Facebook and Twitter are suspending cooperation with data requests after Hong Kong introduced a new “security” law. CC-licensed photo by Jonathan van Smit 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. Again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter suspend review of Hong Kong requests for user data • WSJ

Newley Purnell:

»

Facebook and its WhatsApp messaging service, along with Twitter have suspended processing requests for user data from Hong Kong law-enforcement agencies following China’s imposition of a national-security law on the city.

WhatsApp is “pausing” such reviews “pending further assessment of the impact of the National Security Law, including formal human-rights due diligence and consultations with human-rights experts,” a WhatsApp spokeswoman said in response to a Wall Street Journal query Monday.

A spokeswoman for parent company Facebook said in a later statement that it was doing the same. “We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and support the right of people to express themselves without fear for their safety or other repercussions,” the Facebook statement said.

Twitter later in a statement said it “paused” all data and information requests from Hong Kong authorities immediately when the law went into effect last week.

The moves have put U.S. technology titans on a potential collision course with Beijing, after China fast-tracked the national-security legislation that includes a provision mandating local authorities to take measures to supervise and regulate the city’s previously unfettered internet.

«

Numbers:
• Twitter doesn’t seem ever to have handed over any data about Hong Kong;
• Facebook had 241 in the second half of 2019, of which it granted 46%. (That includes Instagram. WhatsApp doesn’t seem to have a separate transparency report, and I can’t figure out if Facebook includes it.)

Of course the small numbers don’t mean a lot. Things are going to change a lot with the new “security law”, which is basically a way to enforce Chinese law in Hong Kong – destroying the “one country, two systems” principle.
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Let juries review Facebook ads • The Atlantic

Jonathan Zittrain with a neat idea:

»

while an independent oversight board might help with the interpretation of content policies, the job of fact-checking questionable ads is, naturally, fact-specific. The 2020 campaign could see the placement of hundreds of thousands of distinct ad campaigns—far more than Facebook’s oversight board could handle either directly or on some kind of appeal. And there won’t be easy consensus—outside of those obviously deceptive vote-next-Wednesday messages—around what’s “demonstrably false.” That’s not a reason not to vet the ads, especially when the ability to adapt and target them in so many configurations makes it difficult for an opposing candidate or fact-checking third party to catch up to them and rebut them. Instead, we should be thinking as boldly as we can about process.

That brings us back to juries. For all that people might disparage them, and try to avoid serving on them, that small group of citizens has been designed to play a vital role in the high-stakes administration of justice, not as much because 12 randos have special expertise, but because they stand in for the rest of us: I might not agree with what they did, but I wasn’t there, and they heard the evidence, and next time it could be me asked to play their role.

In that spirit, why shouldn’t public librarians be asked in small panels, real or virtually convened, to evaluate ads? Today only 33% of Americans have trust in the news media, but 78% trust libraries to help them find information that is “trustworthy and reliable.”

«

There would be tons and tons and tons of ads, so I guess people would have to be instantly co-opted into juries to make decisions. Maybe that would be the CAPTCHA on logging into Facebook – “is this ad valid?” Though I’m not sure how much you could trust the decision. It could just be random, get-rid-of-it response.

(Via John Naughton.)
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Trump, Twitter, Facebook, and the future of online speech • The New Yorker

Anna Wiener on the American legislative debate around Section 230, which exempts online platforms from liability for content their users post:

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Ultimately, the problems that need solving may not be ones of content moderation. In the book “Platform Capitalism,” published in 2017, the economist Nick Srnicek explores the reliance of digital platforms on “network effects,” in which value increases for both users and advertisers as a service expands its pool of participants and suite of offerings.

Network effects, Srnicek writes, orient platforms toward monopolization; monopolization, in turn, makes it easier for a single tweet to be an extension of state power, or for a single thirty-six-year-old entrepreneur, such as Zuckerberg, to influence the speech norms of the global digital commons. Both outcomes might be less likely if there were other places to go. The business model common to many social-media platforms, meanwhile, is itself an influence over online speech. Advertisers are attracted by data about users; that data is created through the constant production and circulation of user-generated content; and so controversial content, which keeps users posting and sharing, is valuable. From this perspective, Donald Trump is an ideal user of Twitter. A different kind of business might encourage a different kind of user.

Nothing about the current arrangement should be treated as inevitable; the commercial Internet is relatively young.

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It’s Super Saturday, the pubs are open and it’s a privacy nightmare • WIRED UK

Matt Burgess:

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Underpinning all these changes is the extra burden placed on businesses which have to spend time and money on putting these systems in place. But there’s one government request to pubs that carries risks to customer’s privacy and poses a data-heavy bureaucratic problem for landlords. They’ve been asked to record customer details that can be used as part of the NHS Test and Trace scheme, which can be used to identify people in the result of an outbreak.

The idea is simple but the execution is tough. The government says pubs, restaurants and cafes – as well as hotels, museums, cinemas, zoos and hairdressers when they reopen – should collect information about every single person who has visited.

This includes names, contact numbers, date of the visit and arrival and departure times and in the cases of businesses where customers only interact with one staff member. A group can provide just one phone number instead of contact details for everyone. However, when combined this data can give a sense of who individuals interact with, where and for how long. The data should be stored for 21 days and provided to the NHS if it is required.

The scheme is voluntary: neither businesses nor customers are required to collect or provide this information by law. But there’s plenty of potential for things to go wrong.

«

The cartoonist Matt, in the Daily Telegraph, depicted how this would go: the landlord saying “It’s going to be fun contacting Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Spartacus and Joris Bohnson if there’s a problem later.” (Thanks G for the link.)
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Nokia, hurt by costly 5G chip mistake, struggles to catch Huawei • WSJ

Stu Woo:

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Nokia selected the type of chip it thought would work best before an important technical debate had been settled, Mr. Uitto said. A telecom-industry consortium that included Nokia hadn’t finalized the standards for how cellular antennas should communicate with phones and other devices.

Nokia had two options. One is called a “system-on-chip,” or SoC. Advantage: It is power efficient and cheap to make. Disadvantage: Once the chip is made, it is difficult to reprogram. If Nokia ordered a supply of SoC chips and then 5G standards didn’t support them, the company would have a bunch of useless chips.

The other option was the so-called field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, chip. Its advantage was flexibility. An FPGA can be reprogrammed after it goes into an antenna. Nokia could start making antennas with the chips, and wireless carriers could reprogram them to suit whatever 5G standards would be adopted later.

Nokia focused on the more expensive FPGA. When the development of 5G accelerated, and standards crystallized sooner than expected, around 2018, Nokia realized it had too many FPGA chips and not enough of the cheaper ones [SoCs] that Huawei and Ericsson had bet on.

The FPGA was like “buying a car with a lot of features that you don’t use,” said Sandro Tavares, Nokia’s head of mobile marketing. The SoC, meanwhile, “has exactly what you need, so you’re not spending that much money there.”

One European telecom executive said the price tag for certain Nokia equipment was double that of products by Huawei and Ericsson using the SoC chips. Nokia executives say the price difference for high-volume products was typically between 5% to 15%. Nokia products using the FPGA chip also used more energy, a downside for wireless carriers trying to cut down power consumption.

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De-escalating social media • Nick Punt

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Social media has a conflict problem.

Spending even a few minutes on public social media can expose us to dozens of people we know little about, talking about things we know little about. In such a public place, any individual’s reputation, perspectives, and history are difficult to ascertain, and therefore their words must be taken at face value. Coupled with an almost complete lack of standards for participation in the community and a high degree of variance in knowledge among participants, and the environment naturally skews toward conflict and tribalism.

One particular effect of this environment is that small misunderstandings, mistakes, or disagreements can unexpectedly explode due to the public nature of discourse and assumptions of bad faith. Meanwhile, very few tools exist to moderate these effects.

This is why it’s my belief that as designed today, social media is out of balance. It is far easier to escalate than it is to de-escalate, and this is a major problem that companies like Twitter and Facebook need to address.

«

He makes a lot of good points, though it’s hard to see many people climbing down from things – it’s not as if that happens now even given the chance. The option to say “I was wrong” and then turn off replies would be good – but verified users now can choose to turn off replies and effectively insist they’re right.

His mockups are for Twitter. The dynamics on Facebook are rather different, I think.
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Ex-MI6 chief: the UK should bar Huawei from its 5G network • Financial Times

John Sawers is a former head of MI6:

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The Trump administration’s motives for trying to destroy Huawei can be debated. But the latest US sanctions, at the end of June and last week, mean that reliable non-Chinese suppliers to Huawei can no longer work with the company. UK intelligence services can therefore no longer provide the needed assurances that Chinese-made equipment is still safe to use in the UK’s telecoms network.

There are now sound technical reasons for the UK to change January’s decision, which would have allowed Huawei to have an up to 35% stake in the UK’s 5G market, and exclude the company instead. The security assessment is now different because the facts have changed. It helps Boris Johnson that its conclusion points in the same direction as the political pressure from Conservative members of parliament. Reportedly, a fresh decision on Huawei is expected in the next two weeks. 

The interesting question is whether Mr Johnson’s decision to exclude Huawei from UK 5G will be justified purely on technical grounds, and leave Huawei itself to decide whether to go ahead with its planned £1bn Cambridgeshire facility. Or if Mr Johnson uses the moment to set out a comprehensive strategy that puts limits on Chinese investment in the UK.

I suspect the UK government — preoccupied by Covid-19, the deep economic recession and the Brexit negotiations — has no bandwidth to come up with a considered, new strategy. But its first response on Hong Kong, especially its open-door offer to almost 3m Hong Kong citizens, suggests there will be a sharper-edged approach. 

«

The shift against China in the past couple of years has been quite something to watch. Question to consider: how would Hillary Clinton have handled what’s going on? I think the US would have ended up taking the same action against ZTE (and stuck to it) and then Huawei – that had been brewing for a long time. Hong Kong though is quite a wild card in all this.
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Six months of pandemic photography • Science Mag: Visuals

Emily Petersen:

»

Back in early March, we had already spent 2 months covering the COVID-19 outbreak. The team gathered for the morning news meeting, many joining by video conference. “I’m surprised you’re all still in the office. I bet by the end of the week they’ll send everyone home,” Science’s infectious disease reporter declared ominously from the large video screen on the wall.

Science’s offices closed 3 days later. With the pandemic hitting the Washington, D.C., area our staff began working from home.

It’s been six months since the virus emerged. Over that time, as senior photo editor, I’ve pored through thousands of pictures documenting the effects of this historical crisis.

«

They’re all remarkable photos in their way. I think the one I found most captured the surreal nature of the time was the one captioned “A teacher prepares a tablet showing a student’s image for a ‘cybergraduation’ ceremony at a high school in Manila, Philippines, as social distancing continued.” But you might find something else that grabs your attention – the gym users inside plastic shrouds, perhaps.

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Telegram to pay SEC fine of $18.5m and return $1.2bn to investors as it dissolves TON • TechCrunch

Jonathan Shieber:

»

Pavel Durov’s grand cryptocurrency dreams for his Telegram messaging service are ending with an $18.5m civil settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a pledge to return the more than $1.2bn that investors had put into its TON digital token.

The settlement ends a months long legal battle between the company and the regulator. In October 2019 the SEC filed a complaint against Telegram alleging the company had raised capital through the sale of 2.9 billion Grams to finance its business. The SEC sought to enjoin Telegram from delivering the Grams it sold, which the regulator alleged were securities. In March, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York agreed with the SEC and issued a preliminary injunction.

In May, Telegram announced that it was shutting down the TON initiative.

…[The SEC said:] “Our emergency action protected retail investors from Telegram’s attempt to flood the markets with securities sold in an unregistered offering without providing full disclosures concerning their project,” said Lara Shalov Mehraban, associate regional director of the New York Regional Office.

«

Sure to be plenty more like this, aren’t there?
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Who is the mystery shopper leaving behind thousands of online shopping carts? • WSJ

Paul Ziobro:

»

Shawn Bercuson perks up at the mention of John Smith. The chief executive of FinnBin Inc. first spotted the shopper on his site, which sells Scandinavian-inspired boxes for newborns to sleep in, over a year ago.

At first, he thought it was a corporate client—the address was in the heart of Silicon Valley—ready to make a large order, a gift to new parents. But as more orders popped up from John Smith, he wondered whether a competitor was collecting pricing and other information from his site.

“Then it started getting out of hand,” Mr. Bercuson said. “The amount of abandoned carts we got were just insane.” In May, he said, John Smith started and walked away from 73 orders.

A part of the original team that founded Groupon Inc., Mr. Bercuson traffics in analytics to make business decisions from advertising to website design. John Smith fouled that up. When shoppers abandon carts, websites typically send an automated email prodding them to finish the purchase. The dozens of emails to John Smith distort the numbers, as does false shopping traffic.

“I want to know what is working and what’s not,” he said.

He turned to message boards for other online merchants to see if he was John Smith’s only target. He quickly found out he wasn’t, but nobody had answers.

Jeffrey Gornstein thinks of John Smith every day. His site, ComfortHouse.com, which sells home goods such as address plaques and other personalized gifts, has been warned by its email provider about sending emails to nonexistent accounts, due to all the follow-ups sent to John Smith, which bounce back as undeliverable. Every time he gets a readout of recent sales, he scans to see if his foe has visited. He then logs into his email platform to deactivate all the fictitious entries from John Smith.

«

Turns out that John Smith is a Googlebot checking prices, to make sure the cart prices match the advertised ones. Smart, even if it does screw up sites’ statistics.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Seems we have these folks – the Neanderthals – to blame for some susceptibility to SARS-Cov-2. CC-licensed photo by Allan Henderson 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. Restart! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

239 experts with one big claim: the coronavirus is airborne • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli:

»

The coronavirus is finding new victims worldwide, in bars and restaurants, offices, markets and casinos, giving rise to frightening clusters of infection that increasingly confirm what many scientists have been saying for months: The virus lingers in the air indoors, infecting those nearby.

If airborne transmission is a significant factor in the pandemic, especially in crowded spaces with poor ventilation, the consequences for containment will be significant. Masks may be needed indoors, even in socially-distant settings. Health care workers may need N95 masks that filter out even the smallest respiratory droplets as they care for coronavirus patients.

Ventilation systems in schools, nursing homes, residences and businesses may need to minimize recirculating air and add powerful new filters. Ultraviolet lights may be needed to kill viral particles floating in tiny droplets indoors.

The World Health Organization has long held that the coronavirus is spread primarily by large respiratory droplets that, once expelled by infected people in coughs and sneezes, fall quickly to the floor.

But in an open letter to the W.H.O., 239 scientists in 32 countries have outlined the evidence showing that smaller particles can infect people, and are calling for the agency to revise its recommendations. The researchers plan to publish their letter in a scientific journal next week.

«

This surfaced over the weekend and has created a furore, science-wise. The implication is that if you’re not outdoors, you’re at risk (at least if people aren’t all using masks). Remember the restaurant that helped infect three different families? It’s essentially that.
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DNA linked to Covid-19 was inherited from Neanderthals, study finds • The New York Times

Carl Zimmer:

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“This interbreeding effect that happened 60,000 years ago is still having an impact today,” said Joshua Akey, a geneticist at Princeton University who was not involved in the new study.

This piece of the genome, which spans six genes on Chromosome 3, has had a puzzling journey through human history, the study found. The variant is now common in Bangladesh, where 63% of people carry at least one copy. Across all of South Asia, almost one-third of people have inherited the segment.

Elsewhere, however, the segment is far less common. Only 8% of Europeans carry it, and just 4% have it in East Asia. It is almost completely absent in Africa.

It’s not clear what evolutionary pattern produced this distribution over the past 60,000 years. “That’s the $10,000 question,” said Hugo Zeberg, a geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who was one of the authors of the new study.

One possibility is that the Neanderthal version is harmful and has been getting rarer over all. It’s also possible that the segment improved people’s health in South Asia, perhaps providing a strong immune response to viruses in the region.

«

Un-peer-reviewed, it’s worth saying. Although the top line is that it makes you more vulnerable to severe illness, the much higher occurrence in Asia and lower in Europe argues the other way.

But if it is dangerous, then it’s the best example of revenge being a dish best served cold. Quite the move there, Neanderthals. (Thanks G for the link.)
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How Facebook has flattened human communication • OneZero

David Auerbach, writing in 2018:

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The conclusions and impact of data analyses more often flow from the classifications under which the data has been gathered than from the data itself. When Facebook groups people together in some category like “beer drinkers” or “fashion enthusiasts,” there isn’t some essential trait to what unifies the people in that group. Like Google’s secret recipe, Facebook’s classification has no actual secret to it. It is just an amalgam of all the individual factors that, when summed, happened to trip the category detector. Whatever it was that caused Facebook to decide I had an African-American “ethnic affinity” (was it my Sun Ra records?), it’s not anything that would clearly cause a human to decide that I have such an affinity.

What’s important, instead, is that such a category exists, because it dictates how I will be treated in the future. The name of the category — whether “African American,” “ethnic minority,” “African descent,” or “black” — is more important than the criteria for the category. Facebook’s learned criteria for these categories would significantly overlap, yet the ultimate classification possesses a distinctly different meaning in each case. But the distinction between criteria is obscured. We never see the criteria, and very frequently this criteria is arbitrary or flat-out wrong. The choice of classification is more important than how the classification is performed.

«

The way that we’re reduced to bits is easy to forget, but it’s part of why these systems distort our existences so much.
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Spies, lies, and stonewalling: what it’s like to report on Facebook • Columbia Journalism Review

Jacob Silverman:

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In conversations with more than fifteen journalists and industry observers, I tried to understand what it is like to cover Facebook. What I found was troublesome: operating with the secrecy of an intelligence agency and the authority of a state government, Facebook has arrogated to itself vast powers while enjoying, until recently, limited journalistic scrutiny. (Some journalists, like The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, have done important work linking Facebook data to political corruption in the UK and elsewhere.) Media organizations have stepped up their game, but they suffer from a lack of access, among other power asymmetries.

Many journalists contacted for this story declined to talk out of fear of hurting relationships with Facebook’s communications shop. A number of journalists agreed to be interviewed, only to pass after speaking to their editors and PR reps. Some spoke to me off the record.

Nearly everyone I talked to acknowledged that the relationship between Facebook and journalists had dramatically deteriorated in recent years. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that Facebook and its comms shop was, for many journalists, a valued source.

«

I can’t think of a time when I thought of Facebook as a valued source. Certainly though in my experience it moved, exactly like Google, from being eager to talk up new products and give on-the-record briefings about those things, to being secretive and reactive. The shift wasn’t just about going public; there was also a size element (harder to coordinate things), and numerous scandals (for Google and Facebook) which subsequently made them wary of answering questions.

It’s a great piece, this.
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New Trump appointee puts global internet freedom at risk, critics say • The New York Times

Pranshu Verma and Edward Wong:

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In less than a decade, the Open Technology Fund has quietly become integral to the world’s repressed communities. Over two billion people in 60 countries rely on tools developed and supported by the fund, like Signal and Tor, to connect to the internet securely and send encrypted messages in authoritarian societies.

After Mr. Pack was confirmed for his new post on June 4, following a personal campaign of support by President Trump, Mr. Pack fired the technology group’s top officials and bipartisan board, an action now being fought in the courts. A federal judge on Thursday ruled in Mr. Pack’s favor, a decision that plaintiffs will likely appeal.

On Friday, Mr. Pack appointed an interim chief executive, James M. Miles, to head the fund, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Miles is little known in the internet freedom community, and his appointment needs approval from the fund’s new board, which is stacked with Trump administration officials and chaired by Mr. Pack.

The move was a victory for a lobbying effort backed by religious freedom advocates displeased with the fund’s work and who are often allied with conservative political figures.

This battle revolves around software developed by Falun Gong, the secretive spiritual movement persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party.

«

At this point the story takes quite a weird turn, but the key point is that the OTF has always pushed open source software, because it’s easier to spread to countries, easier to verify. (Signal and Tor have been pushed by the OTF.) The bonkers group pushing at Pack wants him to boost a closed-source app. That creates all sorts of risks from fakes and man-in-the-middle attacks.

Every one of these political appointments makes the US that little bit worse.
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iOS 14: iCloud Keychain now alerts users about leaked passwords, more • 9to5Mac

Filipe Espósito:

»

If you’re not familiar with iCloud Keychain, it stores and syncs all your passwords from different websites and apps through iCloud. Users can access the iCloud Keychain with an iPhone or iPad by opening the Settings app and then tapping the Passwords menu.

With iOS 14, Apple offers a new “Security Recommendations” menu that shows only your passwords that could put your accounts at risk for some reason. This includes passwords that are easy to guess and even those that may have leaked on the web.

iCloud Keychain now clarifies what the problem is with the password for each specific account saved there, so users can learn more about creating stronger passwords. Some of these features were already present in iOS 13, but they weren’t as prominent as in iOS 14.

Here are some examples of security alerts provided by iCloud Keychain on iOS 14:
• Many people use this password, which makes it easy to guess.
• This password is easy to guess.
• This password uses a sequence, “123”. Using commom patterns makes passwords easy to guess.

There’s a new alert in particular that’s also one of the most important for users. According to Apple, iCloud Keychain now verifies if your passwords are involved in a data breach.

«

Though that last one will probably mean you’ll get an alert all the time if you’ve signed in many places. Data breaches are more than an everyday occurrence.
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Google-backed groups criticize Apple’s new warnings on user tracking • Reuters

Stephen Nellis and Paresh Dave:

»

Apple last week disclosed features in its forthcoming operating system for iPhones and iPads that will require apps to show a pop-up screen before they enable a form of tracking commonly needed to show personalized ads.

Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook and Alphabet’s Google, faulted Apple for not adhering to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy rules. Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk users will refuse, the associations argued.

Facebook and Google are the largest among thousands of companies that track online consumers to pick up on their habits and interests and serve them relevant ads.

Apple said the new feature was aimed at giving users greater transparency over how their information is being used. In training sessions at a developer conference last week, Apple showed that developers can present any number of additional screens beforehand to explain why permission is needed before triggering its pop-up.

«

Nobody’s going to say “yes, track me everywhere!” For the small adtech companies, it’s going to be a test of whether they really do need to do tracking to earn their money.
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NewsGuard: The internet trust tool

»

Get detailed ratings of more than 4,500 news websites that account for 95% of online engagement with news. See ratings displayed as icons next to links on all the major search engines, social media sites, and platforms.

See who’s behind each site and whether it has a record of publishing accurate information. Learn how each site fares on the nine journalistic standards NewsGuard uses to assess each site.

Get warnings on new trending misinformation sites as they are flagged and rated by NewsGuard’s 24/7 rapid response SWAT team.

[But] NewsGuard is exclusively for personal use, for use by journalists reporting on misinformation, or for use by our school and library partners. Any use of NewsGuard’s data by researchers, or any commercial use, including by moderators, coders and others at technology platforms, search providers or other companies, is strictly prohibited unless expressly permitted…

«

Interesting project. Browser extensions for Edge, Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Mobile apps for iOS and Android. It rates Gateway Pundit as “completely full of crap” (I paraphrase). Not free: it’s £2.95 per month.
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MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

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MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms.

The database was removed this week after The Register alerted the American super-college. MIT also urged researchers and developers to stop using the training library, and to delete any copies. “We sincerely apologize,” a professor told us.

The training set, built by the university, has been used to teach machine-learning models to automatically identify and list the people and objects depicted in still images. For example, if you show one of these systems a photo of a park, it might tell you about the children, adults, pets, picnic spreads, grass, and trees present in the snap. Thanks to MIT’s cavalier approach when assembling its training set, though, these systems may also label women as whores or bitches, and Black and Asian people with derogatory language. The database also contained close-up pictures of female genitalia labeled with the C-word.

Applications, websites, and other products relying on neural networks trained using MIT’s dataset may therefore end up using these terms when analyzing photographs and camera footage.

«

An old but much-used AI picture training database, dating back to the early 2000s, where nobody had actually bothered (we have to assume) to check quite how the content was labelled. Until these researchers did.
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Facebook admits Ben Shapiro is breaking its rules • Popular Information

Judd Legum:

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Last week, Popular Information exposed how The Daily Wire has gained unprecedented distribution on Facebook through its relationship with Mad World News. Five large Facebook pages controlled by Mad World News expanded The Daily Wire’s audience by millions through the coordinated posting of dozens of links from The Daily Wire each day. 

Facebook previously said it had looked into the matter, found no evidence of a violation, and could not prove a financial relationship. The company now admits the two publishers are working together.

“After further investigation, we’ve found that these Pages violate our policies against undisclosed paid relationships between publishers. Our enforcement typically focuses on the Page distributing the cross-promoted content, which is why we are temporarily demoting Mad World News. We are also warning Daily Wire and will demote them if we see this behavior continue,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

«

Legum is chipping away, very gradually but thoroughly, at Shapiro’s little empire of paid-for Facebook echo chambers. (Facebook’s policy: “Facebook pages cannot ‘accept anything of value to post content that you did not create.'”) This is the first takedown, and more will surely follow.

Of course, far too difficult for Facebook, with its gigantic systems, to spot that someone’s posts always get echoed at precisely the same time across a whole ton of Pages. It needs one person asking difficult questions – and even then Facebook initially denied there was a problem.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Google’s $2.1bn acquisition of Fitbit is being held up by by regulators. Perhaps forever CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart 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. Another one down. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The rabbit outbreak • The New Yorker

Susan Orlean:

»

One of the lagoviruses of the family Caliciviridae causes a highly contagious illness called rabbit hemorrhagic disease. RHD is vexingly hard to diagnose. An infected rabbit might experience vague lethargy, or a high fever and difficulty breathing, or it might exhibit no symptoms at all. Regardless of the symptoms, though, the mortality rate for RHD can reach a gloomy hundred%. There is no treatment for it. The virus’s ability to survive and spread is uncanny. It can persist on dry cloth with no host for more than a hundred days; it can withstand freezing and thawing; it can thrive in a dead rabbit for months, and on rabbit pelts, and in the wool made from Angora-rabbit fur, and in the rare rabbit that gets infected but survives. It can travel on birds’ claws and flies’ feet and coyotes’ fur. Its spread has been so merciless and so devastating that some pet owners have begun referring to it as “rabbit Ebola.”

…In the universe of human-animal relations, rabbits occupy a liminal space. They are the only creatures we regularly keep as pets in our homes that we also, just as regularly, eat or wear. Fitting into both the companion-animal category and the livestock category means that rabbits are not entirely claimed by either. A number of animal statutes—particularly, felony-cruelty provisions—are specific to dogs and cats, but not to rabbits. Laws protecting livestock, such as the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, don’t apply to rabbits, either, even rabbits being raised for meat, because the U.S.D.A. does not officially recognize them as livestock. There is probably no other animal that is viewed as diversely, and valued as differently, by its various partisans. Simply being a rabbit person doesn’t mean that you look at rabbits the same way as another self-identified rabbit person. Any of the almost twenty thousand members of the American Rabbit Breeders Association are just as likely to be raising a prized Jersey Wooly that sleeps in their bed and is primped for rabbit shows as they are to have hundreds of caged rabbits that will end up as stew.

A few years ago, a lawyer named Natalie Reeves, who volunteers at a rabbit shelter and has lectured on rabbit law at the New York City Bar Association, was having trouble untangling the hair of her pet long-haired rabbit, Mopsy McGillicuddy. She found an Internet group for long-haired-rabbit owners, and posted about Mopsy’s hair troubles, expecting tips on conditioners and brushes. On the site, she noticed that a common response to similar problems was to kill the rabbit and start fresh with another.

«

This is an amazing tale. Give it your time.
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Facebook says the good it does outweighs the bad. But how many Likes make up for the hate? • The Guardian

Julia Carrie Wong, with a really powerful piece questioning the calculus of Likes:

»

I’m not saying that Facebook is solely responsible for the actions of every hate-addled individual who harassed me, let alone for the decisions made by [Heather] Heyer’s murderer [at the far-right rally in Charlottesville] or Myanmar’s military.

But I do think that Facebook played a role in creating the conditions necessary for those things to happen. I think that not because I am a bitter and cynical reporter who is chasing clicks with outrage, but because over and over and over again reporters, researchers and activists have documented the real and devastating costs of Facebook’s algorithmic negligence and record of accommodating hate.

So when I hear Facebook touting all the good it has supposedly done for the world, I want to know just how it’s making that accounting, because I’m not prepared to say that it’s enough.

Hate is an existential threat to the people it targets, but it’s no threat at all to Facebook. The only existential threat to a $650bn multinational corporation is a threat to its revenues. That’s where the real calculations are taking place right now at Facebook. When hate hurt people, Facebook did nothing. Now that it’s hurting Facebook, we’ll see what it really values.

«

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Facebook to shut down experimental apps Hobbi, Lasso • CNET

Alexandra Garrett:

»

Facebook is shutting down experimental apps Hobbi and Lasso. Users reportedly received notifications that each app will be closing up shop as of July 10.

Hobbi, developed by Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team, launched in February for iOS as a Pinterest-like app for organizing and saving photos of personal projects such as baking, ceramics, gardening, arts & crafts and more. From these photos, users could share videos of their projects with friends and family. 

Facebook confirmed that the NPE team will be shutting down its hobby focused app.

“Many of NPE’s products start small,” said a Facebook spokesperson on Wednesday. “We expect to have to shut down apps when they’re not catching on, but we also hope to learn from these experiments so that we can build better, more interesting apps in the future.”

Lasso was released over a year and a half ago, before the launch of the NPE team in 2019. The app lets users record 15-second long videos to share with friends. Lasso also includes video-editing tools to help users add music and text to their videos, similar to the social app TikTok. Facebook has since added a similar short-form video feature to Instagram, called Reels.

«

Quite a thing if Facebook has realised that it can’t compete with TikTok.
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Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg should change amid ad boycott pressure • Bloomberg

Tae Kim and Alex Webb:

»

antitrust is far more of an existential threat to Facebook than is regulation. That’s not simply because it could, in the most extreme circumstances, result in a breakup of the company. It’s because antitrust by definition seeks to tackle its business practices.

Just last week, Germany’s highest civil court ruled that Facebook must stop logging browsing activity outside of its platforms without users’ explicit permission, and that such permission couldn’t be a condition of using its other services. Crucially, though, the decision was based not on data protection but antitrust laws. It said Facebook was abusing its market power to force users to accept the terms because it is the dominant social network. And the ruling fundamentally attacked the company’s business model, which is built on using such data to target ads effectively. An effort by Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority is even less ambiguous: it’s carrying out a study into online platforms and digital advertising.

While the UK is no longer a member of the European Union, the bloc’s regulators are following the findings of the study closely. After years of tackling Google, Facebook is now high on the European agenda. The two firms’ dominance of digital advertising is fueled by their low incremental costs. Tackle their business models, and you might resolve the harmful content problem, runs the argument. The EU plans new rules by the end of the year on content regulation and platform liability, while Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust and tech chief, is seeking new powers to break companies up.

«

(Style note: Bloomberg calls the United Kingdom “U.K.” but the European Union “EU”. I removed the full stops. But why is the EU just EU to Bloomberg yet the UK is U.K.?)
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EU signals deeper investigation of Google Fitbit deal • Financial Times

Javier Espinoza:

»

EU regulators have sent two questionnaires, adding up to around 60 pages, asking Google and Fitbit’s rivals whether the deal will damage competition, disadvantage other fitness tracking apps in Google’s Play Store, or give Google more profiling data to improve its online search and advertising businesses.

The questionnaires also ask rivals to assess the impact of the deal on Google’s growing digital healthcare business.

Separately, 20 consumer groups, including Europe’s umbrella consumer organisation BEUC and the Consumer Federation of America, issued a warning about the deal on Thursday.

“Regulators must assume that Google will in practice utilise the entirety of Fitbit’s currently independent unique, highly sensitive data set in combination with its own, particularly as this could increase its profits, or they must impose strict and enforceable limitations on data use,” they said, in a joint statement.

The detail of the questions posed by the EU suggests that Brussels is gearing up for an extended investigation and may block the transaction, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

«

This acquisition is crawling along. It was announced in November 2019; still hasn’t happened. Australia’s competition commission is looking at this too. They’re concerned that it’s a one-way street for data, and that Google will get too much of it.
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UK regulators take aim at Apple’s search engine deal with Google • Reuters

Stephen Nellis:

»

The payments by Alphabet Inc’s Google to Apple Inc to be the default search engine on Apple’s Safari web browser create “a significant barrier to entry and expansion” for Google’s rivals in the search engine market, the UK markets regulator said in a report released on Wednesday.

Apple received the “substantial majority” of the £1.2bn ($1.5bn) that Google paid to be the default search engine on a variety of devices in the United Kingdom in 2019, according to the report.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority, in its final report investigating online platforms and digital advertising, said the arrangements between Apple and Google create “a significant barrier to entry and expansion” for Google’s rivals in the search engine market. Those rivals include Microsoft Corp’s Bing, Verizon Communications Inc-owned Yahoo and independent search engine DuckDuckGo, all of which also make payments to Apple in exchange for being search engine options on its devices, the report said.

«

The full report is really very interesting. Lots of data, plenty of graphs. Not short, though. Tantalising detail – such as how much Google’s search share would drop if it was forced to give up the iPhone default – are missing though.
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ThiefQuest Mac malware includes ransomware, data theft capabilities • SecurityWeek.Com

Eduard Kovacs:

»

at the time of writing it is detected by over a dozen engines.

Malwarebytes has seen the malware being distributed as trojanized installers for popular macOS applications, including the Little Snitch firewall, the Mixed In Key and Ableton DJ apps, and a Google software update.

Patrick Wardle, a researcher who specializes in the security of Apple products, pointed out that since these installers are not signed, macOS alerts users before opening them, but people who download pirated software are likely to ignore the warning and install the malware on their device.

Wardle has published a detailed analysis of how ThiefQuest is installed, how it achieves persistence and its capabilities. Once the malware has been deployed, it starts encrypting certain types of files found on the system, including archives, images, audio and video files, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases and web files.

It then drops a text file informing users that their files have been encrypted and instructs them to pay $50 in bitcoin to recover them. A summary of the ransom note is also displayed in a modal window and its content is read out using the speech feature in macOS.

«

Basically, people think they’re getting a pirated (free!) version of paid software, and get more than they expected. Life advice: don’t look into the egg when it opens for you.
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FakeSpy masquerades as postal service apps around the world • Cybereason

Ofir Almkias:

»

The Cybereason Nocturnus team is investigating a new campaign involving FakeSpy, an Android mobile malware that emerged around October 2017. FakeSpy is an information stealer used to steal SMS messages, send SMS messages, steal financial data, read account information and contact lists, steal application data, and do much more.

FakeSpy first targeted South Korean and Japanese speakers. However, it has begun to target users all around the world, especially users in countries like China, Taiwan, France, Switzerland, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, and others.

FakeSpy masquerades as legitimate postal service apps and transportation services in order to gain the users’ trust. Once installed, the application requests permissions so that it may control SMS messages and steal sensitive data on the device, as well as proliferate to other devices in the target device’s contact list.

Cybereason’s investigation shows that the threat actor behind the FakeSpy campaign is a Chinese-speaking group dubbed “Roaming Mantis”, a group that has led similar campaigns.

«

By “postal service”, they literally mean the services that deliver your post – this group has made fake apps pretending to be Royal Mail, Swiss Post, Deutsche Post, French La Poste, US Postal Service, and more. It’s kicked off by an SMS to your phone telling you there’s a package, and that you need to download an app – which it directs you to. The app is real, but fake, if you see what I mean. And then you have a real problem.

It asks for a million permissions, of course, but Android users have been inculcated into ignoring those and just saying yes, of course. (Thanks Jim for the link.)
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Uncovered: 1,000 phrases that incorrectly trigger Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

As Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and other voice assistants have become fixtures in millions of homes, privacy advocates have grown concerned that their near-constant listening to nearby conversations could pose more risk than benefit to users. New research suggests the privacy threat may be greater than previously thought.

The findings demonstrate how common it is for dialog in TV shows and other sources to produce false triggers that cause the devices to turn on, sometimes sending nearby sounds to Amazon, Apple, Google, or other manufacturers. In all, researchers uncovered more than 1,000 word sequences—including those from Game of Thrones, Modern Family, House of Cards, and news broadcasts—that incorrectly trigger the devices.

“The devices are intentionally programmed in a somewhat forgiving manner, because they are supposed to be able to understand their humans,” one of the researchers, Dorothea Kolossa, said. “Therefore, they are more likely to start up once too often rather than not at all.”

Examples of words or word sequences that provide false triggers include
• Alexa: “unacceptable,” “election,” and “a letter”
• Google Home: “OK, cool,” and “Okay, who is reading”
• Siri: “a city” and “hey jerry”
• Microsoft Cortana: “Montana”

«

So don’t watch Seinfeld with a Homepod or similar in the room. Got it. (Have never watched Seinfeld.)
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Google pushing scam ads on Americans searching for how to vote • Tech Transparency Project

»

Google is allowing scammers to prey on Americans seeking information about how to vote in the upcoming election, according to a Tech Transparency Project (TTP) analysis, undercutting the company’s claims that it’s helping people navigate the process of registering to vote, securing a mail-in ballot or finding their polling place.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is changing the way millions of Americans vote, and that makes access to accurate information about elections more important than ever. But citizens who turn to Google for answers could be discouraged or misled by scam ads that pop up as they search for how and where to vote in 2020.

TTP found that search terms like “register to vote,” “vote by mail,” and “where is my polling place” generated ads linking to websites that charge bogus fees for voter registration, harvest user data, or plant unwanted software on people’s browsers.

Such ads could have a suppressive effect on voters. Users searching for guidance about elections who instead find themselves on manipulative or confusing sites may eventually give up on finding the information they need. That’s a far cry from Google’s commitment to “protect our users from harm and abuse, especially during elections.” 

The ads identified by TTP appear to violate Google’s policies that prohibit misrepresentation, collecting user data for unclear purposes, and unwanted software. They may also run afoul of Federal Trade Commission regulations banning “unfair or deceptive advertising.”

«

OK, there are lots of ads to police, but you’d think if it’s important then Google would police it more closely.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Big advertisers are pulling ads from Facebook. Is that going to make any real difference, though? CC-licensed photo by Book Catalog 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. The Facebook edition. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

China’s software stalked Uighurs earlier and more widely, researchers learn • The New York Times

Paul Mozur and Nicole Perlroth:

»

The timeline [discovered by the security company Lookout] suggests the hacking campaign was an early cornerstone in China’s Uighur surveillance efforts that would later extend to collecting blood samples, voice prints, facial scans and other personal data to transform Xinjiang into a virtual police state. It also shows the lengths to which China’s minders were determined to follow Uighurs as they fled China for as many as 15 other countries.

The tools the hackers assembled hid in special keyboards used by Uighurs and disguised themselves as commonly used apps in third-party websites. Some could remotely turn on a phone’s microphone, record calls or export photos, phone locations and conversations on chat apps. Others were embedded in apps that hosted Uighur-language news, Uighur-targeted beauty tips, religious texts like the Quran and details of the latest Muslim cleric arrests.

“Wherever China’s Uighurs are going, however far they go, whether it was Turkey, Indonesia or Syria, the malware followed them there,” said Apurva Kumar, a threat intelligence engineer at Lookout who helped unravel the campaign. “It was like watching a predator stalk its prey throughout the world.”

«

The targeting goes back to 2013. Sometimes the police would physically take phones and install spyware. It’s shocking.
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Alexa, just shut up: We’ve been isolated for months, and now we hate our home assistants • The Washington Post

Travis Andrews:

»

Jennifer Wood-Thompson, an Indianapolis-based office manger, uses both Siri and Alexa for simple tasks such as creating shopping lists, checking the weather and playing music. She said, “My relationship with them has always been a little volatile, because sometimes they’re not cooperative. But being home for 2½ months definitely escalated it a little bit.” So, she added, “when you ask Alexa to turn on the light and she doesn’t do anything, I tend to just yell back her.”

For Zach Ratcheson, the breaking point came during a game of “Jeopardy!” he played on an Echo with his wife and two daughters, ages 10 and 13. They’re a pretty smart crew and kept offering the right answers, but Alexa couldn’t understand. Was it their Marietta, Ga., accents? Was she being purposely stubborn? Maybe the tech just isn’t where it needs to be? All he knows is that it’s infuriating.

“We were trying to make it a fun, non-TV activity for the whole family, but it kept telling us we were wrong, even though we weren’t,” Ratcheson said. “There was nothing more frustrating.”

That annoyance had been building for some time, particularly since he began working from home. Want to know what’s on Joe Scarborough’s Wikipedia page? Ratcheson probably knows it by heart, since Alexa often reads it to him when he wakes up early, puts coffee on, and asks “her” to play “Morning Joe.” Supposedly, Alexa can tell you when a package has reached the front door, but in reality, “the dog is better at it than that spinning yellow circle,” he said.

It feels like a broken pact. “You could hope it could evolve over time,” he said. The promise “of AI is that it’s supposed to get to know you and learn your habits over time, and it just never does.”

«

That thing about how it never learns is the real frustration. Even if a dog can’t turn the radio on, it does learn and it does show affection.
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Official COVID-19 count may underestimate deaths by 28% • UPI.com

Brian Dunleavy:

»

Official counts of COVID-19 cases in the United States may underestimate deaths by as much as 28%, according to an analysis published Wednesday by JAMA Internal Medicine.

From March 1 through May 30, an estimated 122,300 Americans died after being infected with the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, the researchers said. That’s higher than the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s tally of 95,235.

The difference is based on the researchers’ assessment of “excess deaths” across the country — the actual number of reported deaths compared to figures from the same period for the previous five years.”

There have been questions about whether the reported statistics overcount COVID-19 deaths, but our analyses suggest the opposite,” study co-author Daniel Weinberger, an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University School of Medicine, told UPI.

«

Full paper here. But this is the nut.
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SoftBank seeks to end partnership with Wirecard • WSJ

Caitlin Ostroff and Margot Patrick:

»

SoftBank Group Corp. is looking to distance itself from Wirecard AG, after the Japanese tech conglomerate helped arrange a $1bn investment months before the German payments company went bust.

One of the world’s largest technology investors, SoftBank is seeking to terminate a five-year partnership its investment arm formed with Wirecard in April 2019, according to people familiar with the matter.

Wirecard declined to comment.

The partnership agreement called for SoftBank to introduce Wirecard as a digital payments provider to other companies in SoftBank’s sprawling portfolio of tech firms. SoftBank also agreed to help Wirecard expand in Japan and South Korea.

The partnership was struck in April 2019 at the same time that a SoftBank-run investment vehicle agreed to plow €900m ($1bn) into Wirecard through a convertible bond. It was an unusual deal in which SoftBank ended up not putting in any of its own money when it closed later that year.

«

Yet another bad decision by SoftBank. There were loads of warnings by then that this was a bad move. Though of course Credit Suisse, which jumped into this with both feet, bears some blame too.

I start to get a little itchy about ARM, which SoftBank bought some years ago.
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Want to stop hate? Fund facts, not Facebook • Snopes

The Snopes team:

»

Despite several years’ worth of public clamor for reform, Facebook — from our vantage point — has done little but begrudgingly undertake superficial changes to address the hate and misinformation proliferating on its platform. We have first-hand experience dealing with Facebook’s callous indifference to the real-world consequences of its business model.

We participated as a Facebook fact-checking “partner” for two years before we abandoned the role, sensing that the program effectively served as a public relations effort for Facebook, not as a genuine attempt to combat misinformation. When we pressed for changes, Facebook made it clear it was not interested in our suggestions.

Our investigative reporting has exposed vast networks of scammers and political schemers engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior on the platform. Facebook’s lack of cooperation and quiet deletion of the networks we’ve discovered plainly demonstrated it was unwilling to acknowledge the public harm enabled by its indifference.

We are relieved to see Facebook’s half measures and obfuscation tactics to address hate and misinformation are no longer being tolerated.

«

The Facebook fact-checking was pretty lucrative for Snopes: nearly half its revenue in 2018. But it dropped that in 2019 in favour of crowdfunding and reader contributions, which did better. The Facebook fact-checking was a terrible churn (I’ve been told by one who did it).
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Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boycott • The Economist

»

Facebook’s share price has fallen by about 6% since the [Facebook advertising] boycott took off. If ad dollars go elsewhere, possible beneficiaries include smaller rivals like Snapchat, Pinterest and TikTok, as well as YouTube, owned by Google. Some advertisers may even go back to quaint things like newspapers and television, believes Andrew Lipsman of eMarketer, a research firm.

Yet the damage to Facebook is likely to be small. Its $70bn ad business is built on 8m advertisers, most of them tiny companies with marketing budgets in the hundreds or thousands of dollars and often reliant on Facebook as an essential digital storefront. The 100 largest advertisers on the site account for less than 20% of total revenue, compared with 71% for the 100 largest advertisers on American network television. And so far only three of Facebook’s top 50 ad-buyers have joined the boycott.

…On June 29th YouTube blocked various white-supremacist channels. Twitch, a video site, suspended President Donald Trump’s own channel for showing “hateful conduct”. Reddit deleted a forum, “The_Donald”, over hate speech.

This points to a pressure greater than advertising: politics. American tech firms have walked a fine line between Republicans, who accuse them of being too censorious, and Democrats, who want closer moderation. Now, as Mr Trump’s poll numbers swoon, Silicon Valley seem to be edging towards the Democratic view of things. Time, perhaps, to make new friends.

«

Astute point about the politics. (Via John Naughton.)
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Facebook does not benefit from hate • About Facebook

Nick Clegg is Facebook’s vp of public affairs:

»

Facebook has come in for much criticism in recent weeks following its decision to allow controversial posts by President Trump to stay up, and misgivings on the part of many people, including companies that advertise on our platform, about our approach to tackling hate speech. I want to be unambiguous: Facebook does not profit from hate. Billions of people use Facebook and Instagram because they have good experiences — they don’t want to see hateful content, our advertisers don’t want to see it, and we don’t want to see it. There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it.

More than 100 billion messages are sent on our services every day. That’s all of us, talking to each other, sharing our lives, our opinions, our hopes and our experiences. In all of those billions of interactions a tiny fraction are hateful. When we find hateful posts on Facebook and Instagram, we take a zero tolerance approach and remove them. When content falls short of being classified as hate speech — or of our other policies aimed at preventing harm or voter suppression — we err on the side of free expression because, ultimately, the best way to counter hurtful, divisive, offensive speech, is more speech.

«

I disagree with Nick.
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Boogaloo ads have been making money for Facebook for months • Buzzfeed News

Ryan Mac and Caroline Haskins:

»

On Sunday, the @docscustomknives Instagram account placed an ad on the popular photo-sharing social network advocating that people “join the militia, fight the state.” As clips from action movies play, showing police officers being shot and killed, music blares with lyrics proclaiming, “We ain’t scared of no police / We got guns too.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, the ad was still online.

Several hashtags in the ad — including #Boogaloo, #BoogalooBois, and #BoogalooMemes — connect the ad to “Boogaloos,” a catchphrase for anti-government extremists who have called for violence against the police and state officials and advocated for another Civil War in the US.

A current ad on Instagram advocated that people “join the militia” and “fight the state,” while using hashtags associated with the extremist Boogaloo movement.

This ad is just one of several pieces of paid content related to the Boogaloo movement on Facebook and Instagram that were uncovered by BuzzFeed News; this is despite claims by Facebook that it was doing more to take action against the group.

The @docscustomknives may be the most recent, but it is far from the only Boogaloo ad that has run on Facebook or its photo-sharing site, Instagram. As right-wing extremists have used the company’s tools to organize, the world’s largest social network has also profited from ads pushing for white supremacy.

…Tech Transparency Project Director Katie Paul told BuzzFeed News that when Facebook accepted money from Boogaloo supporters and sympathizers, it amplified the movement.

“The company is not just failing to address the fact that its platform is really feeding this echo chamber of supporters, but also the fact that it’s profiting off that movement that is predicated on violence,” she said.

«

Facebook says it doesn’t profit from hate speech. This gives the lie to that.
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Banning a violent network in the US • About Facebook

»

Facebook designates non-state actors under our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy after a rigorous process that takes into account both online and offline behavior. During this process, we work to identify an actor’s goals and whether they have a track record of offline violence. We know the initial elements of the boogaloo movement began as far back as 2012, and we have been closely following its developments since 2019. We understand that the term has been adopted by a range of anti-government activists who generally believe civil conflict in the US is inevitable.

…In order to make Facebook as inhospitable to this violent US-based anti-government network as possible, we conducted a strategic network disruption of their presence today removing 220 Facebook accounts, 95 Instagram accounts, 28 Pages and 106 groups that currently comprise the network. We have also removed over 400 additional groups and over 100 other Pages for violating our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy as they hosted similar content as the violent network we disrupted but were maintained by accounts outside of it. As part of our designation process, we will now identify where we can strengthen how we enforce our policy against this banned network and spot attempts by the violent US anti-government network to return to our platform.

«

What Facebook doesn’t say in this is that the group is the “Boogaloo” movement, which is composed mainly of young white men, many of whom are white supremacists. The tracking was done by humans. Facebook’s recognising (finally) that it’s being used as a recruiting platform for these people.
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YouTube ​bans six big white nationalist channels • Right Wing Watch

Jared Holt:

»

YouTube ​banned six accounts used by high-profile white nationalists on Monday. According to YouTube, the respective channels “repeatedly or egregiously violated our policies by alleging that members of protected groups were innately inferior to others, among other violations.”

The removed accounts include those ​owned by far-right political entertainer Stefan Molyneux, white nationalist outlets American Renaissance and Radix Journal, as well as longtime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. YouTube also removed two associated channels: one belonging to alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer and another hosting American Renaissance podcasts.

“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies. After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies,” a YouTube spokesperson ​told Right Wing Watch in an email.

«

One has to ask: how come it took so long for YouTube to notice that Spencer is a notorious white nationalist? Or, jeepers, Duke?
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Experts predict more digital innovation by 2030 aimed at enhancing democracy • Pew Research Center

»

A large share of experts and analysts worry that people’s technology use will mostly weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation in the coming decade. Yet they also foresee significant social and civic innovation between now and 2030 to try to address emerging issues.

In this new report, technology experts who shared serious concerns for democracy in a recent Pew Research Center canvassing weigh in with their views about the likely changes and reforms that might occur in the coming years.

«

There are lots of the great and good predicting wonders and ponies for everyone (“some variant of social media will likely form the context for the rise of a global movement to stop the [climate denial] madness – which I call the Human Spring”). But also plenty of more rational people offering a more clear-eyed view of what’s more likely to happen over the next ten years.

I particularly liked this (part of one contributor’s input):

»

I’m not hopeful about ameliorating the social-media hate mobs. The driving causes there are too deeply linked to the incentives from outrage-mongering. I should note there’s a cottage industry in advice about social-media pitfalls and good conduct. But this is hardly better than the simplistic ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.’ That’s not bad advice in itself, but it’s no substitute for something comparable to laws and regulations against fraud. Corporations that have their entire focus on selling advertising around outrage and surveillance are not stewards of news, democratic institutions, beneficial self-expression and so on. They are not ever going to become such stewards, as that is not what they do.

«

I’ll go with the latter view.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

She won’t look so happy when she discovers that her Galaxy Flip serves up ads, even in the phone app. CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns 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. Your ad not here. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Examining the US response to the pandemic as if it were a plane crash • The Atlantic

James Fallows:

»

Consider a thought experiment: What if the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] were brought in to look at the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic? What would its investigation conclude? I’ll jump to the answer before laying out the background: This was a journey straight into a mountainside, with countless missed opportunities to turn away. A system was in place to save lives and contain disaster. The people in charge of the system could not be bothered to avoid the doomed course.

…On December 31, the open-source platform ProMED—the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases—carried a translated “Chinese media report about the outbreak.” According to all of the intelligence-community veterans I spoke with, signals like this would certainly have been enough to alert U.S. officials to a significant development. “From these early indications, a pattern would have been discernible, and we would have slewed the rest of the system to find out more about it,” one of these people said. “Particularly since we’d know what to look for. If Martians were invading, we wouldn’t know what that would look like. But we have been down this road before, with MERS and SARS and Ebola, and we know the indications that are visible and detectable.”

With cues like these, the intelligence apparatus directed more attention at the area around the city of Wuhan. “China is a very hard target,” a man who recently worked in an intelligence organization told me. “We have to be very deliberate about what we focus on”—which in normal times would be military developments or suspected espionage threats. “The bottom line is that for a place like Wuhan, you really are going to rely on open-source or informal leads.” During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city’s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market where wild animals, live or already killed, were on sale along with fish and domesticated animals.

«

The information would have been in the PDB – President’s Daily Briefing – by the start of January. But of course he doesn’t actually read that. They should send it to Fox News – then he’d get it.
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Facebook to boost news articles with original reporting in algorithm • Axios

Sara Fischer:

»

The tech giant has long been criticized for not doing enough to elevate quality news over hyper-partisan noise. Now, it’s trying to get ahead of that narrative as the 2020 election inches closer.

Facebook says that in order to identify which original stories to promote, it will use artificial intelligence to analyze groups of articles on a particular story topic and identify the ones most often cited as the original source.

This won’t change the News Feed experience dramatically for most users, because Facebook will still only showcase stories from news outlets that they or their friends follow. But the tech giant will boost the more original story within that subset.

The company has been having active conversations with publishing executives, on both the business and editorial sides, to help define “original reporting” so that it can build signals into its algorithms to boost original stories, along with conducting user research.

The algorithm changes only apply to news stories. For now, the tech giant is focusing on stories in English. It hopes to expand to other languages in the future.

«

This is pretty difficult; it’s always been a big criticism of Google News that it gives more prominence to articles that have been updated in the past five minutes than those which broke the story. And will the tweaked algorithm be able to recognise the rehashed stories used by the company pushing Ben Shapiro’s content?
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Surprise: YouTube TV price goes way up, effective immediately • Android Authority

John Callaham:

»

Google’s YouTube TV first launched in February 2017 for the price of $34.99. Since then, the service has been adding more and more cable TV channels to its live TV streaming service. It has also seen a number of price increases. Today, Google announced the YouTube TV price has gone up by its largest amount since its launch.

In a blog post, Google revealed the YouTube TV price tag is going up by $15, from $49.99 to $64.99 a month. The price boost is going up immediately for new subscribers. Current users will see the price go up in their billing cycles or after July 30.

Along with the price increase, YouTube TV is also adding eight new cable TV channels from Viacom. They include BET, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network, TV Land, and VH1. More Viacom channels, including BET Her, MTV2, MTV Classic, Nick Jr., NickToons, and TeenNick will be added to the service sometime in the near future. It also recently added HBO Max and Cinemax as add-on channels. HBO Max costs $14.99 a month and Cinemax costs $9.99 a month.

«

Ah yes, the marketing strategy known as “boiling the frog”. Adding channels that the kids might like is a smart move. Hilariously, the explanation given for the rise in price is the cost of adding more content. Well, yes, that’s how it works. But there’s no getting away from it: YouTube TV is just another cable offering. And the price has gone up by 85% in three years.
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Ads are taking over Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones — and it needs to stop • Android Police

Max Weinbach:

»

Ads in Samsung phones never really bothered me, at least not until the past few months. It started with the Galaxy Z Flip. A tweet from Todd Haselton of CNBC, embedded below, is what really caught my eye. Samsung had put an ad from DirectTV in the stock dialer app. This is really something I never would have expected from any smartphone company, let alone Samsung.

It showed up in the “Places” tab in the dialer app, which is in partnership with Yelp and lets you search for different businesses directly from the dialer app so you don’t need to Google somewhere to find the address or phone number. I looked into it, to see if this was maybe a mistake on Yelp’s part, accidentally displaying an ad where it shouldn’t have, but nope. The ad was placed by Samsung, in an area where it could blend in so they could make money.

Similar ads exist throughout a bunch of Samsung apps. Samsung Music has ads that look like another track in your library. Samsung Health and Samsung Pay have banners for promotional ads. The stock weather app has ads that look like they could be news. There is also more often very blatant advertising in most of these apps as well.

Samsung Music will give you a popup ad for Sirius XM, even though Spotify is built into the Samsung Music app. You can hide the SiriusXM popup, but only for 7 days at a time. A week later, it will be right back there waiting for you. Samsung will also give you push notification ads for new products from Bixby, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Push Service.

«

Unbelievable. It’s not as if Samsung is short of the odd bob here or there. Weinbach calculates that given the number of ads, and the number of phones, this could be earning Samsung $500m just on the phones it sold in 2019. It shouldn’t, though.
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TikTok servers go down in India after government ban • Android Police

Rita El Khoury:

»

After a large, sweeping ban of 59 Chinese apps was issued by the Indian government yesterday, the biggest and hottest name on that list is now officially down in India: TikTok. The app’s servers are no longer active, and VPNs don’t seem to be working for everyone to circumvent the ban.

The clock has been (excuse the easy pun) tick-tocking on this since yesterday. Earlier today, TikTok’s official Twitter account in India issued a statement saying it was in the process of complying with the government’s decision and reiterated its stance on user privacy and Chinese government meddling.

It later voluntarily removed the app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in India, and now seems to have disabled access to its servers from any Indian IP address. If you already have the app installed or if you sideloaded it, you’ll see a blank slate with no posts or videos.

Looking at online mentions of this, it seems that using a VPN to circumvent the ban isn’t a surefire solution either. Some users are reporting success, but most are failing to connect with that too.

«

This is a novel form of warfare – which follows from a border clash between Indian and Chinese troops which left a number of Indian soldiers dead. TikTok is enormously popular in India, with hundreds of millions of downloads there. Unless the Modi government can persuade people that it’s their patriotic duty not to use it (which it quite possibly could) then there will be quite a backlash.
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Google has acquired North, the maker of Focals smart glasses • Engadget

Igor Bonifacic:

»

According to The Globe and Mail, the search giant paid approximately $180m to buy the startup. Despite a $400 price cut at the start of 2019, North had reportedly sold very few of its Focals smart glasses to consumers, and the Globe says the company was running out of money before the deal came about. In April, North co-founder Stephen Lake teased that North was working on a second-generation model.

With Focals, North thought of a variety of clever solutions to some of the pain points that had come with earlier wearables like Google Glass. For instance, each pair of Focals came with a ring you would wear on your index finger. It featured a small joystick and D-pad to allow you to control the smart glasses without touching them and drawing attention to yourself.

No one could accuse you of being a “glasshole” because Focals were discrete in a way that Google Glass was not. The problem was that they were too expensive. Before North discounted them, a pair of Focals cost $1,000. You also had to get custom fitted for them at a physical retail store. All of those were significant issues for technology that did not feel indispensable.

«

It’s Google Glass, the reboot. The ring for the finger is a good idea, but persuading consumers why we need smart glasses at all remains a hell of a challenge.
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Twitch temporarily bans President Trump • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

»

Twitch has temporarily banned President Donald Trump, in the latest surprise and high-profile suspension from the streaming service. Trump’s account was banned for “hateful conduct” that was aired on stream, and Twitch says the offending content has now been removed.

One of the streams in question was a rebroadcast of Trump’s infamous kickoff rally, where he said that Mexico was sending rapists to the United States. Twitch also flagged racist comments at Trump’s recent rally in Tulsa.

“Like anyone else, politicians on Twitch must adhere to our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. We do not make exceptions for political or newsworthy content, and will take action on content reported to us that violates our rules,” a Twitch spokesperson told The Verge. The statement was originally issued last year when Trump’s channel was launched.

«

Your move, Facebo–oh, never mind.
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Trump’s phone calls alarm US officials, from pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers • CNNPolitics

Carl Bernstein (yes, of Woodward and Bernstein, Watergate fame) has an in-depth piece about how lousy Trump is on phone calls with state leaders. This struck me as the most telling element:

»

In one of the earliest calls between Putin and Trump, the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were in the room to listen — joining McMaster, Tillerson, Hill, and a State Department aide to Tillerson.

“The call was all over the place,” said an NSC deputy who read a detailed summary of the conversation – with Putin speaking substantively and at length, and Trump propping himself up in short autobiographical bursts of bragging, self-congratulation and flattery toward Putin. As described to CNN, Kushner and Ivanka Trump were immediately effusive in their praise of how Trump had handled the call – while Tillerson (who knew Putin well from his years in Russia as an oil executive), Hill and McMaster were skeptical.

Hill — author of a definitive biography of Putin – started to explain some of the nuances she perceived from the call, according to CNN’s sources, offering insight into Putin’s psychology, his typical “smooth-talking” and linear approach and what the Russian leader was trying to achieve in the call. Hill was cut off by Trump, and the President continued discussing the call with Jared and Ivanka, making clear he wanted to hear the congratulatory evaluation of his daughter and her husband, rather than how Hill, Tillerson or McMaster judged the conversation.

«

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Geekbench results for the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit surface online • Macworld

Jason Cross:

»

For Mac apps that aren’t updated to be compatible Apple silicon, the new Macs will use an automatic emulation tool called Rosetta to translate apps made for Intel processors. And now that the DTKs are starting to ship to developers, we have an early look at what kind of performance that might give us.

The Geekbench results database currently shows eight benchmark results for the DTK. [It’s 28 at the time of editing, but probably going to go up by the time you read it.] Since Geekbench has not yet been made available as a new universal Apple/Intel Mac app, these results show what the DTK is capable of when running an app with the Rosetta translation.

The scores generally fall into the low 800s for single-core performance and around 2,800 or so for multi-core performance.

How does that stack up to other products? That same A12Z processor, running native code on an iPad Pro, scores about 1,100 for single-core and 4,700 for multi-core. The iPad Pro is roughly 25% higher on single-core performance and 40% higher on multi-core performance.

The latest MacBook Air, with its entry-level processor, scores around 1,100 for single-core and 2,200 for multi-core. And an entry-level Mac mini (which hasn’t been updated since 2018) delivers a score in the high 800s for single-core performance and around 2,500 for multi-core.

So the Mac Developer Transition Kit, running an Intel-based benchmark under Rosetta emulation/translation, takes a big hit compared to native performance. But Apple’s chips are so fast that it still runs roughly in the same ballpark as an entry-level Mac mini from 2018, or an entry-level MacBook Air from this year.

«

Apple told developers not to upload benchmarks. Of course people ignored that. These benchmarks don’t even begin to give you an idea of what an ARM-based Mac will be able to do. This is a two-year-old processor running emulation software. For ARM-native code on new processors, it’s going to fly.
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Is it safe to go to a restaurant? JP Morgan finds link between restaurant spending, COVID outbreaks • Fortune

Anne Sraders:

»

The firm analyzed spending by 30 million Chase credit and debit cardholders and coronavirus case data from Johns Hopkins University, and found that spending patterns from a few weeks ago “have some power in predicting where the virus has spread since then,” analyst Jesse Edgerton wrote Thursday. The study found that the “level of spending in restaurants three weeks ago was the strongest predictor of the rise in new virus cases over the subsequent three weeks,” in line with the firm’s recent studies using OpenTable data.

Notably, JPMorgan found that ‘card-present’ transactions in restaurants (meaning the person was dining in, not ordering online) were “particularly predictive” to a later spread of the virus.

And interestingly, the JPMorgan study also found that increased spending in supermarkets correlated to a slower spread of the virus. Analyst Edgerton wrote that the correlation hints that “high levels of supermarket spending are indicative of more careful social distancing in a state.” The firm pointed out that as of three weeks ago, supermarket spending in states like New York and New Jersey, which are now seeing a decrease in cases, was up 20% or more from a year ago, whereas states now seeing a surge like Texas and Arizona saw supermarket spending up less than 10%.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A couple of years ago this was Apple’s fastest chip; what’s coming in a couple of years in its laptops? CC-licensed photo by Paul Hudson 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. All in a row. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Facebook wrote its rules to accommodate Trump • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Craig Timberg and Tony Romm:

»

Outrage over the [December 2015 Trump campaign video calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the US] led to a companywide town hall, in which employees decried the video as hate speech, in violation of the company’s policies. And in meetings about the issue, senior leaders and policy experts overwhelmingly said they felt that the video was hate speech, according to three former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Zuckerberg expressed in meetings that he was personally disgusted by it and wanted it removed, the people said. Some of these details were previously reported.

At one of the meetings, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for policy, drafted a document to address the video and shared it with leaders including Zuckerberg’s top deputy COO Sheryl Sandberg and Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan, the company’s most prominent Republican.

The document, which is previously unreported and obtained by The Post, weighed four options. They included removing the post for hate speech violations, making a one-time exception for it, creating a broad exemption for political discourse and even weakening the company’s community guidelines for everyone, allowing comments such as “No blacks allowed” and “Get the gays out of San Francisco.”

Facebook spokesman Tucker Bounds said the latter option was never seriously considered.

The document also listed possible “PR Risks” for each. For example, lowering the standards overall would raise questions such as, “Would Facebook have provided a platform for Hitler?” Bickert wrote. A carveout for political speech across the board, on the other hand, risked opening the floodgates for even more hateful “copycat” comments.

Ultimately, Zuckerberg was talked out of his desire to remove the post in part by Kaplan, according to the people. Instead, the executives created an allowance that newsworthy political discourse would be taken into account when making decisions about whether posts violated community guidelines.

That allowance was not formally written into the policies, even though it informed ad hoc decision-making about political speech for the next several years, according to the people. When a formal newsworthiness policy was announced in October 2016, in a blog post by Kaplan, the company did not discuss Trump’s role in shaping it.

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Isn’t it amazing how every time something controversial involving a right-winger on Facebook comes up, Kaplan is there saying not to act on it? Every. Single. Time.
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Reddit shuts down r/The_Donald after years of problems with racism, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories • The Washington Post

Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin:

»

Reddit shut down its popular but controversial forum devoted to supporting President Trump on Monday, following years in which the social media company tried but often failed to control the racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, glorification of violence and conspiracy theories that flourished there.

The move against r/The_Donald, as the forum was known, came after its volunteer moderators and much of the community had left in recent months, moving to a website that mimics Reddit’s system of conversation and user voting on content but appears to have fewer rules. It is just one of several alternative social media sites, such as Gab and Parler, that have emerged in recent years, portraying themselves as freewheeling alternatives to more mainstream platforms.

The move by Reddit comes amid a broader crackdown by technology companies, including Twitter and Facebook, to try to rein in hateful, deceptive and other problematic content on their platforms, typically after high-profile scandals prompted action. Reddit also implemented its first policy banning hate speech on Monday and closed about 2,000 individual forums, what the company calls “subreddits.” The company already had a policy against “divisive language” in advertising.

Most of the closed subreddits already had become dormant while others, like r/The_Donald, had histories of policy violations. Reddit also closed the left-wing r/ChapoTrapHouse on Monday for violating platform rules.

«

Facebook’s “reining in” looks rather different from that of all the others, as already noted. Though this is really not much of a move, if it was already a ghost town. Though “2,000 others”? That’s a lot.
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Apple Silicon – first impressions • DIGITS to DOLLARS

Jonathan Goldberg:

»

Reading between the lines, they seem to be targeting desktop performance with highly improved power budgets. This is important because they could have done the inverse and built a very different product. This implies some incredibly powerful laptops, as opposed to ultra-long battery life on lighter devices. Which is interesting because that latter use case is an iPad, as most people use it today, which runs on a different branch of their chip family tree. Our interpretation of this is that they have built an incredibly flexible architecture that lets them assemble chip pieces like Lego bricks. This has big implications for the broader industry, which we will return to in tomorrow’s post.

«

I think this post is actually the more interesting one, since it makes a prediction about the forthcoming laptops. It’ll be comparatively easy to create laptops with the same external shape but more power: add more cores, clock the CPU a little faster. Apple has so much potential here.
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2020 iPhones won’t come with a power adapter or earbuds, says Kuo • The Verge

Sam Byford:

»

This year’s new iPhones might not have as much in the box as you’re used to. According to well-connected analyst Ming-chi Kuo, Apple is planning to stop including a power adapter and EarPods in the box with 2020 models, and will even remove the power adapter from the new iPhone SE’s packaging later this year. Kuo’s research note was reported on by AppleInsider, MacRumors, and 9to5Mac.

Apple is attempting to offset the cost increases that come with upgrading the iPhone range to 5G, according to Kuo. Smaller packaging would be more eco-friendly and also reduce shipping costs, since more phones could fit into a single shipment. (Encouraging more sales of AirPods can’t hurt, either.)

Right now Apple includes EarPods with all iPhones, a 5W USB-A adapter with the 11 and SE, and an 18W USB-C adapter with the 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max. Last year’s inclusion of the 18W charger came after years of widespread complaints regarding the slow 5W adapter, so it would be surprising to see it disappear so quickly. It’s not clear, however, whether that will be the case across the whole iPhone line.

«

I don’t think anyone would miss the adapter or the earbuds. If there’s a home that doesn’t have at least one spare set of each, I’d like to know about it. And when people upgrade, they… already have those things. Less electrical waste, too. Though this also tells us that, as expected, Apple isn’t going to get rid of the Lightning connector.
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Apple just crippled IDFA, sending an $80bn industry into upheaval • Forbes

John Koetsier:

»

Yesterday Apple killed the IDFA without killing the IDFA, by taking it out of the depths of the Settings app where almost no-one could find it — although increasingly people were finding it and turning it off — and making it explicitly opt-in for every single app. If an app wants to use the IDFA, iOS 14 will present mobile users with a big scary dialog [“This app would like permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies. Your data will be used to deliver personalised ads to you. Allow/Ask Not To Track”]

Would you say “yes” to allowing an app or brand permission to “track you across apps and websites owned by other companies?” Neither will 99% of consumers.

This is actually a genius move by Apple. Marketers can’t really get upset about losing the IDFA capability, because technically it’s still around. Apple gets to burnish its privacy credentials while not taking huge amounts of flack from brands and advertisers because, after all, who can argue with giving people more rights with their personal data?

And make no mistake: this is a great move for user privacy. But it’s also a huge problem for a massive industry.

«

The problem for the advertisers is that they won’t be able to track people, and measure the effects of their ads. Though that probably helps Facebook and Google, as ever.
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A Better World

“Fibretigre”:

»

The dates you can change are in yellow.

The dates you just changed are in pink.

Click on one of them to change the past!

«

It’s a fun game. I managed to wipe out Europe with my first one. It’s like that SF short story, “A Sound of Thunder.” (That link’s probably not legit.) (Via Sophie Warnes.)
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This coronavirus mutation has taken over the world. Scientists are trying to understand why • The Washington Post

Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach:

»

When the first coronavirus cases in Chicago appeared in January, they bore the same genetic signatures as a germ that emerged in China weeks before.

But as Egon Ozer, an infectious-disease specialist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, examined the genetic structure of virus samples from local patients, he noticed something different.

A change in the virus was appearing again and again. This mutation, associated with outbreaks in Europe and New York, eventually took over the city. By May, it was found in 95% of all the genomes Ozer sequenced.

At a glance, the mutation seemed trivial. About 1,300 amino acids serve as building blocks for a protein on the surface of the virus. In the mutant virus, the genetic instructions for just one of those amino acids — number 614 — switched in the new variant from a “D” (shorthand for aspartic acid) to a “G” (short for glycine).

But the location was significant, because the switch occurred in the part of the genome that codes for the all-important “spike protein” — the protruding structure that gives the coronavirus its crownlike profile and allows it to enter human cells the way a burglar picks a lock.

And its ubiquity is undeniable. Of the approximately 50,000 genomes of the new virus that researchers worldwide have uploaded to a shared database, about 70% carry the mutation, officially designated D614G but known more familiarly to scientists as “G.”

«

Lab experiments suggest the mutation makes it more infectious. Or it might be an accident of sampling. (I’d go with infectivity. Evolution’s a hard taskmaster, and viruses evolve.)
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Coronavirus brings American decline out in the open • Bloomberg Opinion

Noah Smith:

»

In addition to worrying about their jobs and livelihoods, Americans must now be subjected to months of images of Italians casually walking around on the streets while they cower in  their houses. It’s a painful and stark demonstration of national decline. Even more galling, the U.S.’s Covid failure means that its citizens can no longer travel freely around the world; even Europe plans to impose a travel ban on Americans.

But the consequences of U.S. decline will far outlast coronavirus. With its high housing costs, poor infrastructure and transit, endemic gun violence, police brutality and bitter political and racial divisions, the U.S. will be a less appealing place for high-skilled workers to live. That means companies will find other countries in Europe, Asia and elsewhere a more attractive destination for investment, robbing the U.S. of jobs, depressing wages and draining away the local spending that powers the service economy. That in turn will exacerbate some of the worst trends of U.S. decline – less tax money means even more urban decay as infrastructure, education and social-welfare programs are forced to make big cuts. Anti-immigration policies will throw away the country’s most important source of skilled labor and weaken a university system already under tremendous pressure from state budget cuts.

Almost every systematic economic advantage possessed by the U.S. is under threat. Unless there’s a huge push to turn things around – to bring back immigrants, sustain research universities, make housing cheaper, lower infrastructure costs, reform the police and restore competence to the civil service – the result could be decades of stagnating or even declining living standards.

«

Or, you know, elect a competent president. That would be a start.
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The eye of the storm • The Critic Magazine

Marie Le Conte made a comment on Twitter which blew up. So now she’d become “the person everyone’s talking about on Twitter”, which is not who you ever want to be:

»

By the time I was in the pub after work, my Twitter app had become unusable; by the time I met up with two colleagues for dinner, I’d deleted the tweet in a panic. As often happens with anxiety-inducing memories, I remember little from that evening. We were at Bocca Di Lupo and my two companions were trying to discuss the project we’d been working on, but I kept glancing in panic at my phone.

It’s hard to describe what it feels like, being the main character on Twitter. People tweet at you, at first to criticise what you said, then insulting you for what you said, then trying to find other things you said to criticise and insult you for, then moving on to discussing your appearance, what you may be like in bed, and anything else they can think of. They also tweet about you, which is more disconcerting if you aren’t a celebrity, which I am not. They are no longer talking to you but about you to each other; it’s a book club and you’re the book.

At least a book is self-contained; when you become the main character, people take the dots that they have, link them up, then add some new ones where they think they should be and at the end of it there is a person they can attack, but only a small part of that person is you. It was decided I was a frustrated and uptight straight woman; I am bisexual. It was decreed that I was a racist white woman; I am mixed-race.

«

It’s a wonderful piece. “It’s a book club and you’re the book, and nobody wants to hear from the book.”
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Guy who reverse-engineered TikTok reveals the scary things he learned, advises people to stay away from it • Bored Panda

:

»

2 months ago, Reddit user bangorlol made a comment in a discussion about TikTok. Bangorlol claimed to have successfully reverse-engineered it and shared what he learned about the Chinese video-sharing social networking service. Basically, he strongly recommended that people never use the app again, warning about its intrusive user tracking and other issues. Considering that TikTok was the 4th most popular free iPhone app download in 2019, this is quite alarming.

«

It’s a long thread, because as he describes it “it’s a data-collection service thinly veiled as a social network”. Though isn’t what they all are? There’s some more disturbing stuff too.

This isn’t verified by anyone else, yet, but I wouldn’t expect that to take too long.
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A tech company spied on police brutality protesters • Buzzfeed News

Caroline Haskins:

»

On the weekend of May 29, thousands of people marched, sang, grieved, and chanted, demanding an end to police brutality and the defunding of police departments in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. They marched en masse in cities like Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, empowered by their number and the assumed anonymity of the crowd. And they did so completely unaware that a tech company was using location data harvested from their cellphones to predict their race, age, and gender and where they lived.

Just over two weeks later, that company, Mobilewalla, released a report titled “George Floyd Protester Demographics: Insights Across 4 Major US Cities.” In 60 pie charts, the document details what percentage of protesters the company believes were male or female, young adult (18–34); middle-aged 35º54, or older (55+); and “African-American,” “Caucasian/Others,” “Hispanic,” or “Asian-American.”

“African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females,” Mobilewalla claimed. “Men vs. women in Atlanta (61% vs. 39%), in Los Angeles (65% vs. 35%), in Minneapolis (54% vs. 46%) and in New York (59% vs. 41%).” The company analyzed data from 16,902 devices at protests — including exactly 8,152 devices in New York, 4,527 in Los Angeles, 2,357 in Minneapolis, and 1,866 in Atlanta.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren told BuzzFeed News that Mobilewalla’s report was alarming, and an example of the consequences of the lack of regulation on data brokers in the US.

“This report shows that an enormous number of Americans – probably without even knowing it – are handing over their full location history to shady location data brokers with zero restrictions on what companies can do with it,” Warren said.

«

Half of me would love to know how this cross-matched with people who then developed Covid-19, and half of me knows this is already an incredible privacy invasion. (Separate data shows that protests haven’t increased Covid cases. But reopening close-contact areas such as restaurants and shops has.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apple’s iOS 14 will tell you when apps grab data from the clipboard, and has already told on TikTok. CC-licensed photo by allispossible.org.uk 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. Know where you are? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘We’ve bought the wrong satellites’: UK tech gamble baffles experts • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

The UK government’s plan to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a satellite broadband company has been described as “nonsensical” by experts, who say the company doesn’t even make the right type of satellite the country needs after Brexit.

The investment in OneWeb, first reported on Thursday night, is intended to mitigate against the UK losing access to the EU’s Galileo satellite navigation system.

But OneWeb – in which the UK will own a 20% stake following the investment – currently operates a completely different type of satellite network from that typically used to run such navigation systems.

“The fundamental starting point is, yes, we’ve bought the wrong satellites,” said Dr Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester. “OneWeb is working on basically the same idea as Elon Musk’s Starlink: a mega-constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, which are used to connect people on the ground to the internet.

“What’s happened is that the very talented lobbyists at OneWeb have convinced the government that we can completely redesign some of the satellites to piggyback a navigation payload on it. It’s bolting an unproven technology on to a mega-constellation that’s designed to do something else. It’s a tech and business gamble.”

Giles Thorne, a research analyst at Jeffries, agreed. “This situation is nonsensical to me,” he said. “This situation looks like nationalism trumping solid industrial policy.”

«

This satellite company agrees you’d need to upgrade the satellites to get a navigation capability. (But they’d be very resistant to jamming.) And of course there would be satellite broadband, their original purpose, which nobody sensible wants because the latency is terrible.

The problem with LEO (low earth orbit) for GPS is that they go out of visibility so quickly. If you can’t keep a fix on a satellite for long enough, you can’t get the time on its atomic clock, so you can’t figure out your position. The 24 US GPS satellites are in MEO (medium EO) at 20,200km; the OneWeb ones are at 1,200km, and presently in a pole-to-pole orbit, though that can be changed.

This has the potential to be a money pit. Don’t say we weren’t warned.
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The rise and fall of Hancock’s homegrown tracing app • Financial Times

Pilita Clark, Helen Warrell, Tim Bradshaw and Sarah Neville:

»

The UK was one of the first western countries to start building a phone app. By mid-March, work was under way at NHSX, a body reporting to the health department. [Health secretary Matt] Hancock, a digital enthusiast, set it up last year to drag the notoriously analogue NHS into the 21st century.

Headed by a former diplomat, Matthew Gould, it soon discovered, as other nations would, that the task was far from simple. 

The app would have to rely on a Bluetooth system that was designed for pairing a smartphone with a wireless headset rather than trigger an alert that a stranger close to you was carrying a potentially fatal virus.

Figuring out how to repurpose this technology without draining a phone’s battery was just one of the early hurdles faced by developers around the world.

In the UK, however, there was another challenge. In other nations, the app was deployed as a back-up in established national systems where widespread testing helped teams of contact tracers track down those infected.

This was impossible in the UK, which was struggling to process more than [the unsatisfactorily low number of] 8,000 tests a day in March.

That meant the British app had to be shaped in a distinctive way, said several people involved in the early stages of its development.

Instead of triggering alerts about people who had tested positive for Covid-19, developers were initially told to build an app based on people reporting virus symptoms.

This had a ripple effect that ate up developers’ time, those familiar with the process said. First, an algorithm had to be built to try to ensure someone who claimed to have a cough or fever was telling the truth.

This, in turn, meant a database had to be built to hold and process huge amounts of confidential patient symptom data that would then have to be encrypted, anonymised and protected from hackers.

«

This is sure to figure heftily in the surely forthcoming public inquiry. There will be lots of “well it was impossible to know at that time”. Except that Apple and Google’s shift in early April offered the chance to get it right. But Hancock and the rest ploughed on. British exceptionalism: the wrong sort.
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TikTok App to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act by iOS 14 • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

In a statement to The Telegraph, TikTok said that it accessed the clipboard to identify spammy behaviour:

»

“Following the beta release of iOS 14 on June 22, users saw notifications while using a number of popular apps.

“For TikTok, this was triggered by a feature designed to identify repetitive, spammy behavior. We have already submitted an updated version of the app to the App Store removing the anti-spam feature to eliminate any potential confusion.

“TikTok is committed to protecting users’ privacy and being transparent about how our app works.”

«

An update to remove the feature has already been submitted to the App Store , and a download of the new update confirms that TikTok no longer appears to be accessing the clipboard.

TikTok did not say whether the feature would be removed from Android devices, nor whether clipboard data was ever stored or moved from user devices. Other apps have also been called out for reading the clipboard, including Starbucks, Overstock, AccuWeather, several news apps, and more.

«

That TikTok statement is baldly self-contradictory, and a lie. TikTok isn’t transparent about how the app works, because nobody outside TikTok knew it was grabbing the clipboard until this. The protection of users’ privacy – ditto. I bet there will be some crowdsourced examination of the destination of clipboard contents using an older version. And of the Android version.

Equally, I’m surprised that any app gets access to the iOS system clipboard without the user explicitly invoking it. If I copy something in one app, why should any other app be able to see it without me switching to that app and invoking “Paste”? After all, if I copy a password in an app, does that mean any random app running in the background can see it? (App developers tell me: yes. This blogpost from February pointed out the problem.)

It’s impressive that iOS 14 is only in its first week in beta and that it’s already highlighted this sort of behaviour, but the ability to behave like this at all is peculiar.
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Wrongfully accused by an algorithm • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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The police drove Mr. Williams to a detention center. He had his mug shot, fingerprints and DNA taken, and was held overnight. Around noon on Friday, two detectives took him to an interrogation room and placed three pieces of paper on the table, face down.

“When’s the last time you went to a Shinola store?” one of the detectives asked, in Mr. Williams’s recollection. Shinola is an upscale boutique that sells watches, bicycles and leather goods in the trendy Midtown neighborhood of Detroit. Mr. Williams said he and his wife had checked it out when the store first opened in 2014.

The detective turned over the first piece of paper. It was a still image from a surveillance video, showing a heavyset man, dressed in black and wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals cap, standing in front of a watch display. Five timepieces, worth $3,800, were shoplifted.

“Is this you?” asked the detective.

The second piece of paper was a close-up. The photo was blurry, but it was clearly not Mr. Williams. He picked up the image and held it next to his face.

“No, this is not me,” Mr. Williams said. “You think all black men look alike?”

«

The algorithm had decided it was him, though. Hill has done such great work on facial recognition – she was the one who revealed how ClearView had swept up as much data as it could, a hundred years ago. Well, in January.
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Depixellation? Or hallucination? • AI Weirdness

Janelle Shane on an AI system which claims it can reconstruct a face from a pixellated image, but which reconstructed Obama as a white guy:

»

Biased AIs are a well-documented phenomenon. When its task is to copy human behavior, AI will copy everything it sees, not knowing what parts it would be better not to copy. Or it can learn a skewed version of reality from its training data. Or its task might be set up in a way that rewards – or at the least doesn’t penalize – a biased outcome. Or the very existence of the task itself (like predicting “criminality”) might be the product of bias.

In this case, the AI might have been inadvertently rewarded for reconstructing white faces if its training data (Flickr-Faces-HQ) had a large enough skew toward white faces. Or, as the authors of the PULSE paper pointed out (in response to the conversation around bias), the standard benchmark that AI researchers use for comparing their accuracy at upscaling faces is based on the CelebA HQ dataset, which is 90% white. So even if an AI did a terrible job at upscaling other faces, but an excellent job at upscaling white faces, it could still technically qualify as state-of-the-art. This is definitely a problem.

A related problem is the huge lack of diversity in the field of artificial intelligence. Even an academic project with art as its main application should not have gone all the way to publication before someone noticed that it was hugely biased. Several factors are contributing to the lack of diversity in AI, including anti-Black bias. The repercussions of this striking example of bias, and of the conversations it has sparked, are still being strongly felt in a field that’s long overdue for a reckoning.

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Woke capitalism • The Bluestocking

Helen Lewis, in absolutely blistering form in her newsletter (of which this is a special Sunday version because I think this topic is bugging her mightily):

»

Why is [Robin] DiAngelo’s book [“White Fragility”, about why white people are so.. fragile?, and which has gone to the top of the NYT bestseller lists] so popular? Again, look at economics. Every big company has recently poured money into “diversity training”. But it is often no more scientifically grounded than Myers-Briggs: the “implicit bias” test is controversial and the claim that it can predict real world behaviour (never mind reduce bias) is a shaky one. But it looks like something solid and quantitative – ooh! a test score! – and therefore metrics-obsessed modern companies (ie all of them) love it. People have been given the idea that confronting their own bias is the best way to address racism. (Also, let’s be honest, there are probably quite a lot of people who have bought White Fragility because they think of themselves as the kind of person who would read a book like that, without actually wanting to read a book like that. It’s a Social Justice Brief History of Time.)

Anyway, here’s Harvard Kennedy School professor of public policy Iris Bohnet:

»

“About $8 billion a year is spent on diversity trainings in the United States alone. Now, I tried very hard to find any evidence I could. I looked not just in the United States but also in Rwanda and other post-conflict countries, where reconciliation is often built on the kind of diversity trainings that we do in our companies, to see how this is working. Sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.”

«

Eight billion dollars a year! Imagine if you put that money into, say, paying all your junior staff a wage which allows them to live in the big city where your company is based, without needing help from their parents. You’d probably do more good at increasing your company’s diversity. Hell, get your staff to read White Fragility on their own time and give your office cleaners a pay rise.

«

“A Social Justice ‘Brief History Of Time'”. What a gut punch. (BHOT is famously the book everyone owned but nobody read.) But she’s absolutely right. Lewis ranges far and wide here: since it’s statue-toppling time, she’s noticed plenty of clay feet around the place. I love her comment: “the only question I want to ask big companies who chirrup on about ’empowering the female leaders of the future’ is this one: Do you have a creche?” Actions, not words. Don’t miss her analysis of why Stonewall is emphasising the “T” in “LGBT” either.
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Wirecard scandal puts spotlight on auditor Ernst & Young • WSJ

Patricia Kowsmann, Paul J. Davies and Juliet Chung:

»

Ernst & Young, auditor to insolvent German fintech company Wirecard, had questions related to unorthodox arrangements under which the company’s cash was held in bank accounts it didn’t control as far back as 2016, according to emails seen by The Wall Street Journal.

The auditor subsequently signed off on three years of Wirecard’s financial results with those arrangements in place.

Now $2bn that was held in those accounts has disappeared. Wirecard says the money probably doesn’t exist. On Friday, a German shareholder association filed a criminal complaint to the prosecutors’ office in Munich, where Wirecard is based, accusing EY auditors of missing the alleged fraud.

“We feel Ernst & Young’s auditing work was a disaster,” said Marc Liebscher, whose Berlin-based law firm is representing the private Wirecard investors who filed the complaint. “Our clients are convinced, Ernst & Young should stand trial.”

EY said it had been duped along with everyone else. “There are clear indications that this was an elaborate and sophisticated fraud, involving multiple parties around the world in different institutions, with a deliberate aim of deception,” it said.

…Investors who bet Wirecard’s share price would fall have been sending detailed complaints to EY for years, flagging their concerns and media reports that raised questions about the company’s accounting and business practices, based on letters reviewed by the Journal.

“They’ve basically turned a blind eye toward the critics that raised very serious allegations,” said Fraser Perring, who with his former partner, Matthew Earl, published an early report critical of Wirecard in 2016.

«

If it takes a whistleblower going to journalists for the fraud to unravel, then the auditors self-evidently haven’t been doing their job. The fraud was there to be found; as in so many cases (see also: Enron), it’s already visible in the books. But auditors hate to rock the boat: they’re the classic case of not understanding something if your job relies on not understanding it.
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Lest we forget the horrors: a catalog of Trump’s worst cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes: the complete listing (so far): atrocities 1-759 • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Ben Parker, Stephanie Steinbrecher, Kelsey Ronan, John Mcmurtrie, Sophia Durose, Rachel Villa, and Amy Sumerton do what I had hoped someone would do. (If you close your eyes and wish hard enough, the internet will crowdsource whatever you want.) Their “atrocity key” includes these categories:
– Sexual Misconduct, Harassment, & Bullying
– White Supremacy, Racism, & Xenophobia
– Public Statements / Tweets
– Collusion with Russia & Obstruction of Justice
– Trump Staff & Administration
– Trump Family Business Dealings
– Policy
– Environment

I thought they’d missed one in the “White supremacy, racism & xenophobia” from their “before January 2017” category: his call, in a full-page advert, for the death sentence for the five black suspects who were arrested after the rape of a woman in Central Park on the basis that he thought they were guilty of sexual assault. (They were exonerated on DNA evidence and the real criminal’s confession.) But it turns out Trump reiterated that lie in October 2016.

Needless to say, it’s a long, long read, even though they don’t really get started until he’s in office.
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Microsoft to permanently close all of its retail stores • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Microsoft is giving up on physical retail. Today the company announced plans to permanently close all Microsoft Store locations in the United States and around the world, except for four locations that will be “reimagined” as experience centers that no longer sell products.

Those locations are New York City (Fifth Ave), London (Oxford Circus), Sydney (Westfield Sydney), and the Redmond campus location. The London store only just opened about a year ago. All other Microsoft Store locations across the United States and globally will be closing, and the company will concentrate on digital retail moving forward. Microsoft says Microsoft.com and the Xbox and Windows storefronts reach “up to 1.2 billion monthly customers in 190 markets.”

The company tells The Verge that no layoffs will result from today’s decision. “Our commitment to growing and developing careers from this diverse talent pool is stronger than ever,” Microsoft Store VP David Porter said in a LinkedIn post on the move.

A source with knowledge of Microsoft’s retail operations told The Verge that this plan was originally in place for next year, but was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

«

So wonderful how Microsoft calls it “a new approach” to retail. Approach as in full speed retreat. The cost: $450m (“asset writeoffs and impairments”). Began in 2009, had 116 stores in 2018, but the number had fallen to 82 at the time of closure. Sorry, “new approach”.
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Radioactivity hike seen in Northern Europe; source unknown • The New York Times

»

Nordic authorities say they detected slightly increased levels of radioactivity in northern Europe this month that Dutch officials said may be from a source in western Russia and may “indicate damage to a fuel element in a nuclear power plant.”

But Russian news agency TASS, citing a spokesman with the state nuclear power operator Rosenergoatom., reported that the two nuclear power plans in northwestern Russia haven’t reported any problems.

The Leningrad plant near St. Petersburg and the Kola plant near the northern city of Murmansk, “operate normally, with radiation levels being within the norm,” Tass said.

The Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish radiation and nuclear safety watchdogs said this week they’ve spotted small amounts of radioactive isotopes harmless to humans and the environment in parts of Finland, southern Scandinavia and the Arctic.

The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority said Tuesday that “it is not possible now to confirm what could be the source of the increased levels” of radioactivity or from where a cloud, or clouds, containing radioactive isotopes that has allegedly been blowing over the skies of northern Europe originated. Its Finnish and Norwegian counterparts also haven’t speculated about a potential source.

«

It’ll be the Chernobyl Reenactment Group, won’t it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is $100bn enough to outfit the US with the fibre broadband it so sorely needs? Democrats hope so. CC-licensed photo by kip 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. Leonine? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Daily chart: when covid-19 deaths are analysed by age, America is an outlier • The Economist

»

Data released on June 16th by the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) show that the country’s death toll skews significantly younger. There, people in their 80s account for less than half of all covid-19 deaths; people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, meanwhile, account for a significantly larger share of those who die. The median covid-19 sufferer in America is a 48-year-old; in Italy it is a 63-year-old.

Why is America such an outlier? Part of the explanation surely lies in the fact that America has a younger population than Europe does. America’s median age is just 38; Italy’s is 45. Another reason, perhaps, is that middle-aged Americans may be less healthy than their European peers, eg, because they tend to be more obese.

Whatever the cause, the relative youthfulness of America’s covid-19 victims means that the coronavirus is robbing Americans of more years of precious life. A recent study by a group of Scottish researchers estimated the number of years of life lost to covid-19 by age, taking account of the victims’ underlying health conditions. It found that in Italy, people who died in their 50s, 60s, and 70s typically lost 30, 21, and 12 years, respectively. Those in their 80s lost five years, on average.

Applying these estimates to the victims of America’s outbreak, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that covid-19 has so far shortened the lives of its American victims by 11 years, on average, compared with about nine years in the hardest-hit European countries.

«

Related, in some ways: Coronavirus cases rise in states with relaxed face mask policies.
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The dirty secret behind Ben Shapiro’s extraordinary success on Facebook • Popular Information

Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria:

»

What explains The Daily Wire’s phenomenal success on Facebook? Popular Information revealed part of the answer last October. But the full story is much darker. 

Popular Information has discovered a network of large Facebook pages — each built by exploiting racial bias, religious bigotry, and violence — that systematically promote content from The Daily Wire. These pages, some of which have over 2 million followers, do not disclose a business relationship with The Daily Wire. But they all post content from The Daily Wire ten or more times each day. Moreover, these pages post the exact same content from The Daily Wire at the exact same time. 

The undisclosed relationship not only helps explain The Daily Wire’s unlikely success on Facebook but also appears to violate Facebook’s rules.

The network of large Facebook pages promoting The Daily Wire are all run by Corey and Christy Pepple, who are best known as the creators of Mad World News. Facebook pages controlled by the Pepples include Mad World News (2,176,003 followers), The New Resistance (2,857,876 followers), Right Stuff (610,809 followers), America First (577,753 followers), and American Patriot (447,799 followers).

…How did the pages like Mad World News and The New Resistance grow so big? They did it by exploiting racism, religious bigotry, and violence.

Here is how it works. Most of the content on the five pages in this network consists of links to MadWorldNews.com and TadHaps.com, two websites owned by the Pepples. These sites identify incendiary stories — that are frequently months or years old — that prey on prejudice and fear. The sites then rewrite the stories with no indication that the story is old. This generates a “new” link that is able to thrive in Facebook’s algorithm.

«

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How CO2 boosters’ op-ed slipped by Facebook fact-checkers • E&E News

Scott Waldman:

»

A team of climate scientists working as approved fact checkers for Facebook evaluated a post last year by a White House-connected group that claims the world needs to burn more fossil fuels.

The researchers found that the post by the CO2 Coalition was based on cherry-picked information to mislead readers into thinking climate science models are wrong about global warming. The post, which was published originally in the conservative Washington Examiner, was an opinion piece that had been marked as false, in accordance with Facebook’s standards. The coalition, which is funded by groups that oppose regulations on fossil fuels, was prevented from advertising on the site.

It didn’t last long.

A “conservative” Facebook employee quietly intervened, overturning the fact check, and the misinformation was no longer labeled as false, according to the CO2 Coalition. The post was free to be shared, and a new loophole was created for the coalition and other groups that attack mainstream climate science.

After the quiet decision by Facebook, the coalition says it and other groups that attack consensus climate science can share content that climate scientists have labeled as misleading because Facebook will consider it “opinion” and therefore immune to fact-checking.

The CO2 Coalition is increasingly focused on using Facebook to reach more people with its message that climate change fears are overblown and that burning more fossil fuels would help humanity, Executive Director Caleb Rossiter told E&E News this week. He sees the battle over its climate-related posts as part of a larger proxy war over how to reach an audience outside of conservative media.

“It’s a huge reach. You can reach so many people both with your posts and your advertisements,” Rossiter said. “We’re kind of like Donald Trump. We’re not happy with the treatment we’re getting from the mainstream media, we resort to social media. That’s where our action is in larger part.”

«

I wonder if the “conservative” Facebook employee was Joel Kaplan, formerly of the GWBush administration. However I’m told by an Authoritative Source that Facebook doesn’t interfere in fact-checking, but that the CO2 Coalition appealed to the fact-checking org, which allowed that “opinion” didn’t qualify for fact-checking. Quite a loophole.
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Military stands firm in defense of western Myanmar’s internet blackout • Eurasia Review

»

A Tatmadaw [Myanmar’s official military] spokesperson said the leaking of sensitive information about military operations and positions was one of the primary reasons for an internet ban in parts of Arakan State that entered its second year over the weekend.

The secretary of the Tatmadaw True News Information Team, Brigadier-General Zaw Min Tun, was speaking at a news conference in Nay Pyi Taw on June 23.

“Military information such as which military column is moving from what location to which area is uploaded on social media,” he explained. “And there is some information that makes people in the country and abroad misunderstand the Tatmadaw. So, we have to shut down the internet in the region for security reasons.”

Zaw Min Tun described the internet embargo as also intended to put a stop to the dissemination of extremist rhetoric, hate speech and misleading information, saying the Tatmadaw had no plan as yet to recommend a lifting of the ban to the government.

«

Essentially, the Tatmadaw is concerned that its aggression against the many minority ethnic groups in Myanmar would be revealed to the world. It’s still a brutal, repressive regime which now understands how to warp the internet to its own use. (Thanks Jim for the link.)
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Google blew a ten-year lead • Second Breakfast

Will Schreiber:

»

something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software.

Docs and Sheets haven’t changed in a decade. Google Drive remains impossible to navigate. Sharing is complicated. Sheets freezes up. I can’t easily interact with a Sheets API (I’ve tried!). Docs still shows page breaks by default! WTF!

Even though I have an iPhone and a MacBook, I’ve been married to Google services. I browse Chrome. I use Gmail. I get directions and lookup restaurants on Maps. I’m a YouTube addict.

Yet I’ve been ungluing myself from Google so far this year. Not because of Google-is-reading-my-emails-and-tracking-every-keystroke reasons, but because I like other software so much more that it’s worth switching.

At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. Yesterday, I made Safari my default browser again.

…I’ve given up on Google Docs. I can never find the documents Andy shares with me. The formatting is tired and stuck in the you-might-print-this-out paradigm. Notion is a much better place to write and brainstorm with people.

The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone’s default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I’m never doing heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don’t have to scroll past six ads to get the first result.

«

That last point is quite a point, though, isn’t it. Mobile advertising is the curse of Google.
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Wirecard collapses into insolvency • Financial Times

Dan McCrum in London, Olaf Storbeck in Frankfurt, Stefania Palma in Singapore and John Reed in Bangkok:

»

Wirecard filed for insolvency after the once high-flying payments group revealed a multiyear fraud that led to the arrest of its former chief executive.

In a remarkable collapse of a company once regarded as a European tech champion, Wirecard said in a statement on Thursday morning that it faced “impending insolvency and over-indebtedness”.

The first failure of a member of Germany’s prestigious Dax index is expected to inflict big losses on creditors and reputational damage on regulators led by BaFin and Wirecard’s longstanding auditors EY.

EY on Thursday afternoon said there were “clear indications that this was an elaborate and sophisticated fraud, involving multiple parties around the world in different institutions, with a deliberate aim of deception”, adding that “even the most robust and extended audit procedures may not uncover a collusive fraud”.

Wirecard’s admission a week ago that €1.9bn of cash was missing was the catalyst for the company’s unravelling. Founder and former chief executive Markus Braun was arrested on Monday on suspicion of false accounting and market manipulation before being released on bail.

«

I have two questions: first, what would have happened if there hadn’t been a whistleblower? Second, what use were the auditors, exactly? People keep ripping companies off, and auditing systems keep missing them.
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$100 billion “universal fiber” plan proposed by Democrats in Congress • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

House Democrats yesterday unveiled a $100bn broadband plan that’s gaining quick support from consumer advocates.

“The House has a universal fiber broadband plan we should get behind,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Legislative Counsel Ernesto Falcon wrote in a blog post. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) announced the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, saying it has more than 30 co-sponsors and “invests $100 billion to build high-speed broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved communities and ensure that the resulting Internet service is affordable.” The bill text is available here.

In addition to federal funding for broadband networks with speeds of at least 100Mbps downstream and upstream, the bill would eliminate state laws that prevent the growth of municipal broadband. There are currently 19 states with such laws.

…The bill also has a Dig Once requirement that says fiber or fiber conduit must be installed “as part of any covered highway construction project” in states that receive federal highway funding. Similar Dig Once mandates have been proposed repeatedly over the years and gotten close to becoming US law, but never quite made it past the finish line.

«

Infrastructure Week, but they’re saving it for after November. (The Republican-controlled Senate will surely block it, or not even discuss it – as has happened with lots of plans passed up since the Democrats took over the HoR.)
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Twitch reckons with sexual assault as it begins permanently suspending streamers • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

»

Harassment and abuse issues have followed Twitch for years. In 2017, Kotaku said it was “incredibly easy” to find examples of harassment on the platform just by browsing around. A Fusion documentary looked at the sexist harassment a woman who is a top Hearthstone player faced on Twitch in 2016. Bloomberg called harassment “something female streamers have to deal with routinely” in a 2015 feature. In 2012, Giant Bomb reported on sexual harassment at a Capcom tournament that was hosted on Twitch. Twitch tightened its policies around harassment in 2018, but it’s not evident to many streamers that it’s had a real impact on enforcement.

The men accused of harassment and misconduct range from streamers with thousands of followers to those with hundreds of thousands of followers or more. Some of the stories involve incidents that happened on Twitch, such as men who were allegedly streaming while messaging underage fans for sexual photos. Others didn’t happen on Twitch directly but involve people in its community. Several people said they met an abuser through Twitch or that misconduct occurred at a Twitch event or an afterparty at a Twitch convention.

«

Harassment done by young folks (well, men): indistinguishable from previous generations’.
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Facebook executive admits to ‘trust deficit’ on call with advertisers • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

»

A leading Facebook executive has told advertisers the company is suffering from a “trust deficit” as it tries to stop brands joining a boycott over its policies on political content moderation.

The world’s largest social media group joined a conference call with almost 200 advertisers on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the discussion. Senior policy executives then defended Facebook’s decision to allow several controversial posts from US president Donald Trump to remain on its platform.

According to leaked audio of the call obtained by the Financial Times, Neil Potts, Facebook’s head of trust and safety policy, acknowledged that the company suffered from a “trust deficit” but added that it was “here to listen” to its clients’ concerns. The call was convened by the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade body in Canada.

The lobbying by Facebook comes as several high-profile brands — including apparel groups The North Face and Patagonia, and ice-cream maker Ben & Jerry’s — pulled advertising from the platform for July in protest against the company’s approach to content moderation. On Wednesday, Goodby Silverstein, part of Omnicom Group, with clients such as Cisco, BMW and Pepsi, became the first big ad agency to join the boycott. 

Mr Potts had been asked by the IAB on behalf of a member: “Why as advertisers we should risk our brands’ reputation by staying on your platform?” He had also been asked how the group was “reconciling the loss of faith in Facebook as a trustworthy source of information”. 

“There is a trust deficit. You try to make a decision and people disagree and maybe that builds that deficit even deeper,” Mr Potts said.

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These are the people who Facebook really listens to. Political advertising is a tiny slice of revenue. Commercial is what really matters.
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Daily Cartoon for Thursday, June 25th • The New Yorker

Lisa Rothstein:

»

“It’s new. We place them in an endless video conference with everyone they couldn’t stand in life.”

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Like something out of The Good Place.
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Steven Chu: long-term energy storage solution has been here all along • Forbes

Jeff McMahon:

»

The most efficient energy storage technology may be as close as the nearest hill, according to former Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and almost as old.

“It turns out the most efficient energy storage is you take that electricity and you pump water up a hill,” Chu said Tuesday at the Stanford University Global Energy Forum.

When electricity is needed, you let the water flow down, spinning generators along the way. Pumped hydro can meet demand for seasonal storage instead of the four hours typical of lithium-ion batteries.

“There’s been a resurgence and a new look at pumped storage because it is the one thing we do have, and we know it works and lasts a long time,” Chu said, highlighting it first in a review of energy-storage technologies.

Pumped hydro takes advantage of the efficiency of converting electricity to mechanical motion using an electric motor, and converting it back again using generator.

“Round-trip efficiencies can reach as high as 85 percent,” he said. “In terms of energy storage it’s really one of the best.”

«

But does also involve damming lots of rivers, with the attendant risks. No free rides.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Excellent social distancing: perhaps that’s why BLM protests didn’t spike Covid-19 cases. CC-licensed photo by quinn norton on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Le8.. elated? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Trump campaign weighs alternatives to big social platforms • WSJ

Emily Glazer and Michael C. Bender:

»

The Trump campaign, known for its social media savvy, is hitting digital roadblocks.

Facebook’s decision to remove Trump campaign political ads and posts last week, citing its policy against organized hate, surprised campaign officials. It added urgency to internal discussions about devising workaround plans if some of the world’s largest social media companies continue to remove or block content from the campaign and President Trump, people familiar with the matter said.

The campaign is unlikely to pull advertising on Facebook, campaign officials said, since it can reach around 175 million U.S. users. The campaign has spent $19.6m on Facebook ads so far this year. But the rebuke from the social media giant, following restrictions from Twitter and Snap’s Snapchat, has top campaign officials considering alternatives, such as moving to another, lesser known company, building their own platform or doubling down on efforts to move supporters to the campaign’s smartphone app, according to people familiar with the discussions.

But there is disagreement internally over what—if anything—to do next, the people said. No other platforms offer the reach of Facebook or Twitter, and with about five months until Election Day, time is running out. The situation has been described internally as “code red,” a person familiar with the matter said.

Still, while some content by Mr. Trump or the campaign has recently been flagged or taken down, nearly all gets through on social media outlets.

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and others in the campaign have talked for months about building up audiences on alternative platforms, including social media platform Parler, a person familiar with the conversations said.

«

The “blocks” are hardly dramatic. Twitter makes people click on an overlay, and prevents the tweet being replied to, Liked or retweeted. (The latter must make quite a difference.) They can quote-tweet it. Facebook has taken down a couple of egregious Trump ads. How many egregious ones does it have lined up, exactly?

As for Parler – that’s hilarious. If Trump wants to vanish from view, that’s a great idea. Ditto for the smartphone app.
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Biden campaign continues to pressure Facebook and Twitter over Trump’s false voter fraud claims – CNNPolitics

Sarah Mucha and Donie O’Sullivan:

»

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign is calling on Facebook and Twitter to remove false posts sent this week by President Donald Trump about foreign-backed voter fraud and stoking fears of a ‘rigged election.’

“Our campaign has sent letters to Twitter and Facebook demanding that this disinformation, which seeks to undermine faith in our electoral process, gets taken down immediately,” Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.

In the campaign’s letter to Twitter, obtained by CNN, the campaign’s general counsel Dana Remus scolds the company for not taking action and argues the President’s tweets “creates the misimpression that the tens of millions of Americans who will vote by mail may have their votes drowned out by fraud.”

Twitter said Monday it would not take action on the President’s tweets.

CNN has repeatedly debunked Trump’s comments, and his primary allegation – that voting-by-mail leads to “massive fraud” – is completely untrue.

«

Biden clearly just trying to get a thumb on the scale here; to make enough noise that Facebook and Twitter will start getting an institutional “wait, though, what if” response when weighing up whether to do something about a tweet or an ad. Though I’d imagine the response might actually turn into “let’s just annoy them both”.
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Cities that had Black Lives Matter Protests have not seen spikes in COVID-19 • Buzzfeed News

Peter Aldhous:

»

More than three weeks after hundreds of thousands of Americans started taking to the streets to protest the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, anticipated surges in COVID-19 cases have not shown up in the cities with the biggest protests.

Some commentators are already speculating that the lack of protest-related spikes in coronavirus cases means that social distancing rules are not so important if people are outside and wear masks — as many protesters did. Slate went so far as to suggest that “a much wider range of outdoor activities — sports events, beaches, swimming pools, playgrounds, and so forth — could be safely permitted much sooner than currently scheduled.”

But some experts say that leaping to this conclusion could be a serious mistake. “I do think it’s good news that we haven’t seen enormous outbreaks at this time,” Kate Grabowski, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told BuzzFeed News. “But everything that we’ve learned from the epidemiology of this virus tells us that people who are in close proximity with people who are infected are at risk.”

What’s more, a new analysis based on cellphone tracking data suggests a surprising reason for the lack of protest-related spikes in COVID-19: in the cities with large protests, the wider population actually spent more time at home during the demonstrations — suggesting that any surge caused by virus transmission at the protests themselves would have been countered by an increase in social distancing among the rest of the cities’ populations.

New cases per day for selected counties with protests

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via New York Times / USAFacts
Numbers plotted for any day reflect the average for the preceding seven days. Protests began on May 26 in Minneapolis and spread to other cities over the next few days.

«

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As fashion resets, its algorithms should too • Vogue Business

Maghan McDowell:

»

In 2018, futurist and academic Karinna Nobbs worked with a major cosmetics brand on an augmented reality try-on tool. During user testing, Nobbs noticed that some of the technology worked more effectively on white and Asian faces. For darker skin tones and older users, it was not able to track and place the content on the face, and lipstick would “wobble” on lips.

The brand solved the problem by training the algorithm to recognise more types of people, which also enabled the tool to better calibrate colour cosmetics. This experience demonstrated the importance of inclusivity to build an effective product, Nobbs says. It also shows that artificial intelligence and algorithms can be flawed.

Just like the humans that design it, AI can have bias. In fashion and beauty, this might manifest as online searches showing only certain types of models, or an image-matching engine mistaking legs for dark jeans. It might mean missing out on an entire customer segment or reinforcing harmful stereotypes. So as brands undergo a reckoning to be more inclusive and diverse, their data and algorithms are due for a closer look as well.

“Brands have come under fire for using creative that is offensive and discriminatory. If your AI has seen that in the data set and thinks it’s acceptable, it will most likely reproduce some of that offensive design,” says Ashwini Asokan, CEO of retail automation platform Vue.ai, which works with Thredup and Zilingo. “This is why there is no ‘one size fits all’ in AI. AI must adapt to your business, your goals, your aspirations as a company.”

«

Plenty more examples, too – often those ML systems are trained from clothes catalogues, and guess what? Those catalogues aren’t representative either. If those then feed into apps that “recommend” clothes, you can see that the problem can quickly become systemic.
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‘A chain of stupidity’: the Skripal case and the decline of Russia’s spy agencies • The Guardian

Luke Harding on Bellingcat, which used (mostly) open source intelligence to unmask the GRU’s poisoners:

»

Bellingcat revealed the identity of poisoner No 1 in a message on its website. Having unmasked one assassin, it seemed likely that Bellingcat would succeed in identifying Petrov, too. Sure enough, in late September I received an invitation to a press conference. It was to be held in an illustrious location: the Houses of Parliament, in an upstairs committee room, number nine. Its subject was Petrov’s real identity.

By the time I arrived, the room was full. I spotted a reporter from the New York Times, Ellen Barry, together with leading representatives from the British and US media. It was hard to escape the conclusion that power in journalism was shifting. It was moving away from established print titles and towards open-source innovators. The new hero of journalism was no longer a grizzled investigator burning shoe leather, à la All the President’s Men, but a pasty-looking kid in front of a MacBook Air.

Higgins and Grozev were there, as well as a Conservative MP, Bob Seely. I found a spot on a bench and sat down. The mood was expectant. Seely set the scene. He described Bellingcat as a “truly remarkable group of digital detectives”. Their success was due to an explosion of digital technology and a rise in digital activism, he said.

Grozev explained how Bellingcat had identified that Petrov’s real name was Alexander Mishkin. The search involved methods new and old. It found Mishkin in a car insurance database, as the owner of a Volvo XC90. The car was registered to the GRU’s Moscow headquarters at Khoroshevskoye Shosse. Next, they used Russian social media to get in touch with Mishkin’s student contemporaries. Did any of them remember him from their St Petersburg days?

Most didn’t answer. But two did. One said Mishkin had been in a different class – and that Russia’s security services had been in touch two weeks previously and instructed graduates not to divulge any information about Mishkin under any circumstances.

«

Britain’s love of CCTV effectively burnt the two GRU heavies, who then had to give media interviews. Remember, you’ve never ever seen James Bond give a media interview in a Bond film, for good reasons.

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Apple Silicon Mac mini dev kit looks like a desktop iPad Pro • Appleinsider

Daniel Eran Dilger:

»

Apple also detailed that its developer transition kit provides USB 3 connectivity over USB-C, as well a legacy USB-A ports and HDMI. This looks a bit like a Mac mini, but its really iPad Pro connectivity. New Mac minis support Thunderbolt 3, which can drive up to four 4K DisplayPort screens and support devices such as RAID storage and eGPU expansion. Thunderbolt 3 is an Intel specification that effectively works like a PCIe slot in the form of a cable. Supporting Thunderbolt 3 connectivity requires an Intel controller chip.

Most iOS devices only support USB 2, as well as support for a single 1080p HDMI video output, USB storage, and networking, all though Apple’s proprietary Lightning port using a dongle or a special cable. The newest iPad Pro models sport a USB C port which can handle the faster USB 3 specification and up to 4K video output using a USB-C DisplayPort monitor— as long as the display doesn’t also require Thunderbolt 3.

This makes it pretty clear that the developer transition kit isn’t a Mac mini outfitted with an Apple Silicon SoC, but rather an iPad Pro logic board hooked up to multiple USB ports, Ethernet, and HDMI for convenience. It sports the same Bluetooth 5.0 and 802.11ac WiFi, and can attach to an SSD for storage using USB-C.

«

Makes sense. Going to be really fascinating to see all the benchmarks in a few weeks when the kits arrive with developers. Apple has said that people aren’t allowed to run benchmarks on it or discuss it on social media. Let’s try to imagine how many seconds that’s going to survive.
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Keeping your private information private • Google blog

Sundar Pichai:

»

We believe that products should keep your information for only as long as it’s useful and helpful to you—whether that’s being able to find your favorite destinations in Maps or getting recommendations for what to watch on YouTube. 

That’s why last year we introduced auto-delete controls, which give you the choice to have Google automatically and continuously delete your Location History, search, voice and YouTube activity data after 3 months or 18 months. We continue to challenge ourselves to do more with less, and today we’re changing our data retention practices to make auto-delete the default for our core activity settings. 

Here’s how it works: Starting today, the first time you turn on Location History—which is off by default—your auto-delete option will be set to 18 months by default. Web & App Activity auto-delete will also default to 18 months for new accounts. This means your activity data will be automatically and continuously deleted after 18 months, rather than kept until you choose to delete it. You can always turn these settings off or change your auto-delete option. 

«

I’m going to be cynical and say that the half-life of usefulness for that data that they collect is a lot less than 18 months, so that this is a sort of “strategy credit” (or “strategy neutral”): it has no impact on their business, but makes it sound like they’re being nice to you. On YouTube, however, the default-delete period is 36 months, which shows you that it digs a lot deeper there.
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Tech firms face a stark choice between China and the United States in new cold war • Foreign Policy

Jacob Helberg used to work as a policy advisor at Google:

»

Chinese Christians who joined a Sunday worship service via Zoom were later arrested by the CCP. How long will Zoom’s American employees be content to cite compliance with “local laws” as their platforms are used to not only suppress free speech but also to enable the oppression of dissidents and minorities?

At Google, the answer was “not long.” Many of the company’s own employees turned against Project Dragonfly in an open letter to management.

Other firms could soon face similar quandaries. Amazon and Microsoft each operate cloud storage services in China. What would happen if the CCP pressured Microsoft to turn over information on a Chinese dissident if it wanted to keep operating in China? Ever since 2004, when Yahoo divulged to the Chinese government the email account of a newspaper editor named Shi Tao—who was subsequently sentenced to a decade of forced labor—this dilemma has haunted Silicon Valley. And what would happen if the CCP requested information on a user outside of China under the same conditions?

Finally, the most harmful weakness of “one company, two systems” is also the most overlooked: geopolitics.

Zoom’s recent takedowns are likely to intensify a broader reckoning within the technology industry, which is being caused not by market pressures but by strategic pressures. The coronavirus pandemic has amplified and accelerated the thrum of a new cold war between an autocratic China and a democratic United States.

«

Helberg reckons that tech companies will have to choose: China or the US?
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The App Store is a monopoly: here’s why the EU is correct to investigate Apple • ProtonMail

Andy Yen:

»

Apple’s iOS controls 25% of the global smartphone market (the other 75%, is largely controlled by Google’s Android). This means that for over a billion people (particularly in the US where their market share approaches 50%), the only way to install apps is through the App Store. This gives Apple enormous influence over the way software is created and consumed around the world.

Perhaps the most harmful expression of this power is Apple’s exorbitant 30% tax on developers, which is now the subject of antitrust investigations in both the United States and the European Union. To be clear, this is an enormous fee and would be intolerable in normal market conditions, but it’s particularly damaging if you offer a product that competes with Apple. It is hard to stay competitive if you are forced to pay your competitor 30% of all of your earnings…

…In January 2020, ProtonVPN submitted an update of its iOS app description in the App Store. The new description highlighted ProtonVPN’s features, including the ability to “unblock censored websites” with the app.

Even though ProtonVPN had been in the App Store since 2018 and the basic functionality of our VPN has not changed, Apple abruptly rejected the new app version and threatened to remove ProtonVPN entirely. They demanded that we remove this language around anti-censorship on the grounds that freedom of speech is severely limited in some countries.

«

It would be great if Yen didn’t overstate his case so badly. Apple has about 15% of the global market, and that’s pretty consistent down the years. The 30% charge is about the same as you see in bookshops – though most retailers add a 40% markup from wholesale. Plus the person who’s getting affected there is the customer. The app developer is free to set their own price to make up for the 30%; just pick a space where you’re not competed into the ground.

On the censorship point, that’s tricky. Apple knows that. The options are: make it possible for people to buy a device that’s really secure while they live in countries with onerous censorship, or stay out of those countries. Apple gets the sales, and dissidents get security. Difficult balance, but there’s more than one interpretation.
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Apple’s new ARM-based Macs won’t support Windows through Boot Camp • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Apple will start switching its Macs to its own ARM-based processors later this year, but you won’t be able to run Windows in Boot Camp mode on them. Microsoft only licenses Windows 10 on ARM to PC makers to preinstall on new hardware, and the company hasn’t made copies of the operating system available for anyone to license or freely install.

“Microsoft only licenses Windows 10 on ARM to OEMs,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. We asked Microsoft if it plans to change this policy to allow Boot Camp on ARM-based Macs, and the company says “we have nothing further to share at this time.”

Apple has been working closely with Microsoft to ensure Office is ready for ARM-based Macs later this year, but the company didn’t mention its lack of Boot Camp support at WWDC. It’s possible that both companies are still working toward some sort of support, but that would require Microsoft to open up its Windows 10 on ARM licensing more broadly.

Other methods to run Windows on ARM-based Macs could include virtualization using apps like VMWare or Parallels, but these won’t be supported by Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation technology. Virtual machine apps will need to be fully rebuilt for ARM-based Macs, and it’s not immediately clear if that’s even a workable solution for Windows on ARM or whether VMWare, Parallels, and others will commit to building these apps with Windows support.

«

Raises the question of why Microsoft only licences Windows on ARM to OEMs. Although as Warren points out, the number of Boot Camp users is pretty small. They’ll probably rush to buy Intel machines right up to the last minute, which will see them through the next four or five years, by which time there should be more clarity.

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Microsoft president swipes at rivals like Apple in urging scrutiny of app stores • POLITICO

Steven Overly:

»

Microsoft President Brad Smith called Thursday for greater antitrust scrutiny of the app stores run by rivals like Apple and Google, suggesting they have made it too difficult for small developers to build applications for their smartphones and other devices without agreeing to onerous rules.

“I do believe the time has come, whether we’re talking about Washington, D.C., or Brussels, for a much more focused conversation about the nature of app stores, the rules that are being put in place, the prices and the tolls that are being extracted and whether there is really a justification in antitrust law for everything that has been created,” Smith said during a POLITICO Live interview.

While he did not explicitly mention Apple and Google, the two companies whose operating systems run on almost all smartphones, Smith expressly criticized several practices true of their platforms.

Apple and Google both take a sizable cut of app sales and subscriptions through their platforms, and Apple in particular offers few ways to reach customers without going through its app store. Those practices have long been decried by certain app developers and they have now begun attracting the attention of antitrust officials on both sides of the Atlantic.

«

A dish served very cold for Smith, given that some of Apple’s top people testified against Microsoft 20-odd years ago in the antitrust case. (Specifically, Avie Tevanian over Quicktime.)
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Third-party accessories can now be integrated into the Find My app with iOS 14 • 9to5Mac

Filipe Espósito:

»

Apple has announced iOS 14 with several new features, including redesigned home screen, built-in translation, and more. And now, the company has just confirmed during the “Platforms State of the Union” keynote that third-party accessories can now be integrated into the Find My app with iOS 14.

Apple calls this feature the “Find My network.” Here’s how the company describes it:

»

Introducing a new program that will let customers locate your products using the power of the vast Find My network. With hundreds of millions of Apple devices around the world, advanced end-to-end encryption, and industry-leading security, users can locate their items within the Find My app with the peace of mind that their privacy is protected.

«

In other words, this basically means that any tracking accessory maker can sign up to use Apple’s technology, allowing those accessories to be monitored by the Find My app. Third-party accessories can benefit from Apple’s Find My infrastructure, including the ability to find them offline.

Although the company hasn’t provided further details, this has probably been changed due to Tile’s accusations of Apple’s anti-competitive practices ahead of the alleged Apple’s AirTags launch later this year.

«

So that’s another antitrust issue knocked away (though I expect Tile will complain about the details – there will be all sorts of privacy demands). I make that three antitrust issues down, and counting.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess how much of the food people pick up at a buffet comes from the first three items – whatever they are. CC-licensed photo by Second Judicial Circuit Guardian ad Litem Program on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Yes, we are, briefly, elite hax0rs. (Thanks Walt for the pointer.) I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Dozens of women in gaming speak out about sexism and harassment • The New York Times

Taylor Lorenz and Kellen Browning:

»

More than 70 people in the gaming industry, most of them women, have come forward with allegations of gender-based discrimination, harassment and sexual assault since Friday. They have shared their stories in statements posted to Twitter, YouTube, Twitch and the blogging platform TwitLonger.

The outpouring of stories from competitive gamers and streamers, who broadcast their gameplay on platforms like Twitch for money, led to the resignation of the C.E.O. of a prominent talent management company for streamers and a moment of reflection for an industry that has often contended with sexism, bullying and allegations of abuse.

Already, the response has been a far cry from Gamergate in 2014, when women faced threats of death and sexual assault for critiquing the industry’s male-dominated, sexist culture. Now, some are optimistic that real change could come.

Gamers began sharing their stories after a Twitter user who posts as Hollowtide tweeted about an unnamed “top” player of the online game Destiny on Friday night, referring to the person as a “scum lord.” Three female streamers, JewelsVerne, SheSnaps and SchviftyFive, saw the post and decided to come forward about their experiences with the gamer in question, who is known online both as Lono and SayNoToRage.

The women posted their allegations, including nonconsensual touching, propositioning for sex and harassment, on Twitter using their streamer handles. (The streamers did not provide their legal names to The New York Times. In years past, women gamers who have spoken out against the industry using their legal names have been subjected to further harassment, hacking and doxxing.)

«

Plenty on this to come, one suspects.
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Two-thirds of Americans think government should do more on climate • Pew Research Center

Alec Tyson and Brian Kennedy on the latest polling from Pew:

»

At a time when partisanship colors most views of policy, broad majorities of the public – including more than half of Republicans and overwhelming shares of Democrats – say they would favor a range of initiatives to reduce the impacts of climate change, including large-scale tree planting efforts, tax credits for businesses that capture carbon emissions and tougher fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Public concern over climate change has been growing in recent years, particularly among Democrats, and there are no signs that the COVID-19 pandemic has dampened concern levels. A recent Center analysis finds 60% view climate change as a major threat to the well-being of the United States, as high a share taking this view as in any Pew Research Center survey going back to 2009.

The new national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted April 29 to May 5 among 10,957 U.S. adults using the Center’s online American Trends Panel, finds a majority of U.S. adults want the government to play a larger role in addressing climate change.

«

Notice how even a majority of Republicans are in favour of tougher fuel efficiency – the complete opposite of what the Republican administration is doing. Wonder if this will be fodder for adverts in the presidential campaign.

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Check out this London tube map made from a working circuit board • ianVisits

Ian Mansfield:

»

A clever fusion of modern computer API data to provide the tube movements and traditional circuit board design come together in the TrainTrackr.

The board shows all twelve of the main underground lines: Bakerloo, Central, Circle, District, DLR, Hammersmith & City, Jubilee, Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria, Waterloo & City, and has 333 station points lit with LEDs.

The circuit board tube map requires a Wi-Fi connection and then pulls down live tube data from TfL’s open data API to make it come alive.

Two versions are available.

A smaller 20cm x 15cm model with all white lights. Or the larger 40cm x 30cm version which used coloured lights for each line – except the Northern, which sticks with white lamps.

You can buy the TrainTrackr from here.

«

Not cheap, but wonderful. The logical progression of Matthew Somerville’s 2010 hack to produce the Live London Underground map.
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Apple is changing parts of its app review process after the Hey controversy • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

»

the Cupertino company says it will no longer hold up bug fixes over guideline violations except where legal concerns are at play. Apple also says that it will offer new channels for developers to challenge its judgments.

Apple came under fire after it rejected a bug-fix update to email app Hey, which is made by Basecamp. Apple told the app’s developers that the app would have to incorporate Apple’s own system for in-app purchases or risk being delisted. Apple also claimed it should have rejected the app to begin with but that it only noticed the issue when reviewing the bug-fix submission.

The CTO of Basecamp took to Twitter with an impassioned thread accusing Apple of criminal behavior for insisting on a cut of the app’s revenues. The tweet thread sparked a great deal of discussion, not only about Apple’s take of app revenues, but also about the company’s failure to be transparent and consistent about App Store guidelines.

Here are Apple’s words on the developer website today:

»

Additionally, two changes are coming to the app review process and will be implemented this summer. First, developers will not only be able to appeal decisions about whether an app violates a given guideline of the App Store Review Guidelines, but will also have a mechanism to challenge the guideline itself. Second, for apps that are already on the App Store, bug fixes will no longer be delayed over guideline violations except for those related to legal issues. Developers will instead be able to address the issue in their next submission.

«

«

Well isn’t that interesting. Apple’s clearly trying to avoid the worst of an antitrust case, though I don’t think this will quite get it out from under what we shall henceforth call Vestager’s Hammer.
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HomePod to add support for third-party streaming music services like Spotify • 9to5Mac

Benjamin Mayo:

»

The status quo with current software is that the HomePod will answer all Siri music requests by initiating Apple Music. Third-party services like Spotify can [presently] only be played on the HomePod by way of AirPlaying a stream from another device.

…It’s currently unclear if other audio apps like podcast clients will be able to participate.

Later this year, Apple is expected to grow the HomePod family with a HomePod mini. Supporting services other than Apple Music helps expand the HomePod’s appeal. It also helps address some of the anticompetitive allegations the company is receiving, with Spotify filing a formal complaint to the EU last year that Apple explicitly disadvantaged competing music services to promote Apple Music adoption.

«

That’s two antitrust issues that Apple has addressed by way of tiny mentions on slides rather than mentioning them in its speeches: default apps and also the HomePod, which Spotify grumbled about.
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Apple rejects Facebook’s gaming app, for at least the fifth time • The New York Times

Seth Schiesel:

»

Since February, Apple has rejected at least five versions of Facebook Gaming, according to three people with knowledge of the companies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are confidential. Each time, the people said, Apple cited its rules that prohibit apps with the “main purpose” of distributing casual games.

Facebook Gaming may also have been hurt by appearing to compete with Apple’s own sales of games, two of the people said. Games are by far the most lucrative category of mobile apps worldwide. Apple’s App Store, the only officially approved place for iPhone and iPad users to find new games and other programs, generated about $15bn in revenue last year.

Apple’s rejections of the app from Facebook, a fellow Silicon Valley powerhouse, illustrate the control it exerts over the mobile software and entertainment ecosystem — clout that regulators are increasingly examining. On Tuesday, the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, said it had opened a formal antitrust investigation into Apple to determine if the terms that the company imposes on app developers violate competition rules.

“We need to ensure that Apple’s rules do not distort competition in markets where Apple is competing with other app developers,” said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president in charge of competition policy.

«

The problem with Facebook’s app is that it would contain self-contained programs that run inside a self-contained program, which Apple treats as a potential malware threat, and also routing around its payment systems.
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What’s at the front of the line? • Seth’s Blog

Seth Godin:

»

A study of behaviour at breakfast buffets showed that the first item in the buffet was taken by 75% of the diners (even when the order of the items was reversed) and that two-thirds of all the food taken came from the first three items, regardless of how long the buffet is.

This means that optimizing marketers usually put the things they most want to sell first.

And that smart consumers benefit from adopting patience as they consider what’s on offer.

Of course, this game theory applies to a lot more than food.

«

Meaning you can tweak peoples’ diets so that they will eat more healthily – put the fruits and so on at the front of the breakfast buffet. From the days when people all used to line up for the same food.
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Can the cult of Bang & Olufsen last? • WIRED

Rob Walker:

»

B&O got out of mobile phones and MP3 devices entirely, and those cutbacks have helped it survive the global financial crisis. But the company is still struggling to adjust to the contemporary universe of products, software, and services. “This is about carving out our niche — our reason to be, really — in a market that has completely changed,” Mantoni says.

It’s open to debate whether the image projected by B&O’s products is even desirable nowadays. “There’s an ‘impress the neighbors’ quality” to this gear, says Lucian James, founder of brand consultancy Agenda, which specializes in the luxury market. “And that’s an embarrassing concept to a lot of people these days.” Louise Rosen, a 40-year-old brand consultant in Paris, illustrates the problem from the consumer’s point of view. Her Danish mother, she says, is of a generation that aspired to own the company’s wares: “Every electronic device in her house is Bang & Olufsen.” But Rosen has never bought B&O, finding its aesthetic off-putting. “For me,” she says, “it’s nonsense.”

Good taste is no minor matter in Denmark. “We are very aware that Danish design is something the world knows us for,” says Jeppe Trolle Linnet, a social anthropologist and consumer-culture expert in Copenhagen. For proof, go to the city’s Stroget shopping thoroughfare and step into Illums Bolighus, a stunning emporium with four floors of home-design products. You’ll see long-celebrated Danish creations like the refined housewares of Georg Jensen and the legendary PH lamps of Poul Henningsen, with their nested shades that tame glare by emitting reflected light; they were devised around the time B&O was founded and are still sold today. You’ll also see newer arrivals on the Scandinavian design scene: Normann Copenhagen’s amusing round-bottomed tumblers, Muuto’s clever tea-light holders that feature a slot to accommodate a match. These engaging wares make a collective statement about “thingness,” a palpable feeling that every object, no matter how trivial its function, ought to be treated seriously and built to last.

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The article is a fascinating insight into the company’s slightly mad thinking, though it doesn’t answer the question posed in the headline. Looking at its financials, with three successive quarters in the red and revenues slightly down, you might not feel confident.
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Unsubscribe: the $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’ • BBC News

Joshua Nevett:

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In normal times, blockbuster movies usually dominate the box office charts.

The big-budget productions, directed by the likes of James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott, regularly draw the biggest crowds at cinemas across the US and beyond.

But on 10 June, one box office-topping movie was watched by just two people, in one cinema.
Unsubscribe, a 29-minute horror movie shot entirely on video-conferencing app Zoom, generated $25,488 (£20,510) in ticket sales on that day.

Nationwide, the movie hit the top of the charts, according to reputable revenue tacker Box Office Mojo.

The budget of the movie: a flat $0. How was that possible?

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This is wonderful. (Like the B+O article, this is also stolen shamelessly from Benedict Evans’s newsletter.)
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Chinese study: antibodies in COVID-19 patients fade quickly • CIDRAP

Robert Roos:

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A new study from China showed that antibodies faded quickly in both asymptomatic and symptomatic COVID-19 patients during convalescence, raising questions about whether the illness leads to any lasting immunity to the virus afterward.

The study, which focused on 37 asymptomatic and 37 symptomatic patients, showed that more than 90% of both groups showed steep declines in levels of SARS-COV-2–specific immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies within 2 to 3 months after onset of infection, according to a report published yesterday in Nature Medicine. Further, 40% of the asymptomatic group tested negative for IgG antibodies 8 weeks after they were released from isolation.

The authors said the findings suggest that it could be risky to assume that recovered patients are immune to reinfection, which may have implications for how long to maintain physical distancing restrictions.

The patients included in the study were among 2,088 people who were tested for COVID-19 because they were close contacts of confirmed patients in China’s Wanzhou district. Of those who tested positive, 60 had had no symptoms in the preceding 2 weeks but were hospitalized for isolation. Of those, 23 people who had mild symptoms on admission or soon afterward were excluded from the study, leaving 37.

…Among the main findings was that IgG levels in 93% (28/30) of the asymptomatic group and 97% (30/31) of the symptomatic group declined greatly during the early convalescent phase (by 8 weeks after release from the hospital). Antibody levels dropped by 71.1% in asymptomatic patients and 76.2% in the symptomatic group.

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Speaking as someone who have Covid-19 (symptomatically) three months ago, this is bloody annoying.
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Novak Djokovic is latest tennis player to test positive for virus after protocol-flouting tour • The Washington Post

Liz Clarke:

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Djokovic, 33, announced his positive result in a statement Tuesday morning, explaining that his family was tested upon returning to Belgrade after the tour stop in Croatia.

“My result is positive, just as Jelena’s, while the results of our children are negative,” Djokovic wrote, adding that he intends to self-isolate for 14 days.

Originally scheduled over four weeks in three Balkan countries, the Adria Tour kicked off with a news conference in Belgrade that included Djokovic, third-ranked Dominic Thiem, seventh-ranked Alexander Zverev and 19th-ranked Dimitrov seated side by side, without protective face masks, while fielding questions from several rows of reporters who also were not wearing masks.

On the court, there was no apparent effort to keep players from shaking hands or draping arms around one another following matches. And off the court, they danced and partied shirtless at a Belgrade nightclub.

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Djokovic lost in the exhibition match, possibly because he was already ill. If he sickens to any significant extent, his career is effectively over: this is not a forgiving disease, and it’ll affect his stamina. Especially if in a few months he gets reinfected. Djokovic is an anti-vaxxer, by the way. (Wonder if he’ll stay that way if a vaccine becomes available?) Viruses, of course, don’t care about beliefs.
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Superhuman’s email app is overhyped and overpriced – The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

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Superhuman is one of the most in-demand startups right now, with the invite-only app considered one of the most exclusive services in the tech industry. That’s impressive, for an email app. It’s even more impressive for an email app that merely accesses your existing Gmail account and costs $30 per month to use. The buzz — both from the company’s marketing and around Silicon Valley — is off the charts. Superhuman bills itself as “not another email client,” promising an inbox that’s been “rebuilt from the ground up” that will make you “feel like you have superpowers.” The website is peppered with accolades from startup CEOs praising how it has changed their relationship with email.

But does it live up to the hype? I spent a month using the service to find out.

Just getting into Superhuman, which launched way back in 2016, is a task all on its own. First, you’ll either need to submit a request for access or be invited by someone who’s already using the app. In most cases, that’ll put you on a waiting list — which, as of last June, was reportedly 180,000 members long — which may or may not result in the company contacting you to move on with your application.

Assuming that you are accepted, you’ll be asked to fill out a lengthy workflow questionnaire so Superhuman can learn more about how you use email — and whether your workflow is the right fit for its app.

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We last heard about Superhuman back in July last year, when it was getting ragged for failing to protect users’ privacy. Still ridiculous, but it’s obviously just a Veblen good (or service), much as Vertu phones used to be. Oh, Vertu? Went bust because people realised they were after all fungible for cheaper things.
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