Duke, Rebecca Rivers, and Sophie Waldman—filed complaints with the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] almost exactly a year ago alleging that Google’s “draconian, pernicious, and unlawful conduct” was an unlawful attempt to prevent workplace organizing.

A few weeks later, another former Google employee, Kathryn Spiers, was fired after she developed a tool for the company’s internal build of Chrome that notified Google workers of their legal rights to organize. Spiers, too, filed a complaint with the NLRB claiming that Google’s retaliation against her was unlawful.

Google at the time alleged that Rivers, Berland, and others were fired for “intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies.” According to the NLRB’s filing, however, Google put several of the rules the employees allegedly violated in place in response to the employee organizing efforts, and those rules were designed to “discourage employees from forming, joining, [or] assisting a union.” The company also unlawfully surveilled employees’ protected activities by viewing an employee slide deck in support of a union drive, as well as by interrogating employees about protected activities.

“Google’s hiring of IRI is an unambiguous declaration that management will no longer tolerate worker organizing,” Berland said in a statement, referring to Google bringing on the infamous union-busting firm as consultants in late 2019. “Management and their union busting cronies wanted to send that message, and the NLRB is now sending their own message: worker organizing is protected by law.”

«

Another Google worker, Timnit Gebru, who worked on ethical AI research was fired on Thursday, apparently for expressing her frustration at her experience in the company. Fired, not resigned.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Hyperbolic paraboloids! And the canister is pretty good for Wi-Fi extenders too. CC-licensed photo by Chris 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. Disconnected. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The modern world has finally become too complex for any of us to understand • OneZero

Tim Maughan:

»

I am here to tell you that the reason so much of the world seems incomprehensible is that it is incomprehensible. From social media to the global economy to supply chains, our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.

In other words: no one’s driving. And if we hope to retake the wheel, we’re going to have to understand, intimately, all of the ways we’ve lost control. This is the first entry in a series — called, yes, No One’s Driving — that aims to do exactly that. Each month, we’ll examine a technological system that has grown too complex to be understood by, well, just about any one person, and break down how it has spiraled out of control, why that is dangerous, and what we might do about it.

Most of us do not spend a lot of time thinking about the huge, complex systems that keep our technologically dependent society running. And with very good reason. It takes a certain amount of faith and belief — in ourselves, in capitalism, in the digital platforms that mediate our interactions with it, and in the infrastructures that support all of the above — in order to wake up and get through every day. But eating breakfast, pulling on our business-casual Zoom-appropriate shirts — all those mundane acts are made possible by an almost unfathomably complex, algorithmically calibrated, partly automated, and partly sweatshop-labor-dependent global supply chain.

There are currently over 17 million shipping containers in circulation globally, and at any given time, about 5 or 6 million shipping containers cross the sea. The US alone imports over 20 million shipping containers’ worth of products a year. While it’s common to talk about iPhones and high-end sneakers when we talk about imports from China and Asia, the truth is the vast majority of those containers are stuffed which much more mundane goods: socks, umbrellas, pencils, paper, packing materials, bedsheets, fruit, car parts, frozen food, pharmaceuticals — the endless inventory of physical items that make our modern lives possible.

«

Maughan is a science fiction writer (based in Bristol) whose novel Infinite Detail posits a world where all this breaks down. It’s entertaining, if worrying.
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The geometry of Pringles, the crunchy hyperbolic paraboloid • Interesting Engineering

Kathleen Villaluz:

»

Perfectly executed geometries are always pleasant to look at as their natural proportions are simply eye-catching. Just like how a perfectly symmetrical human face, that is naturally proportioned with the golden ratio, is always deemed beautiful or pretty. In the case of a Pringle chip, its intersecting curves form a sturdy structure as well as an attractive geometry.

This special geometry is referred to as the hyperbolic paraboloid in the world of mathematics.

What is interesting about a hyperbolic paraboloid is the point where the maximum and the minimum of the two principal curvatures meet each other at a zero point. This is known as the saddle point or the minimax point.

So, what makes it particularly interesting?

The hyperbolic paraboloid’s intersecting double curvature prevents a line of stress from forming, which doesn’t encourage a crack to naturally propagate. That’s why Pringles have that extra crunch in them when you either bite a piece off or when you put a whole Pringle in your mouth.

If you frequently eat Pringles you would know that they never break off symmetrically but instead, they crack in different directions and produce flakes with varying shapes. It’s all due to the hyperbolic paraboloid geometry of each chip.

«

From 2017, but they’re still just as moreish, and the bottom one in a pack doesn’t get crushed just the same as ever.
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NASA: this rare metal asteroid is worth more than the global economy • Robb Report

Rachel Cormack:

»

Humans just got one more reason to journey to outer space. There’s a rare asteroid the size of Massachusetts orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, and it’s worth an estimated $10,000 quadrillion.

The rarity, known as 16 Psyche, was actually discovered back in 1852, but NASA’s Hubble Telescope has finally given earth-dwellers a closer look. The new study, which was published this week in The Planetary Science Journal, indicates that asteroid’s composition is key to its astronomical value.

To put this touted figure into perspective, when written out in full it boasts a line of zeros that could nearly stretch to the asteroid itself. That’s $10,000,000,000,000,000,000. This makes Psyche 70,000 times more valuable than the global economy, worth about $142 trillion in 2019, or enough to buy and sell Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is just shy of $200 billion, about 50 million times. That’s all thanks to some heavy metal.

Psyche, which spans 140 miles in diameter, appears to made entirely of iron and nickel. This metallic construction sets it apart from other asteroids that are usually comprised of rock or ice.

«

It’s 230 million miles away, of course, and you’d have to think that the price of iron and nickel might just possibly fall if a colossal amount were suddenly made available. Supply and demand, what even are they?
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TSMC confirms 3nm tech for 2022, could enable epic 80 billion transistor GPUs • PC Gamer

Jeremy Laird:

»

Monster chip foundry TSMC has confirmed its 3nm production node is on track for full mass production in the second half of 2022, according to Chinese tech site ItHome (in Chinese). TSMC reckons its 3nm node will pack in somewhere north of 250 million transistors per square millimetre of silicon, making it at least two and half times more dense than Intel’s latest 10nm node. In theory, TSMC’s 3nm tech could enable a GPU three times more complex than AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000 Series chips.

TSMC, of course, makes all of AMD’s high performance Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs. Until recently, it also produced Nvidia’s top graphics chips, too. Advances like TSMC 3nm tech matter because they allow for more complex, faster computer chips. Like, you know, CPUs and GPUs.

Intel reckons its new 10nm process is good for around 100 million transistors per square millimetre, while TSMC’s most refined 7nm process is rated at 113 million transistors per square millimetre.

While TSMC is promising at least 250 million transistors per square millimetre for its 3nm node, the reality may turn out nearer 300 million. All of which means that in late 2022, TSMC will have the capability of producing chips somewhere between 2.5x and 3x as dense as the 7nm tech used for current AMD CPUs and graphics chips.

«

Apple’s M1 is on 5nm, of course, but going down to 3nm would still mean a dramatic increase in the number of transistors on a chip, and hence even more computing power. This would power, what, the M3?
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EU criticises ‘hasty’ UK approval of COVID-19 vaccine • Reuters

Francesco Guarascio:

»

The European Union criticised Britain’s rapid approval of Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday, saying its own procedure was more thorough, after Britain became the first western country to endorse a COVID-19 shot.

The move to grant emergency authorisation to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has been seen by many as a political coup for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has led his country out of the EU and faced criticism for his handling of the pandemic.

The decision was made under an ultra-fast, emergency approval process, which allowed the British drugs regulator to temporarily authorise the vaccine only 10 days after it began examining data from large-scale trials.

In an unusually blunt statement, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which is in charge of approving COVID-19 vaccines for the EU, said its longer approval procedure was more appropriate as it was based on more evidence and required more checks than the emergency procedure chosen by Britain.

The agency said on Tuesday it would decide by Dec. 29 whether to provisionally authorise the vaccine from US drugmaker Pfizer Inc and its German partner BioNTech SE.

«

A difference of about three weeks. Some Tory MPs have been crowing that this was made possible by Brexit; in fact that isn’t true. But the EU’s criticism will be valuable fuel for getting the pro-Brexit crowd (some of whom are insistent Covid is nonsense) to get vaccinated, if only to annoy the EU.
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An iOS zero-click radio proximity exploit odyssey • Google Project Zero

Ian Beer:

»

In this demo I remotely trigger an unauthenticated kernel memory corruption vulnerability which causes all iOS devices in radio-proximity to reboot, with no user interaction. Over the next 30,000 words I’ll cover the entire process to go from this basic demo to successfully exploiting this vulnerability in order to run arbitrary code on any nearby iOS device and steal all the user data

«

There’s a short video which shows a laptop (screen not visible) doing something, and an array of iPhones just beside it winking off like lights going out in a power cut. If you really want to get into the weeds of how security researchers discover things (this took him six months of hard work, once he had the idea in 2018 after a mistake in an iOS beta by Apple) then you can.

Also: Apple fixed the vulnerability, which is quite an Independence Day-style thing (like when they upload the virus into the attacking spacecraft). Wi-Fi continues to be a fabulous source of security drama, as it has been from the beginning. (Ars Technica has a shorter writeup too.)
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Windows on M1 Macs: how to run ARM virtualization [Video] • 9to5Mac

Michael Potuck:

»

Last week we saw the first successful virtualization of ARM Windows 10 on an M1 Mac. The good news is that it even appeared to be “pretty snappy.” Now we’ve got a look at a helpful walkthrough and peek at real-world performance in a new video, including the M1 Mac mini blowing away Microsoft’s Surface Pro X.

Alexander Graf was the first to successfully run an ARM Windows virtualization on an M1 Mac. He used the QEMU open source machine emulator and an Insider Preview of Windows.

…YouTuber Martin Nobel shared a useful video of the process to run an ARM Windows virtualization on Apple Silicon as well as a real-world look at the overall impressive performance considering it’s an unofficial workaround.

Impressively, the Martin’s M1 Mac mini benchmarked much higher than Microsoft’s Surface Pro X, almost doubling the single-core score, and coming in almost 2,000 higher in the multi-core score. Sure it’s not a desktop like the Mac mini, but you can get about the same performance from the $999 M1 MacBook Air, a closer competitor to the $999 Surface Pro X.

«

It’s a very roundabout way to do something, but gets it done nonetheless. There must be a lot of meetings going on at Microsoft just now trying to figure out their strategy on this. Allow it? Continue ignoring it?
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Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? And what can we do to use this global opportunity for green growth? • Our World in Data

Max Roser:

»

If we want to transition to renewables, it is their price relative to fossil fuels that matters. This chart here is identical to the previous one, but now also includes the price of electricity from renewable sources.

All of these prices – renewables as well as fossil fuels – are without subsidies.

Look at the change in solar and wind energy in recent years. Just 10 years ago it wasn’t even close: it was much cheaper to build a new power plant that burns fossil fuels than to build a new solar photovoltaic (PV) or wind plant. Wind was 22%, and solar 223% more expensive than coal.

But in the last few years this has changed entirely.

Electricity from utility-scale solar photovoltaics cost $359 per MWh in 2009. Within just one decade the price declined by 89% and the relative price flipped: the electricity price that you need to charge to break even with the new average coal plant is now much higher than what you can offer your customers when you build a wind or solar plant.

It’s hard to overstate what a rare achievement these rapid price changes represent. Imagine if some other good had fallen in price as rapidly as renewable electricity: Imagine you’d found a great place to live back in 2009 and at the time you thought it’d be worth paying $3590 in rent for it. If housing had then seen the price decline that we’ve seen for solar it would have meant that by 2019 you’d pay just $400 for the same place.

«

Astonishing chart. Onshore (and offshore) wind really do hold out a lot of hope; next you need other consumption to shift to electricity from fossil fuels too.
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Parler’s weak moderation attracts pornography • The Washington Post

Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell and Rachel Lerman:

»

Anyone following the #sexytrumpgirl hashtag on Parler, a social media site increasingly popular with conservatives, got an eyeful one recent Thursday evening as images of topless women and links to hardcore pornography websites appeared at a rapid-fire rate, often more than one per minute.

The surge of #sexytrumpgirl posts highlighted a broader dilemma for Parler: The site’s lax moderation policies, in keeping with its claims to being a bastion of free speech, have helped it become a magnet for pornographers, escort services and online sex merchants using hashtags targeting conservatives, such as #keepamericasexy and #milfsfortrump2020.

The pornography threatens to intrude on users not seeking sexual material and has the potential to complicate hopes the site may have to expand advertising, which is now limited. Experts on the impact of pornography say major companies typically avoid having their sales pitches appear alongside controversial imagery.

…Officials at Parler, including chief operating officer Jeffrey Wernick and chief policy officer Amy Peikoff, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on its handling of pornography.

Peikoff defended the company’s approach to content moderation in response to questions for a previous Post story about Parler. “Broadly, our whole guiding principle is that we want to allow everything that the First Amendment protects as speech, and nothing that it doesn’t,” she said.

The U.S. Supreme Court has declared pornographic images of adults to be constitutionally protected speech.

«

Pornography is one of those things (along with spam) that keeps tripping up those who oppose sites being able to remove content they don’t want. Parler, hoist with its own petard there. “One per minute” sounds like nothing, but it’s a tiny site as well.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The iconic telescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico has collapsed after cables suspending this system broke. CC-licensed photo by Meredith P. 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. Unobserved. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Salesforce to acquire Slack for $27.7bn • The New York Times

Erin Griffith and Lauren Hirsch:

»

Demand for Slack’s products, which allow people to communicate and collaborate with one another, has increased as people work from home during the pandemic. While the company said in September that revenue rose 49% to $216m in the quarter ending in July and that the pandemic had created a “significant increase in demand and usage of Slack,” it also said it did not expect that rise to continue. Layoffs at some of its customers have hurt its business, the company said.

At the same time, Slack has faced increasing competitive pressure from Microsoft. Teams, Microsoft’s collaboration product, reported 115 million daily users in October, up 50% from April. Slack has not provided an update on the 12 million daily users it reported a year ago.
Editors’ Picks

In July, Slack filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission, claiming Microsoft had unfairly bundled Teams with its suite of Microsoft Office work products. Microsoft has offered the software alongside Office since Teams was released in 2017.

“When you’re a scrappy start-up going against an 800-pound gorilla that’s one of the most well-capitalized companies in existence, its tough to compete,” Mr. Park said of Slack. “This is more or less saying, ‘We can’t compete with Microsoft Teams anymore. We need more firepower.’”

«

I wonder if the complaint against Microsoft lapses once Slack becomes part of a much, much bigger company. I don’t think anyone’s expecting the interface to become any more friendly (or platform-specific). The amount works out to roughly $250,000 per paying user, by the way.
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52 things I learned in 2020 • Fluxx Studio Notes

Tom Whitwell:

»

This year I edited another book, worked on fascinating projects at Fluxx, and learned many learnings.

1. Most cities plant only male trees because it’s expensive to clear up the fruit that falls from female trees. Male trees release pollen, and that’s one of the reasons your hay fever is getting worse. [Jessica Price]

2. In China, 🙂 doesn’t mean happy, it means “a despising, mocking, and even obnoxious attitude”. Use these, instead: 😁😄😀. [Echo Huang]

3. The hold music you hear when you phone Octopus Energy is personalised to your customer account: it’s a number one record from the year you were 14. [Clem Cowton]

4. If Apple AirPods was a standalone business (founded 2016, $12bn revenue, 125% growth, 30–50% margin), it would probably be the most valuable startup in the world. [Kevin Rooke]

5. Sarcasm detection has been a serious problem in computer science since the mid 2000s [Martin Gardiner]

6. All of the ten best-selling books of the last decade had female protagonists [Tyler Cowen]

«

And that’s only the first six. Worth your time every year.
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Corporate reporting in the era of artificial intelligence • NBER

»

Companies have long seen annual reports and other corporate disclosures as opportunities to portray their business health in a positive light. Increasingly, the audience for these disclosures is not just humans, but also machine readers that process the information as an input to investment recommendations.

In How to Talk When a Machine Is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of AI (NBER Working Paper 27950), Sean Cao, Wei Jiang, Baozhong Yang and Alan L. Zhang explore some of the implications of this trend. Rather than focusing on how investors and researchers apply machine learning to extract information, this study examines how companies adjust their language and reporting in order to achieve maximum impact with algorithms that are processing corporate disclosures.

To gauge the extent of a company’s expected machine readership, the researchers use a proxy: the number of machine downloads of the company’s filings from the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s electronic retrieval system. Mechanical downloads of corporate 10-K and 10-Q filings have increased exponentially, from 360,861 in 2003 to around 165 million in 2016. Machine downloads have become the dominant mode during this time — increasing from 39% of all downloads in 2003 to 78% in 2016.

…Companies also go beyond machine readability and manage the sentiment and tone of their disclosures to induce algorithmic readers to draw favorable conclusions about the content. For example, companies avoid words that are listed as negative in the directions given to algorithms.

«

First we shape our tools and then they shape us, financial reporting edition.
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EU urged to address aviation’s full climate impact, including non-CO2 emissions • Climate Home News

Chloé Farand:

»

The aviation sector’s climate impact is three times bigger than the effect of its carbon dioxide emissions alone, according to a study by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (Easa), the EU’s aviation regulator, commissioned by the European Commission.

The study endorses findings published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, showing that non-CO2 emissions from planes such as of oxides of nitrogen (NOx), soot particles, sulphate aerosols, and water vapour at high altitude together drive significant global heating.

Current EU policies to curb the aviation sector’s growing emissions only take into account carbon dioxide emissions.

The EU estimates direct carbon emissions from aviation account for nearly 4% of the bloc’s total CO2 emissions. But when considering non-CO2 emissions, aviation is likely playing a much bigger role in the EU’s contribution to rising temperatures globally.

Campaigners at Transport & Environment (T&E) say the study is an acknowledgment by the European Commission that the aviation sector’s full impact on warming needs to be addressed — 12 years after it started to consider the issue.

«

Nobody wants to take the hard decisions; and it’s impossible to defect because everyone else will continue. It’s too convenient. Which leads to our next item…
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Rising seas predicted to flood thousands of affordable housing units by 2050 – The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

The number of affordable housing units vulnerable to flooding could triple by 2050 as the planet heats up, according to a new study. That amounts to more than 24,000 homes that could flood at least once a year by 2050, compared to about 8,000 in 2000.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, ranks the states and cities at greatest risk. Its authors also unveiled a new interactive map that people can use to see how their hometown might be affected.

As the world warms, seas rise. That means tides are creeping further ashore, and storm surges are becoming a bigger threat to homes along the coast. The encroaching waters are just one way climate change is transforming cities, and the dangers are piling up on lower-income communities.

“I hope this can guide policy that will help the people who are most vulnerable to coastal flooding, which is low-income people in affordable housing. We feel like we’ve really pinpointed that problem with this study,” said Benjamin Strauss, a co-author of the study who is also chief scientist and CEO of the nonprofit research organization Climate Central. Seventy-five% of the affordable housing stock vulnerable to future floods is concentrated in just 20 cities. Those cities are where policymakers can make the biggest difference in residents’ lives by making housing there more resilient.

Many homes lining American coastlines are vulnerable to flooding — not just affordable housing. The researchers wanted to focus on homes for lower-income residents because they’re often older buildings that could have a harder time standing up to the stress of climate-related disasters. Residents here might also have less money and political clout to push for changes to infrastructure so that their homes are better protected. There’s already a shortage of affordable housing in the US, according to the nonprofit National Housing Trust, which contributed to the study. Climate change could make that situation worse.

«

Ben Shapiro, the helium-voiced rightwinger, has the perfect solution for this: the people whose homes are being flooded should just sell them.
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The Arecibo radio telescope’s massive platform has collapsed • Scientific American

Meghan Bartels:

»

After two cable failures in the span of four months, Puerto Rico’s most venerable astronomy facility, the Arecibo radio telescope, has collapsed in an uncontrolled structural failure.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the site, decided in November to proceed with decommissioning the telescope in response to the damage, which engineers deemed too severe to stabilize without risking lives. But the NSF needed time to come up with a plan for how to safely demolish the telescope in a controlled manner.

Instead, gravity did the job this morning (Dec. 1) at about 8 a.m. local time, according to reports from the area.

…Images shared on Twitter by Deborah Martorell, a meteorologist for Puerto Rican television stations, compare views of the observatory taken yesterday — showing the 900-ton science platform suspended over the massive dish strung up on cables — and today, when the observatory’s three supporting towers are bare.

None of the three towers collapsed fully, which was one of NSF’s key concerns about leaving the structure as it was. Martorell’s image does appear to show some damage in the knot of buildings at the base of one of the support towers, which includes administrative buildings and a public visitor’s center, although the buildings are still standing.

«

Couldn’t be repaired without putting workers at too much risk. This Ars Technica article from earlier in November explains a lot of the why, and also why Arecibo was so famous. The cables began failing at well below their expected stress, which meant none of it could be properly trusted.
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Earthlings, not aliens, removed the Utah monolith • The New York Times

Serge F. Kovaleski, Deborah Solomon and Zoe Rosenberg:

»

The office of the San Juan County Sheriff at first announced that it was declining to investigate the case in the absence of complaints about missing property. To underscore that point, it uploaded a “Most Wanted” poster on its website, or rather a jokey version of one in which the faces of suspects were replaced by nine big-eyed aliens. But by the end of Monday, the sheriff’s office had reversed its position and announced that it was planning a joint investigation with the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency.

It was left to an adventure photographer, Ross Bernards, to disclose evidence on Instagram. Mr. Bernards, 34, of Edwards, Colo., was visiting the monolith on Friday night when, he said, four men arrived as if out of nowhere to dismantle the sculpture. Mr. Bernards had driven six hours for the chance to ogle the sculpture and to take dramatic photographs of it. Using upscale Lume Cube lights attached to a drone, he produced a series of glowy, moonlit pictures in which the monolith glistens against the red cliffs and the deep blue of the night sky.

Suddenly, around 8:40 p.m., he said, the men arrived, their voices echoing in the canyon. Working in twosomes, with an unmistakable sense of purpose, they gave the monolith hard shoves, and it started to tilt toward the ground. Then they pushed it in the opposite direction, trying to uproot it.
“This is why you don’t leave trash in the desert,” one of them said, suggesting that he viewed the monolith as an eyesore, a pollutant to the landscape, according to Mr. Bernards.

The sculpture popped out and landed on the ground with a bang. Then the men broke it apart and ferried it off in a wheelbarrow.

«

Oh well. We still don’t know who put it there, of course.
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Another mysterious monolith has disappeared, in Romania • CNET

Abrar Al-Heeti:

»

In case you thought the story of the mysterious metallic monolith couldn’t get any weirder, just remember it’s 2020 and anything’s possible. After the surprising discovery and subsequent disappearance of a monolith in the middle of the Utah desert earlier this month, it seems a similar object was found in Romania – before also disappearing.

A structure that appears to be identical to the one in the Utah desert was found on Batca Doamnei Hill in Romania on Nov. 26, according to The Mirror. But it didn’t remain for very long; according to a Tuesday report by Reuters, the Romanian monolith disappeared four days later.

“The 2.8 metre (9ft) tall structure disappeared overnight as quietly as it was erected last week,” journalist Robert Iosub of the Ziar Piatra Neamt local newspaper told Reuters. “An unidentified person, apparently a bad local welder, made it … now all that remains is just a small hole covered by rocky soil.”

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Not really as good as something really remote in Utah, though, is it. That’s 2020’s best mystery yet. (Thanks Gregory for the link.)
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The rhetoric and the reality of Operation Moonshot • Manchester Evening News

Jennifer Williams:

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If you were to follow the story of mass testing through ministerial pronouncements alone, you could be forgiven for making a number of assumptions.

You might think everywhere in ‘tier three’ is about to test its entire population using new, rapid turnaround tests, as has been the case in the pilot in Liverpool. You might think, too, that this was about to be carried out by thousands of soldiers.

Equally you might assume there was conclusive evidence that Liverpool’s pilot had been instrumental in bringing rates down on Merseyside – and that there was no debate whatsoever about the effectiveness of the technology being used. 

“This is a success story which we want other parts of the country to replicate,” said Boris Johnson decisively of the Liverpool whole-city testing trial this week. “So we will work with local government, public health leaders and our fantastic armed forces, to offer community testing to tier 3 areas as quickly as possible, opening the way for them to follow Liverpool’s example.” This, he has told MPs, is the route out of the top tier.

The reality is, as usual, more complicated.

Rapid testing, using the kind of new ‘lateral flow’ pregnancy test-style devices being piloted in Liverpool, involving a swab of the nose and throat and a 30-minute turnaround, is indeed about to be rolled out to other places, including – public health departments here hope – in Greater Manchester and other parts of northern England.

But it won’t be like the Liverpool trial. There won’t be thousands of squaddies out on the ground, for starters. In fact currently it is understood there are just four military personnel expected to be involved across the entire North West of England, largely doing logistical planning.

The testing due to begin at Manchester’s universities from this week will largely be carried out not by soldiers but by student nurses and other healthcare undergraduates, after no military support was made available.

Rapid testing won’t happen in every single place currently in tier three, either, because there isn’t the capacity in the national or local system. And where it does, we won’t all be offered a test, Liverpool-style.

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Williams has been slogging away writing about this topic, which is of enormous importance in the north of England. The reality of Cummings’s Operation Moonshot is more like Operation Firework.
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DeepMind has made a significant breakthrough in forecasting protein folding – and it matters. CC-licensed photo by Enzymlogic on Flickr.

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A selection of 8 links for you. Neatly folded. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘It will change everything’: DeepMind’s AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures • Nature

Ewen Callaway:

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The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

AlphaFold came top of the table at the last CASP — in 2018, the first year that London-based DeepMind participated. But, this year, the outfit’s deep-learning network was head-and-shoulders above other teams and, say scientists, performed so mind-bogglingly well that it could herald a revolution in biology.

“It’s a game changer,” says Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, who assessed the performance of different teams in CASP. AlphaFold has already helped him find the structure of a protein that has vexed his lab for a decade, and he expects it will alter how he works and the questions he tackles. “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything,” Lupas adds.

In some cases, AlphaFold’s structure predictions were indistinguishable from those determined using ‘gold standard’ experimental methods such as X-ray crystallography and, in recent years, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). AlphaFold might not obviate the need for these laborious and expensive methods — yet — say scientists, but the AI will make it possible to study living things in new ways.

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It’s really hard to overstate the importance of this, though it will take years to become apparent; rather as sequencing the human genome in the late 1990s led to us being able to produce an mRNA vaccine in just two days, given its sequence (the rest of the time has been spent on production and trials). The complexity of protein folding is mindblowing: it depends on interactions between existing parts of the protein as it’s produced, which then are influenced by subsequent parts. And it all works.
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‘Christmas slots went in five hours’: how online supermarket Ocado became a lockdown winner • The Guardian

Harry Wallop:

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From the viewing platform you can watch these metal cubes endlessly whiz around, moving thousands of plastic crates as if they were playing an enormous game of chess. You occasionally sight bottles of bleach or rosé, packets of noodles and dog biscuits, before they are sent down to a lower level.

“I find it quite mesmerising, like robotic ballet,” says Mel Smith, CEO of Ocado Retail, the UK arm of the business. “The day I decided I wanted this job was when I went to [the warehouse] and thought, this is absolutely the future.”

Smith is a plain-speaking, cheery New Zealander who joined just over a year ago from Marks & Spencer. She was hired in part to oversee the potentially tricky move of Ocado taking on M&S as its main supplier, after its longstanding relationship with Waitrose turned sour. The day I visit, it is just 48 hours after Ocado switched to M&S.

A floor below the robots, Elizabeth, a personal shopper, is standing at pick station number 29. Her average “each” time – Ocado jargon for individual products – is flashed up on a screen in front of her: 6.7 seconds, beating the target of seven seconds. This is how long it takes her to reach into the crate that has flown down a shaft from the floors above, take a product – in this case a bag of Cafédirect Machu Picchu ground coffee – scan its barcode and place it in one of Ocado’s distinctive grey plastic bags.

This is what makes the online retailer so different. If you place an order for a large shop from Tesco, Sainsbury’s or any of the other supermarkets, they will usually send a worker to walk along the aisles and pick your shopping in either an actual store or a so-called “dark store”, which caters exclusively to online shopping. Even if they are very quick, this is likely to take 20 minutes to half an hour. “There’s no way you can pick as quickly in store as here. Nothing like it,” says Simon Nottage, who runs the warehouse and is showing me around. He points to Elizabeth, who is now placing some cat litter into a bag: “This one station will do up to 400 ‘eaches’ an hour.”

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The start of lockdown in March was like a DDOS attack. But in a good way.
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Economists urge BBC to rethink ‘inappropriate’ reporting of UK economy • IPPR

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) is a centrist (in the British, not American, sense) thinktank on economics, and this is from its executive director Carys Roberts:

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We are writing to you with regards to coverage of the 2020 Spending Review on Politics Live, Wednesday 25th November. Specifically, when responding to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s public sector borrowing projections, BBC News political editor Ms Kuenssberg said that “this is the credit card, the national mortgage, everything absolutely maxed out”, and later went on to comment that “for next few years, there is really no money”. We argue that this commentary misrepresents the financial constraints facing the UK government and reproduces a number of misconceptions surrounding macroeconomics and the public finances.

To focus on the “credit card” analogy, we would argue that this is never an appropriate metaphor for public finances. Maxing out a credit card would imply that the government is approaching a hard limit on its ability to borrow. This is not the case. It is the consensus amongst economists that the government should at this point in time not focus on reducing the deficit, but rather on delivering the spending necessary to secure a recovery from Covid-19. Modelling suggests that public debt as a proportion of GDP could actually fall were the government to embark upon a major investment package boosting jobs and growth, a position similar to that of the IMF in its flagship publication (pp 18-19) on the issue. This is in line with standard macroeconomic literature which stresses the beneficial effects of countercyclical government spending during crises.

Interest rates currently charged on government bonds are at record lows, so much so that the government is set to spend less on debt interest over the next five years than previously forecast, despite the rise in national debt over the course of the pandemic. Moreover, it is likely that interest rates will remain low for the foreseeable future; the interest rate charged on the 30-year gilt is currently 0.88%. These are not the signs of an institution approaching its credit limits.

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Margaret Thatcher created the idea of the economy being like the household budget in the 1980s, and it stuck firmly in the national consciousness. It also happens to be wrong.
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We talked to a PS5 scalper about how they got their consoles • Pocket Lint

Max Freeman-Wills:

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After getting four consoles himself when pre-orders went live, each through manual means, Jack [the PS5 scalper] set about getting ready for launch-day stock. That meant, in practice, buying up the use of bots and proxies through connections on Discord, and choosing where they’d target come launch.

If that sounds hyper-technical, he says “it’s one of those things where once you get into it, it becomes very clear.” The Discord community helps newbies set stuff up, to avoid situations where someone “wastes a load of money on proxies” and badmouths the process. If people make money without too much hassle, more people will buy bots and the developers who act as the beating heart of reseller communities will continue making more and more money themselves. 

Most communities can be found by carefully watching Twitter, he says -“you kind of have to gamble a bit on joining a group and finding one on Twitter, but I think Twitter always has been and always will be one of the best resources for releases like this because you’ve got your chronological timeline”. If you’re let in, the simplest step is to simply pay another reseller to run a bot for you – for a fee of around £50, you’ll have bought a far higher chance of getting a console than your average consumer, with a risk of detection and cancellation to go with it. 

From there things have a steeper learning curve, but the picture Jack paints still summons some dismay – this isn’t something that’s hard to get into if you’re relatively comfortable using computers and browsing the web, which is hardly the highest bar to clear. That said, there is still an undeniable risk to be taken at some point when card details need to be handed over, and addresses (and mates’ addresses) detailed. 

Those risks don’t disappear when you’ve got a console either – resellers regularly have their time wasted by frustrated non-buyers (something that’s easy to see the satisfaction in), which can be harmless but can make them feel vulnerable while it’s happening. In turn, he’s heard about a reseller who was apparently stabbed during a handover this week, showing that more unacceptable levels of anger are bubbling away at scalpers. 

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He targeted John Lewis, the big department store chain, on the basis that it probably wouldn’t be prepared for an onslaught. And picked correctly. Used to be that sites worried about bots taking them down; now it’s about cleaning them out. Except that’s good for John Lewis, and Sony.
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How venture capitalists are deforming capitalism • The New Yorker

Charles Duhigg:

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From the start, venture capitalists have presented their profession as an elevated calling. They weren’t mere speculators—they were midwives to innovation. The first V.C. firms were designed to make money by identifying and supporting the most brilliant startup ideas, providing the funds and the strategic advice that daring entrepreneurs needed in order to prosper. For decades, such boasts were merited. Genentech, which helped invent synthetic insulin, in the 1970s, succeeded in large part because of the stewardship of the venture capitalist Tom Perkins, whose company, Kleiner Perkins, made an initial hundred-thousand-dollar investment. Perkins demanded a seat on Genentech’s board of directors, and then began spending one afternoon a week in the startup’s offices, scrutinizing spending reports and browbeating inexperienced executives. In subsequent years, Kleiner Perkins nurtured such tech startups as Amazon, Google, Sun Microsystems, and Compaq. When Perkins died, in 2016, at the age of 84, an obituary in the Financial Times remembered him as “part of a new movement in finance that saw investors roll up their sleeves and play an active role in management.”

The V.C. industry has grown exponentially since Perkins’s heyday, but it has also become increasingly avaricious and cynical. It is now dominated by a few dozen firms, which, collectively, control hundreds of billions of dollars. Most professional V.C.s fit a narrow mold: according to surveys, just under half of them attended either Harvard or Stanford, and 80% are male. Although V.C.s depict themselves as perpetually on the hunt for radical business ideas, they often seem to be hyping the same Silicon Valley trends—and their managerial oversight has dwindled, making their investments look more like trading-floor bets. Steve Blank, an entrepreneur who currently teaches at Stanford’s engineering school, said, “I’ve watched the industry become a money-hungry mob. V.C.s today aren’t interested in the public good. They’re not interested in anything except optimizing their own profits and chasing the herd, and so they waste billions of dollars that could have gone to innovation that actually helps people.”

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That’s the core of this piece, which is mostly about WeWork – which is of course the object lesson in VC gone wildly wrong. And what an object. (Theranos had almost no VC money.)
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Astongate: fake emission figures, an embattled carmaker and a sock puppet PR company • LinkedIn

Michael Liebreich:

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You may have seen the news story last week about a new report purporting to show that it takes 50,000 miles before an EV’s emissions beat those of a petrol car. First of all, the figures were comprehensively debunked – the correct figure is nearer 16,000 miles – then, over the weekend I uncovered evidence that the report was written by a sock-puppet PR company run from an address owned by Aston Martin’s Director of Global Government and Corporate Affairs.

Before I start, a caveat. This story is about getting the truth out EV carbon emissions, and how much lower they are than internal combustion cars. It does not deal with any other aspect of the environmental footprint of EVs, which are considerable and still require much investment and innovation. Nor does it show that EVs are superior to every other form of transport. Even the best EV will always have a carbon footprint, a material supply chain, and will cause particulate pollution. Active travel – walking, cycling, scooting and so on – should always be our first choice. With that said, let’s get stuck in!

“Astongate”, as I call it, started with widespread coverage of a new study, purporting to show that building an EV involves such huge CO2 emissions that you have to drive it 48,000 miles before it breaks even with a petrol equivalent. It was just the sort of story loved by UK media on the political right – always keen to pour cold water on any sign of green over-reach.

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It’s quite the story, where an overzealous PR company with links to the car firms managed to plant a story which has been unravelling for days.
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A lack of transparency is undermining pandemic policy • WIRED

Roxanne Khamsi:

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I’ve seen this happen again and again since the start of the pandemic: a new, “science-based” Covid-19 measure is prescribed, but the science in support of it is either vague or missing altogether. Just last week, for example, I was working on a story about the latest research into quarantine procedures. The best data to this point suggests that an eight-day stretch of quarantine, combined with a Covid test, provides the same level of protection as the traditional 14-day quarantine. But then I saw New York state’s new policy: Some people who arrived from out of state are allowed to quarantine for just four days. I asked New York’s Department of Health how they’d come to this decision, and they sent me another statement from Cuomo, in which he said only that he’d “worked with global health experts” on the plan. A formal guidance from the state health department gave no research citations, either, but it did find space to boast about New York’s record of “strict adherence to data-driven, evidence-based protocols.”

This problem is hardly limited to one state. While reporting on that same quarantine story, I reached out to Alberta, Canada, which allows for an even riskier-seeming 48-hour period of quarantine for some travelers. What was the scientific basis for this policy? I never heard back.

A lack of transparency has even shown up in guidance from the World Health Organization. Back in March, I emailed the headquarters in Geneva to ask how they felt so certain at the time that the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus was not “airborne.” The press office responded to my questions with a pair of unhelpful scientific documents. In that case, the decision to omit (or ignore) existing research—which suggested that other coronaviruses are likely to be spread by air—might well have been a deadly mistake.

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It’s not so much a lack of transparency, as gigantic inertia – being both slow to start shifting from a position, and being slow to change course once headed in a direction. The WHO’s absurd refusal first to recommend masks and then to acknowledge that Covid transmits via aerosol has arguably cost a lot of time, and hence lives.

This is a consequence of organisations with strict organisational flows: they can’t flex. Social media flows more like water.
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How an anti-lockdown ‘truthpaper’ bypasses online factcheckers • The Guardian

Jim Waterson:

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photo that was spreading across Facebook, they were confused. The picture – which had been uploaded by users in the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere in the world – showed a headline that made the false claim that a US government agency had declared Covid-19 did not exist. It appeared to be from a real print newspaper, but no credible outlet would publish such a claim.

Then they had a breakthrough: it turned out the headline was from a new self-published conspiracy theorist “truthpaper” called the Light, edited by a man from Manchester who runs a business selling anti-vaccine T-shirts and 9/11 conspiracy merchandise.

The outlet, which has published three issues since it first appeared in September, draws heavily on the gloop of long-running online conspiracies about a new world order, which have attached themselves to the current pandemic. Among other things it encourages people to stop wearing masks and disobey lockdown on the basis that the coronavirus is a hoax.

It has been formed as a reaction to attempts by major tech platforms to clamp down on coronavirus disinformation – but the same tech outlets also help enable its reach: the Light’s distribution relies on a 5,000-strong private Facebook group where volunteers offer to hand out copies and post them through their neighbours’ doors.

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Claims a circulation of 100,000 – which is sure to be untrue. That would be super-expensive. But shows how they’re trying to route around expectations by producing a printed thing: print is trusted.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Road potholes are a constant source of annoyance – and government funding – in the UK. CC-licensed photo by Darren Moloney on Flickr.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Every one counted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How a young, queer Asian-American businesswoman is rethinking user safety at Twitter • Protocol

Anna Kramer:

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No matter how many times you monitor, report and moderate harmful posts, the reactionary model does little to reverse the damage that’s already been done to the people targeted or to prevent it from happening again, [new head of product for conversational safety at Twitter, Christine] Su said. So instead of putting the spotlight just on the posts causing harm, new functions coming from her team will be all about user control, she explained, giving people a wide range of capabilities to react to situations on the platform. “The point is not to make the entire world a safe space: That’s not possible. The point is to empower people and communities to have the tools to heal harm themselves and to prevent harm to themselves and put them in control,” Su said.

The product team gave some clues about what that user control could look like when they described the upcoming audio hangout function, Spaces, in a press call last week. Spaces will allow users to determine who is allowed in the audio room and who can speak, and the team is rolling out the function to women and people from other marginalized communities first, to test out how effective these safety functions can be in practice.

Su also cited recent election-related interventions as examples of how reimagining Twitter in the long term could work; for example, the function that encourages people to read content before reposting it has remained in place for now while the team assesses its long-term value. “You’ve seen over the last year, a willingness of Twitter to rethink its fundamental mechanisms,” she said.

For Su, implementing transformative justice means building tools that create private pathways for apologies, forgiveness and deescalation (somehow, we’ll get apologies before we get an edit button). While she didn’t describe exactly how private apology tools will work just yet, they are intended to become part of “a set of controls that people can take with them around digital spaces, and be able to use them when and if circumstances warrant,” she said.

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Sounds like quite a weird network that Twitter is going to mutate into.
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Facebook’s Libra currency to launch next year in limited format • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

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The long-awaited Facebook-led digital currency Libra is preparing to launch as early as January, according to three people involved in the initiative, but in an even more limited format than its already downgraded vision.

The 27-strong Libra Association said in April that it had planned to launch digital versions of several currencies, plus a “digital composite” of all of its coins. This followed concerns from regulators over its initial plan to create one synthetic coin backed by a basket of currencies.

However, the association would now initially just launch a single coin backed one-for-one by the dollar, one of the people said. The other currencies and the composite would be rolled out at a later point, the person added.

Libra’s exact launch date would depend on when the project receives approval to operate as a payments service from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, but could come as early as January, the three people said. Finma said it would not comment on Libra’s application, which was initiated in May. 

First launched in June 2019, the scaling down of Libra’s vision comes as it has received a sceptical reception from global regulators, who have warned that it could threaten monetary stability and become a hotbed for money laundering.

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Still feel this is dangerous, and that Facebook doesn’t understand quite how dangerous. As it didn’t understand how dangerous using its algorithm to encourage people into Groups would be, or its cultural ignorance about what would work and not work in different countries.
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Welcome to the PC Malaise Era • getwired.com

Wes Miller reckons that PCs (Windows ones) are in the same rut that American cars were in 1973-1983, known as the “Malaise Era“:

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I’ve said before that Windows has never escaped x86. I’m still not sure if it ever can. So the challenges then come down to three things:

A) Can Intel succeed where they’ve failed for the last 5+ years, at building hybrid processors? The next year to two years should answer this question.

B) Can Microsoft succeed at finally getting application developers to write platform-optimized, energy-respectful, halo applications for the PC? I’ve been writing about the Windows Store for a long, long time. A long time. And I’m still not sure how Microsoft can light a fire under Windows application developers when they’ve lost that mindshare.

C) Can Microsoft begin pushing the Surface platform forward again? This one’s completely up to Microsoft. I’ve seen the rumors of the next Surface Pro… and it’s more of the same – evolutionary, not revolutionary.

I guess we will see in the next 3-5 years whether Intel can cross this chasm; if they can’t, then the future likely belongs to ARM, and that future will likely mean less and less to Microsoft, outside of running classic Win32 applications on x64/x86 Windows.

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Meet the Censored: Andre Damon • TK News by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi:

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Like many alternative news sites, WSWS [the World Socialist Web Site] noticed a steep decline in traffic in 2016-2017, after Donald Trump was elected and we began to hear calls for more regulation of “fake news.” Determined to search out the reason, the site conducted a series of analyses that proved crucial in helping convince outlets like the New York Times to cover the issue. In its open letter to Google, the WSWS described inexplicable changes to search results in their political bailiwick:

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Google searches for “Leon Trotsky” yielded 5,893 impressions (appearances of the WSWS in search results) in May of this year. In July, the same search yielded exactly zero impressions for the WSWS, which is the Internet publication of the international movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

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The WSWS connected the change to Project Owl, a plan announced by Google in April of 2017 designed to “surface more authoritative content.” When I called Google about a year later for a story on a related subject, they explained the concept of “authority” as an exercise in weighting some credentials over others. So, I was told, an old search for “baseball” might first return a page for your local little league, while a new one would send you to the site for Major League Baseball.

The rub was that Google was now pushing viewers away from alternative sources, such that an article in the New York Times about Trotskyism might be ranked ahead of the world’s leading Trotskyite media organ. Queries had to be right on the nose to call up a whole host of alternative sites, all of which had seen sharp drops in their Google search results.

The WSWS listed many of them: Alternet down 63%, Common Dreams down 37%, Democracy Now! down 36%, , down 25%, etc. Even Wikileaks, in the middle of an international furor over Russiagate, was down 30%.

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So Taibbi contacted Andre Damon, who runs WSWS:

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TK: When did the WSWS first become interested in the issue of platform censorship, content moderation, or whatever you want to call it? Actually, what do you call it? Is what’s going on with increased content moderation a first amendment/free speech issue?

Damon: It’s censorship, and it absolutely is a First Amendment issue.

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Oh good grief. It isn’t censorship (Google isn’t changing what’s on the site, or telling it what to put on the site), and it’s absolutely not a First Amendment issue (the decisions are not made by the government). For the average person, the most relevant, useful, informative site about Trotsky is almost certainly not going to be the WSWS. Failing to understand the principles on which search engines work is like not understanding electricity. (Thanks, Seth, for the link.)
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Visitors track down mystery desert monolith in Utah • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

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Around 48 hours after news of their finding was made public, pictures appeared on Instagram of people who had managed to find it.

Among them was David Surber, 33, a former US army infantry officer, who drove for six hours through the night to find it after spotting a Reddit post purporting to have found its coordinates.

“Awesome journey out to the monolith today,” he wrote on Instagram, where he also shared its location. “Regardless of who built it or where it came from. It was a positive escape from today’s world. Some for many people to rally behind and enjoy together.”

He said he was alone with the structure, which he described as formed of aluminium and formed of “three pieces riveted together”, for about 10 minutes before others arrived.

“Overall not too crowded you all want to make the journey,” he wrote.

Tim Slane, who shared the coordinates on Reddit, said he worked them out by tracking the flight path of the helicopter.

It is not known what the origins of the object, estimated by Bret Hutchings, the helicopter pilot who discovered it, to be between 10ft and 12ft high (about three metres), are.

But it has been compared to the work of several minimalist sculptors, including the late John McCracken.

A spokesperson for his gallerist, David Zwirner, told the Guardian earlier this week it was not one of McCracken’s works, saying they believed it could be “a work by a fellow artist paying homage to McCracken”.

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And now it has disappeared. Unclear whether it was stolen, or reclaimed. Or, you know, returned to its previous time/space coordinates. We all expect them to look like blue police boxes, but why should they?
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Microsoft’s ‘Project Latte’ aims to bring Android apps to Windows 10 • Windows Central

Zac Bowden:

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Microsoft is working on a software solution that would allow app developers to bring their Android apps to Windows 10 with little to no code changes by packaging them as an MSIX and allowing developers to submit them to the Microsoft Store. According to sources familiar with the matter, the project is codenamed ‘Latte’ and I’m told it could show up as soon as next year.

The company has toyed with the idea of bringing Android apps to Windows 10 before via a project codenamed Astoria that never saw the light of day. Project Latte aims to deliver a similar product, and is likely powered by the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL.) Microsoft will need to provide its own Android subsystem for Android apps to actually run, however.

Microsoft has announced that WSL will soon get support for GUI Linux applications, as well as GPU acceleration which should aid the performance of apps running through WSL.

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Well, it sounds like it might be tricky, and there’s always the question of how you handle touch because a mouse is so much more precise. I wonder if there are any other gotchas that people might have to think about?

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It’s unlikely that Project Latte will include support for Play Services, as Google doesn’t allow Play Services to be installed on anything other than native Android devices and Chrome OS. This means that apps which require Play Services APIs will need to be updated to remove those dependencies before they can be submitted on Windows 10.

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Oh well, they tried. Nobody’s going to bother to recompile like that; it would make a lot more sense to build a progressive web app (PWA).

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Britain’s big pothole problem • The Economist

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Potholes arouse passions in Britain—not surprisingly, since the country’s road quality ranks 37th in the world, between Slovenia and Lithuania. Councils received 700,000 complaints about potholes last year, says the Federation of Small Businesses. The weather, a topic even more popular among the natives than potholes, is mostly to blame. Potholes form when water seeps under the road surface, breaking the tarmac as it expands and contracts. Budget cuts in the wake of the financial crisis did not help. The Local Government Association (lga) says road maintenance budgets fell from £1.1bn in 2009 to £701m in 2017—the equivalent of 8m potholes. The Asphalt Industry Alliance claims there is a road-repair backlog of £11bn.

But there may be relief in sight for the suspension of the British motor car. Politics is one reason. Traditional Tories—who love cars, particularly fast ones, and tend to live in the countryside, so rely on roads—are particularly infuriated by them. Northern “red wall” seats that the Tories won from Labour in the last election tend to be rural places where the roads are bumpier and the weather worse. Nottinghamshire, home to several of those contested seats, is Britain’s pothole capital, with 253,920 reported in 2017-19. Hence the promise in the Tory manifesto of the “biggest-ever pothole-filling programme”, and a promise of £2.5bn over five years.

Covid is also fuelling the drive against potholes. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, needs shovel-ready spending opportunities to justify his claim in the spending review on November 25th that “we’re prioritising jobs”. Potholes are ready and waiting for those shovels—hence his commitment that £1.7bn would be spent this year.

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I seem to recall John Major’s government (in 1992-7) promising to do lots on potholes, as did the May government in 2016. It’s a periodic excitment for Tory governments. I’d love to see a graph showing how the number of potholes has changed over time, and compared to the governments in power. Fixing them is actually in the power of local councils (which also keep the numbers; there isn’t a central figure for the number of potholes), but it’s government funding that makes it happen.
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Dominic Cummings wanted to rewire the British state, but he needed to change the thinking of those in charge • Politics Home

Sam Freedman worked at the Dept for Education, and got used to the “all caps and punctuation-free email rants to various officials” dubbed “Domograms”:

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The standard ministerial tenure is around two years. A mere 1 in 10 of the junior ministers appointed in 2010 made it to the end of the Parliament. Given the limited time they have to make an impact the last thing politicians want is a machinery that is geared to long-term, expert-driven, and evidence-based policy making.

There’s a reason why all of Cummings’ treasured examples of high-performance either come from the American military (Manhattan Project; DARPA) or single party states like Singapore or China. They are typically long-term, highly technical programmes, undertaken with no or minimal public transparency, and with the role of politician limited to signing cheques. The absence of any major social reforms from his analysis of success is something of a warning sign that what he wants is not in fact possible, certainly within the confines of British democracy.

The truly baffling thing about Cummings’ worldview is the refusal to see the contradiction between his technocratic utopia of expert scientists driving paradigmatic change and his own rock-solid conviction that whatever policies he happens to support right now must be implemented at maximum speed.

For all his demands for a scientific approach to government not a single policy either of us worked on at the DfE had been properly evaluated through, for example, a randomised control trial, because they were rolled out nationally without any piloting. In technocrat utopia a major policy like the introduction of academies would have been phased in such a way as to allow for evaluation. In the real-world huge amounts of capital (real and political) were spent arguing academies were the way forward, so the suggestion that they might not work couldn’t be countenanced.

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Things I recommend you buy, 2020 edition • Consumer Surplus

Sam Bowman:

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Here is a list of products that I get a lot of consumer surplus from. I recommend any and all of these. The list spans cooking and kitchen equipment, through “work from home” products (a new 2020 category), to things I use when I go travelling (in normal times, I travel quite often for both work and pleasure). I usually do a lot of research before making any big purchase and I return things to Amazon that I don’t like, so I think I am a fairly reliable source.

This is the third edition of my “Things I recommend you buy” series, and is comprehensive – anything from old editions that is not included is no longer recommended.

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You’ll probably find you’ve got lots of them, though the knife-sharpening stuff could be good (nothing more annoying than a blunt kitchen knife). You might find an idea for a Christmas present or two. (Note to male readers: don’t buy anything for the kitchen for the other half.)
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New UK tech regulator to limit power of Google and Facebook • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

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A new tech regulator will work to limit the power of Google, Facebook and other tech platforms, the government has announced, in an effort to ensure a level playing field for smaller competitors and a fair market for consumers.

Under the plans, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will gain a dedicated Digital Markets Unit, empowered to write and enforce a new code of practice on technology companies which will set out the limits of acceptable behaviour.

The code will only affect those companies deemed to have “strategic market status”, though it has not yet been decided what that means, nor what restrictions will be imposed.

The business secretary, Alok Sharma, said: “Digital platforms like Google and Facebook make a significant contribution to our economy and play a massive role in our day-to-day lives – whether it’s helping us stay in touch with our loved ones, share creative content or access the latest news.

“But the dominance of just a few big tech companies is leading to less innovation, higher advertising prices and less choice and control for consumers. Our new, pro-competition regime for digital markets will ensure consumers have choice, and mean smaller firms aren’t pushed out.”

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Great ideas, and the CMA effectively has the powers to impose them by diktat; they’re many of the things that the US antitrust suit against Google is trying to make happen, but with far less justification given its antitrust frameworks.

In passing, the business secretary Alok Sharma sure does have a weird resemblance to a younger Martin Sorrell.
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Pennsylvania Supreme Court dismisses request from Mike Kelly and Sean Parnell to declare mail-in voting unconstitutional in state, deny results from 2020 election mail-in ballots • CBS Pittsburgh

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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has dismissed the lawsuit from Congressman Mike Kelly and congressional candidate Sean Parnell to declare universal mail-in voting unconstitutional in the state and deny the votes of the majority of Pennsylvanians who voted by mail in the Nov. 3 election.

The state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, threw out the three-day-old order, saying the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the law allowed for challenges to Pennsylvania’s expansive year-old mail-in voting law.

The state’s attorney general, Democrat Josh Shapiro, called the court’s decision “another win for Democracy.”

The week-old lawsuit, led by U.S. Rep. Kelly of Butler, had challenged the state’s mail-in voting law as unconstitutional.

As a remedy, Kelly and the other Republican plaintiffs had sought to either throw out the 2.5 million mail-in ballots submitted under the law — most of them by Democrats — or to wipe out the election results and direct the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to pick Pennsylvania’s presidential electors.

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Getting near to losing count, but I think this makes almost 40 lawsuits that the Trump campaign (or grifty associates) has lost in court.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified