For shops that are physically shut, Facebook Shopping could be a boon – at least online CC-licensed photo by CJS*64 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. No idea how. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The public do not understand logarithmic graphs used to portray COVID-19 • LSE

Alessandro Romano, Chiara Sotis, Goran Dominioni and Sebastián Guidi:

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the canonical example of framing effects involves an epidemic: a disease that kills 200 out of 600 people is considered worse than one in which 400 people survive…

…Many media outlets portray information about the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths using a logarithmic scale graph. At first sight, this seems sensible. In fact, many of them defend their decision by showing how much better these charts are in conveying information about the exponential nature of the contagion. For history lovers, the popular economist Irving Fisher also believed this, which led him to strongly advocate for their use in 1917 (right before the Spanish Flu rendered them tragically relevant). Fisher was ecstatic about this scale: “When one is once accustomed to it, it never misleads.” It turns out, however, that even specialized scientists don’t get used to it. Not surprisingly, neither does the general public.

…We conducted a between-subjects experiment to test whether people had a better understanding of graphs in a logarithmic or in a linear scale, and whether the scale in which the chart is shown affects their level of worry and their policy preferences. Half of our n=2000 sample of US residents was shown the progression of COVID-19 related deaths in the US at the time of the survey plotted on a logarithmic scale. The other half received exactly the same information–this time plotted on a good old linear scale.

Contrary to [the 1917 economist Irving] Fisher’s optimism, we find that the group who read the information on a logarithmic scale has a much lower level of comprehension of the graph: only 40.66% of them could respond correctly to a basic question about the graph (whether there were more deaths in one week or another), contrasted to 83.79% of respondents on the linear scale. Moreover, people in the logarithmic group also proved to be worse at making predictions on the evolution of the pandemic…

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The problem comes with having lots of countries which you’re trying to compare. In that situation, log graphs are useful for comparison. When you’re looking at one country alone (as in this experiment), linear works better.
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Facebook launches shopping platform for small businesses • WSJ

Maria Armental:

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Facebook is making a big push into online shopping through Facebook Shops, enlisting small businesses to sell their wares through its platform and giving them access to its technology at the same time the coronavirus pandemic has upended business world-wide.

“It’s clear at this point that Covid isn’t just a health emergency,” Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday, referring to Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus that has forced businesses to close physical stores. “It’s also the biggest economic shock that we’ve felt in our lifetime.”

Small businesses, Mr. Zuckerberg said, will be able to personalize virtual storefronts to show specific products that are considered more relevant and use augmented reality to let customers virtually try on things such as sunglasses, lipstick or makeup or sample what furniture might look like in a room.

The virtual shops will appear on the businesses’ Facebook and Instagram accounts and, eventually, on the Messenger and WhatsApp messaging tools.

The move, which Facebook said was months in the making and was done with partners such as Shopify Inc., comes a day after the company released results from a survey of small-business owners that found that as of April nearly one-third of small and midsize businesses had stopped operating.

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Potentially huge, and while there’s lockdown in place businesses will be gasping to use this. And Facebook tightens its grip just a little bit more.
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Unboxing a 5G protection device • The Quackometer Blog

Andy Lewis:

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The makers of 5G bioshields claim to use a “PROPRIETARY HOLOGRAPHIC NANO-LAYER TECHNOLOGY” to

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provide protection for  your home and family,  thanks to the wearable holographic nano-layer catalyser, which can be worn or placed near to a smartphone or any other electrical, radiation or EMF emitting device.

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This is of course bullshit.

But it is bullshit that sells at £283.00 and is endorsed by the good denizens of Glastonbury [specifically, its 5G committee, as mentioned here on Friday].

Variations of such devices have been around for many years, peddled to protect you from the every increasing dangers of 3G, WiFi, 4G and now 5G. Every few years, a new scare comes along to keep selling such devices.

I bought one a few years ago.

The device I bought was from a chap called Gary Johnson,

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a qualified Homoeopath, Subtle Energy engineer and lecturer in health & environmental analysis. Developing the art and science of mental/emotional/physical  healing for 28 years.

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Gary sells a number of solutions to the problems of mobile radiation. He has updated his range somewhat since I bought my device a few years back but a full house solution will set you back about £200.

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Aren’t nano-layers dangerous though?

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BBC Together is like Netflix Party but for BBC shows • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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BBC is launching a new experimental tool, BBC Together, that will let you watch or listen to BBC programming with others over the internet, with everyone seeing the same thing on-screen at the same time. It sounds a lot like Netflix Party but for BBC content.

BBC Together works with any audio or video content from BBC iPlayer (which has on-demand video content from the BBC), BBC Sounds (which has on-demand audio content), Bitesize (which has educational content), BBC News, and BBC Sport, according to the BBC. You should be able to try it now on Taster, the BBC’s site for its experimental technologies.

Once you decide what you want to watch with others with BBC Together, you’ll be able to share a link with your friends so they can join in. If you’re the host, you can decide when to start, stop, rewind, or forward content, and everyone’s stream should stay in sync.

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Easyjet hacked: nine million people’s data accessed plus 2,200 folks’ credit card details grabbed • The Register

Gareth Corfield:

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Budget British airline Easyjet has been hacked, it has told the stock markets, admitting nine million people’s details were accessed and more than 2,000 customers’ credit card details stolen.

Some information about the attack was released to the London Stock Exchange by the company, which claimed it had been targeted by “a highly sophisticated source”.

Email addresses and “travel details” of “approximately 9 million customers” were slurped by the unidentified hackers. Easyjet insists that the passport and credit card details of nearly all of those people were not affected.

However, 2,208 unlucky souls within the group did have their credit card details nabbed. Precisely which details – 16 digit card number, 3-digit CVV from the reverse, expiry date and so on – were not spelled out.

Twitter activity dating back to the first few days of April, however, shows Easyjet customers asking the airline whether notification emails were real…

…Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey speculated about the digital break-in: “So either credit card details [were] not encrypted or it’s Magecart again. Can’t see why they’d leave only 2,000 cards unencrypted, so suggests Magecart.”

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Magecart being the group that hacked British Airways by getting their card-stealing code to load from the baggage booking page.
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Retrospective pooled screening for SARS-CoV-2 RNA in late 2019 • medRxiv

Catherine Hogan and others at Stanford University:

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Reports have emerged documenting earlier SARS-CoV-2 cases than previously recognized. To investigate this possibility in the Bay Area, we retrospectively tested 1,700 samples from symptomatic individuals [with respiratory problems] for the last two months of 2019. No SARS-CoV-2 positive pools were identified, consistent with limited transmission in this population at this time.

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In other words: nobody seems to have had Covid-19 in the US in 2019 in the Bay area. Just need this for the Seattle area and New York now.
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State Dept. investigator fired by Trump had examined weapons sales to Saudis and Emiratis • The New York Times

Edward Wong and David Sanger:

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The State Department inspector general fired by President Trump on Friday was in the final stages of an investigation into whether the administration had unlawfully declared an “emergency” last year to allow the resumption of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for their air war in Yemen.

Employees from the office of the inspector general, Steve A. Linick, presented preliminary findings to senior State Department officials in early March, before the coronavirus forced lockdowns across the United States. But it was not clear whether that investigation, or others that Mr. Linick had underway, led to his dismissal.

Mr. Trump, speaking about the latest in his series of firings of inspectors general around the government, said on Monday of Mr. Linick: “I don’t know him. Never heard of him. But I was asked by the State Department, by Mike” to terminate Mr. Linick. He apparently was referring to a recommendation he received from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo…

…The investigation into how Mr. Pompeo moved to end a congressional hold on arms sales to the Saudis was prompted in part by demands from the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, who said on Monday that the subsequent investigation might have been “another reason” for the firing of Mr. Linick.

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The tales of Pompeo being investigated for getting someone to walk his dog and getting his wife onto planes now sounds like a distraction; this is the real meat of it.
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Pentagon contractors’ report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ origins of coronavirus is bogus • Daily Beast

Erin Banco, Adam Rawnsley and Lachlan Cartwright:

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Multiple congressional committees have obtained and are scrutinizing the 30-page report, produced by the Multi-Agency Collaboration Environment (MACE), a part of Sierra Nevada, a major Department of Defense contractor. The report claims to rely on social media postings, commercial satellite imagery, and cellphone location data to draw the conclusion that some sort of “hazardous event” occurred at the Wuhan virology lab in October 2019—an event that allowed COVID-19 to escape. It’s a theory that has gained currency on the political right and in the upper tiers of the Trump administration.  

But the report’s claim centers around missing location data for up to seven phones — and in many cases, less than that. It’s too small a sample size to prove much of anything, especially when the same devices showed similar absences in the spring of 2019. The MACE document claims a November 2019 conference was canceled because of some calamity; in fact, there are selfies from the event. 

What’s more, imagery collected by DigitalGlobe’s Maxar Technologies satellites and provided to The Daily Beast reveals a simpler, less exotic reason for why analysts believed “roadblocks” went into place around the lab after the supposed accident: road construction. The Maxar images also show typical workdays, with normal traffic patterns around the lab, after the supposedly cataclysmic event.

“This is an illustrated guide on how not to do open source analysis,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, who analyzed the MACE report for The Daily Beast. “It is filled with apples-to-oranges comparisons, motivated reasoning, and a complete refusal to consider mundane explanations or place the data in any sort of context.” 

A Department of Defense spokesperson told The Daily Beast that MACE did not produce the report “in coordination with the DoD.”

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Bellingcat, the OSInt group, looked at this and disproved it within minutes. Pompeo and the DoD are now backing away from this at speed.
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Georgia coronavirus data made reopening look safe. It wasn’t • Los Angeles Times

Matthew Fleischer:

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Mass delusion seems a dubious strategy for ending the coronavirus crisis. And yet if you look at the data coming out of Georgia over the past month — which had one of the earliest and most aggressive efforts to reopen its economy — you might be convinced that there is little danger in a broad economic reopening.

According to state data models, which Gov. Brian Kemp used to justify Georgia’s aggressive reopening, the state’s infection curve has been rapidly heading in a direction that would be the envy of states like California, with its aggressive lockdown rules. The Wall Street Journal hailed the “Georgia Model” as evidence that aggressive lockdowns were needlessly harming the economy.

Georgia’s miraculous curve seemingly played an important role in the changing public sentiment around reopening nationally. If it’s working in Georgia, why can’t it work here?

Georgia’s flattening curve defied all scientific logic. Pandemics don’t end because the economy is suffering and we want them to.

And yet data don’t lie. Or do they?

Thanks to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, we now know things did indeed look too good to be true. Georgia’s coronavirus numbers looked so rosy because officials misrepresented the data in such a way it’s difficult to believe it wasn’t done on purpose. [Dates were out of order in a way that made the figures appear to be going down.]

“I have a hard time understanding how this happens without it being deliberate,” microbiology and molecular genetics PhD and state Rep. Jasmine Clark told the Journal Constitution. “Literally nowhere ever in any type of statistics would that be acceptable.”

Georgia isn’t the only state itching to reopen that has a penchant for dubious data. Florida actively tried suppressing county coroners from releasing COVID-19 death tallies.

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If you can’t trust the data, you’ve got a problem. Georgia’s data dashboard shows a fall. But can you trust it now? Florida just fired its data scientist for being too careful.
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Germany′s data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go • DW

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Data privacy commissioner Ulrich Kelber said any use of WhatsApp was prohibited for federal ministries and institutions, even if some had resorted to using it during the current pandemic.

In a letter to branches of the federal government, Kelber said that bodies must respect, and not neglect, data protection “even in these difficult times.”

Read more: WhatsApp in India — Scourge of violence-inciting fake news tough to tackle
He stressed that federal entities were obliged to uphold Germany law and had a role model function.
The Düsseldorf newspaper Handelsblatt said Kelber, previously a Social Democrat (SPD) federal parliamentarian, was reacting to complaints from citizens about the use of WhatsApp by unnamed federal authorities.

“Just by sending messages, metadata is delivered to WhatsApp every time,” said Kelber, adding that it could be assumed that these data snippets were then forwarded directly to Facebook, WhatsApp’s parent concern.

“These contribute, even if only as a small piece of the mosaic, to the increased storage of personal profiles,” he wrote, referring to IP addresses and locations.

WhatsApp, cited in Handelblatt’s Monday edition, rebutted Kelber’s warning, saying the messaging service did not forward user data to Facebook — for example, to enable more accurately the distribution of online advertising.

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There’s a gap in Facebook’s denial. It’s able to block messages being forwarded more than a certain number of times from WhatsApp groups; it’s able to measure how much less virality there is as a result. How can it know that if it isn’t collecting some metadata?
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China puts city of Shulan under Wuhan-style lockdown after fresh Covid-19 cases • The Guardian

Helen Davidson:

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In Shulan, residential compounds were restricted to just one entry and exit for emergency vehicles, and banned non-residents and vehicles from entering. If there are confirmed cases in a community residence, no one can enter or leave.

Last week, the city was reclassified as high risk after a cluster of cases emerged connected to a woman with no known history of travel or exposure to the virus. In response, authorities ordered the temporary closure of public places, schools and public transport.

On Monday however these restrictions were increased further, with China Daily referring to the city as “the latest pandemic hotspot in the country”. It said hundreds of people were under medical quarantine, and that life might not go back to normal for weeks.

The north-east of the country, which borders Russia and North Korea, has emerged as an area of serious concern, as cases appear to have been brought in from across the border, and then begun to spread locally.

At least 34 people have been diagnosed with Covid-19 in Jilin province in the past fortnight.

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Shulan in is the north-east region of the country, a long way from Wuhan. Tempted to say that coronavirus is endemic in China now.
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OnePlus 8 Pro’s color filter mode won’t be disabled after all (except in China), but will receive changes • Android Police

Ryne Hager:

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OnePlus has announced that it will temporarily disable the “color filter” camera on the 8 Pro in a future update, but only the Chinese version of the phone running HydrogenOS will be affected. The camera, which is augmented with its ability to gather infrared light, was able to see through materials like certain plastics and even some kinds of cloth. The functionality will apparently return in the future when OnePlus can limit “other functionality that may be of concern.”

The company made its initial announcement via Weibo, but a follow-up post to the OnePlus forums has made the upcoming changes much more clear. The color filter camera will be disabled in the Chinese market within the next week via a HydrogenOS update, but the company has plans to bring it back once it can eliminate customer worries. Again, this temporary feature removal only affects HydrogenOS, the company’s Chinese ROM. OnePlus has no plans to disable the color filter camera in the US or international markets, though it all markets will end up with whatever fix the company eventually devises.

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Unclear why it’s only the Chinese version. Perhaps sales aren’t actually significant enough outside China yet to make it worth considering; it would just be hassle.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Isle of Wight: not the ideal place to find people with coronavirus, which is good – but also bad CC-licensed photo by Alwyn Ladell on Flickr.

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

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

Huawei hits back at US as TSMC cuts off chip orders • The Verge

Sam Byford:

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“In its relentless pursuit to tighten its stranglehold on our company, the US government has decided to proceed and completely ignore the concerns of many companies and industry associations,” Huawei adds in an official statement. “This decision was arbitrary and pernicious, and threatens to undermine the entire industry worldwide. This new rule will impact the expansion, maintenance, and continuous operations of networks worth hundreds of billions of dollars that we have rolled out in more than 170 countries.”

“We expect that our business will inevitably be affected,” Huawei’s statement continues. “We will try all we can to seek a solution.”

Nikkei reported earlier today that TSMC has moved to stop new orders from Huawei following the US government’s announcement last week. The rules are specifically designed to target Huawei and its chip subsidiary HiSilicon, requiring a license for any shipments from manufacturers that use US technology or equipment. TSMC didn’t deny the reports but called them “purely market rumor,” according to Reuters.

Huawei has in the past suggested that it could switch its chip supply to Samsung in this eventuality. The company has also recently been exploring domestic chip production through China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), which just received a $2.2 billion investment from the Chinese government.

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This is going to cripple both Huawei’s consumer and network businesses. The latter is way bigger and more important. It will also hasten China aiming to do everything itself. The US-China divide is going to get wider, rather than China becoming in any way subservient to the US.
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Isle of Wight contact-tracing app trial: a mixed verdict so far • BBC News

Rory Cellan-Jones:

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It is 10 days since all Isle of Wight residents were invited to test the NHS app at the heart of the government’s test, track and trace strategy. So how’s it going?
Mixed would probably be a fair verdict.

The big concern was how many people would download it. Epidemiologists suggest that for the UK as a whole, about 60% of the population needs to install and use the software for it to live up to its full potential. So when Downing Street says there have been roughly 60,000 downloads, that’s not a bad result. The island’s population is 140,000, and its inhabitants are slightly older and less likely to own a smartphone than the UK average.

But one cautionary note – that 60,000 may include some who downloaded it twice or are from the mainland. Still, that compares well with other experiments. About 20% of the population of Singapore downloaded its contact-tracing app, and last week an Australian government app had been installed by roughly a quarter of its population.

But here’s the key question – does it work? Are users being alerted to take action after coming into contact with the virus?

Here, there is very little to go on. What we know is that there are just 173 confirmed cases of Covid-19 on the Isle of Wight. With most people still in lockdown, it is quite unlikely that any single individual using the app would have come into contact with an infected person.

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Umm well that does seem like a bit of a drawback for testing your contact-responding app. Though Apple just released iOS 13.5 with the contact tracing API, so it’ll be back to the drawing board for the NHS.
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Uber cuts 3,000 more jobs, shuts 45 offices in coronavirus crunch • WSJ

Preetika Rana:

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Uber Technologies is cutting several thousand additional jobs, closing more than three dozen offices and re-evaluating big bets in areas ranging from freight to self-driving technology as Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi attempts to steer the ride-hailing giant through the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Khosrowshahi announced the plans in an email to staff Monday, less than two weeks after the company said it would eliminate about 3,700 jobs and planned to save more than $1 billion in fixed costs. Monday’s decision to close 45 offices and lay off some 3,000 more people means Uber is shedding roughly a quarter of its workforce in under a month’s time. Drivers aren’t classified as employees, so they aren’t included.

Stay-at-home orders have ravaged Uber’s core ride-hailing business, which accounted for three-quarters of the company’s revenue before the pandemic struck. Uber’s rides business in April was down 80% from a year earlier.

“We’re seeing some signs of a recovery, but it comes off of a deep hole, with limited visibility as to its speed and shape,” Mr. Khosrowshahi said in his note to employees. The company’s food-delivery arm, Uber Eats, has been a bright spot during the crisis, but “the business today doesn’t come close to covering our expenses,” he wrote.

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Uber used to lose money even when people were moving around all the time. The weird thing is that when things start opening up, its cost structure might actually make sense.
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Disney’s Mayer becomes TikTok CEO • The New York Times

Brooks Barnes:

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The Walt Disney Company’s top streaming executive, Kevin Mayer, resigned on Monday and will become the chief executive of TikTok, the app for making and sharing short videos that has exploded in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Mayer, 58, will also serve as chief operating officer of ByteDance, the Chinese conglomerate that owns TikTok.

As Americans have stayed home during the pandemic, a growing number have turned to TikTok to help pass the time. New users in the United States downloaded the app about 11 million times in March, nearly twice the total in December, according to Sensor Tower, a company that tracks app usage data.

But national security concerns about TikTok’s growing influence have been raised by members of Congress, who have also questioned if there is a risk that the app could share user data with its Chinese parent company.

Mr. Mayer’s departure from Disney is not entirely a surprise. Disney’s board of directors passed over him earlier this year when it was looking for a successor for Robert A. Iger, who abruptly stepped down in February. (Mr. Iger remains executive chairman, with a focus on the creative process.) Many people in Hollywood and on Wall Street had viewed Mr. Mayer, 58, as the logical internal candidate because the future of Disney rests on its ability to transform itself into a streaming titan. The top job, however, went to Bob Chapek, the lower-profile chairman of Disney’s theme parks and consumer products businesses.

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Disney+ has hardly done badly, but this is quite a move. TikTok (and ByteDance) are going to get serious about monetisation now. And also the whole global domination thing.
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US lockdown protests may have spread virus widely, cellphone data suggests • The Guardian

Jason Wilson:

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Cellphone location data suggests that demonstrators at anti-lockdown protests – some of which have been connected with Covid-19 cases – are often traveling hundreds of miles to events, returning to all parts of their states, and even crossing into neighboring ones.

The data, provided to the Guardian by the progressive campaign group the Committee to Protect Medicare, raises the prospect that the protests will play a role in spreading the coronavirus epidemic to areas which have, so far, experienced relatively few infections.

The anonymized location data was captured from opt-in cellphone apps, and data scientists at the firm VoteMap used it to determine the movements of devices present at protests in late April and early May in five states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado and Florida.

They then created visualizations that tracked the movements of those devices up to 48 hours after the conclusion of protests. The visualizations only show movements within states, due to the queries analysts made in creating them. But the data scientist Jeremy Fair, executive-vice president of VoteMap, says that many of the devices that are seen to reach state borders are seen to continue across them in the underlying raw data.

One visualization shows that in Lansing, Michigan, after a 30 April protest in which armed protesters stormed the capitol building and state police were forced to physically block access to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, devices which had been present at the protest site can be seen returning to all parts of the state, from Detroit to remote towns in the state’s north.

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I know, you’re surprised that meeting up with people might spread the virus. Total shocker.
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Microsoft: we were wrong about open source • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Microsoft has admitted it was wrong about open source, after the company battled it and Linux for years at the height of its desktop domination. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously branded Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches” back in 2001.

Microsoft president Brad Smith now believes the company was wrong about open source. “Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally,” said Smith in a recent MIT event. Smith has been at Microsoft for more than 25 years and was one of the company’s senior lawyers during its battles with open-source software.

“The good news is that, if life is long enough, you can learn … that you need to change,” added Smith. Microsoft has certainly changed since the days of branding Linux a cancer. The software giant is now the single largest contributor to open-source projects in the world, beating Facebook, Docker, Google, Apache, and many others.

Microsoft has gradually been adopting open source in recent years, including open-sourcing PowerShell, Visual Studio Code, and even Microsoft Edge’s original JavaScript engine.

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Gather round, children, and let’s remember that Microsoft used to rely on licensing Windows as the engine of its revenues, and so open source was indeed anathema. But times change, and now Microsoft makes its money from licensing things that aren’t Windows, such as access to its cloud services. That makes it platform-agnostic, but it’s nice to pretend it’s a spiritual conversion.
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Not even wrong: ways to predict tech • Benedict Evans

He’s blogging again:

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there is no predictive value in saying ‘that doesn’t work’ or ‘that looks like a toy’ – and that there is also no predictive value in saying ‘people always say that’. As Pauli put it, statements like this are ‘not even wrong’ – they do not give you any insight into what will happen. You have to go one level further. You have to ask ‘do you have a theory for why this will get better, or why it won’t, and for why people will change their behaviour, or for why they won’t’?

To understand both of these, it’s useful to compare the Wright Flier with the Bell Rocket Belt. Both of these were expensive impractical toys, but one of them changed the world and the other did not. And there is no hindsight bias or survivor bias here.

The Wright Flier could only go 200 meters, and the Rocket Belt could only fly for 21 seconds. But the Flier was a breakthrough of principle. There was no reason why it couldn’t get much better, very quickly, and Blériot flew across the English Channel just six years later. There was a very clear and obvious path to make it better. Conversely, the Rocket Belt flew for 21 seconds because it used almost a litre of fuel per second – to fly like this for half a hour you’d need almost two tonnes of fuel, and you can’t carry that on your back. There was no roadmap to make it better without changing the laws of physics. We don’t just know that now – we knew it in 1962.

These roadmaps can come in steps. It took quite a few steps to get from the Flier to something that made ocean liners obsolete, and each of those steps were useful. The PC also came in steps – from hobbyists to spreadsheets to web browsers. The same thing for mobile – we went from expensive analogue phones for a few people to cheap GSM phones for billions of people to smartphones that changed what mobile meant. But there was always a path.

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A general point, though he does draw a comparison with self-driving cars.
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FBI: shooter at Pensacola military base linked to al-Qaida • The Washington Post

Eric Tucker:

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The Justice Department had previously asked Apple to help extract data from two iPhones that belonged to the gunman, including one that authorities say Alshamrani damaged with a bullet after being confronted by law enforcement. Wray said FBI agents were able to break the encryption without the help of Apple.

Law enforcement officials had previously left no doubt that Alshamrani was motivated by jihadist ideology, saying he visited a New York City memorial to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and posted anti-American and anti-Israeli messages on social media just two hours before the shooting.

Separately, AQAP, al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen, released a video in February claiming the attack. The branch has long been considered the global network’s most dangerous branch and has attempted to carry out attacks on the U.S. mainland.

But it was only with access to the phones that U.S. officials were able to establish certain suspicions as facts.

Barr said the information retrieved from Alshramani’s phone has already proved valuable, with U.S. officials recently conducting a counterterrorism operation targeting an AQAP operative who was one of Alshramani’s contacts…

Barr used Monday’s press conference to forcefully call on Apple to do more to cooperate with law enforcement.

“In cases like this, where the user is a terrorist, or in other cases, where the user is a violent criminal, human trafficker or child predator, Apple’s decision has dangerous consequences for public safety and national security and is, in my judgment, unacceptable,” Barr said.

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General principle: listen to any recommendation Barr makes, and do the opposite. Apple isn’t going to make a backdoor, and if a US law is passed obliging it to, it won’t start until that law has been challenged all the way to the Supreme Court – on the basis it would be “speech forced by the government”, violating the First Amendment.
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The American economy is imploding — and America is too • Medium

Umair Haque:

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The few jobs that are left are “low-income service jobs” offered by mega-monopolies, which means delivering groceries and driving cars and walking pets. But they don’t provide stable incomes, benefits, guarantees, much less raises, career paths, and so on But when economy’s labour force…goes nowhere…what future can it really have?

That brings me to the second transformation depressions wreak. Economies grow permanently poorer. Yes, as in “forever.” That’s already happening in America, too. yesterday’s if not great but somewhat decent jobs were already being substituted away by the new, gruesome “gigs” that modern-day American techno-capital offers — driving an Uber, delivering an Instacart, selling a pallet on Amazon — but coronavirus has accelerated that transition, massively. Megacorporations aren’t going to magically hire huge numbers of people once they’ve found out they can make do with permanently lowers levels of hiring. But lower levels of hiring across the economy mean that workers have less bargaining power. Bang! Incomes fall — the share of the economy going to working people craters. What’s the net result? Society grows poorer.

What happens to poorer societies? They’re left in a kind of terrible paradox, which is my third transformation: they can’t afford the very things they need to survive most. Why is it that the average American is the only person in the rich world by now who votes against their own healthcare, retirement, education, childcare, and so on? Because they can’t afford it. 80% of Americans lived paycheck to paycheck before coronavirus. Who can afford to pay an extra 5% or 10% in taxes for decent social systems? Nobody, really, except the already rich — who don’t need them. Hence, the famous paradox of the American Idiot: people who vote against their self-interest. It’s not their fault, really: they have no choice. They can’t afford to vote for things like public healthcare.

America was already becoming too poor a society to have functioning public goods, like healthcare or retirement for all. Coronavirus is going to seal that fate. America will be poor now — far too poor to ever really make the transition to having decent public goods. Think of that full half of the American population who’s now not employed. How exactly are they going to afford the higher taxes it takes to have a European or Canadian style social contract? They struggled to before — and after coronavirus, it’s going to be flatly impossible.

«

One point apparently not considered: much higher taxes on those with higher incomes, and higher corporate taxes. That could pay for healthcare. Ah, but Haque is assuming, probably correctly, that the legislature is captured by corporate and personal interests which forestall those. His later points are even more concerning.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When (if?) there’s a coronavirus vaccine, will the desire to get back to “normal” overwhelm antivaccine idiocy? CC-licensed photo by frankieleon on Flickr.

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

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

The US government is getting ready to sue Google for monopolizing online ads • The Verge

Russell Brandom and Makena Kelly:

»

The Justice Department and a coalition of state attorneys general are likely to file antitrust charges against Google in the coming months, according to a new report by The Wall Street Journal. The reporting is consistent with earlier statements by Attorney General William Barr, who said he expected a decision to be made sometime this summer.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton confirmed the general timeline in a statement to the Journal, saying he would “hope to have the investigation wrapped up by fall,” although he would not commit to whether charges would be filed.

The investigation is one of the greatest efforts to regulate Google by the US government, with rare coordination between state and federal law enforcement. Google has turned over more than 100,000 documents to investigators as part of the ongoing probe, and civil demands have been served to a number of related third parties. Notably, the investigation does not include Justice Department antitrust chief Makan Delrahim, who has recused himself because of former lobbying work involving Google.

On a call with reporters on Thursday, Paxton said the primary focus was the broad reach of Google’s online advertising network, the economic heart of the company. “We think Google has 7,000 data points on just about every human being alive,” Paxton told reporters on the call. “They control the buy-side [of online advertising], the sell-side and the market which we are concerned gives them way too much power.”

«

Can’t see this sticking. Having a monopoly is not illegal. Using your monopoly to annexe an adjacent market can be an antitrust violation. But that’s not the accusation. The topic to go after Google on antitrust was, and remains, its favouring of its own Shopping and downranking of rivals in its search results. That’s what the EU went after.
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Google erases thousands of links, tricked by phony complaints • WSJ

Andrea Fuller, Kirsten Grind and Joe Palazzolo:

»

A Google search, at one time, could locate a news article on a man accused of attempted child rape, another on someone charged with fraud and still others on Ukrainian politicians facing corruption allegations. Googling certain keywords in March would find an article detailing the movements of two coronavirus-infected British tourists in Vietnam and warning others who visited the same places to take precautions.

Then the stories vanished.

Google stopped listing them in searches after it received formal requests that it scrub links to the pieces, a Wall Street Journal investigation found.

The Journal identified hundreds of instances in which individuals or companies, often using apparently fake identities, caused the Alphabet Inc. unit to remove links to unfavorable articles and blog posts that alleged wrongdoing by convicted criminals, foreign officials and businesspeople in the U.S. and abroad.

Google took them down in response to copyright complaints, many of which appear to be bogus, the Journal found in an analysis of information from the more than four billion links sent to Google for removal since 2011.

Google’s system was set up to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. The 1998 law gives tech firms immunity from claims in copyright cases as long they quickly take down copyrighted material once alerted.

«

Google can’t win this one. There are lots of malicious actors doing this (and using the Right To Be Forgotten in Europe). Yet there are links that do need to be taken down. So.. you get humans to review every one? Now you’re employing tons of people of varying capability to make difficult decisions, which might need to be reviewed by someone else. You thought you were running a search engine but you seem to be running a content review site. That doesn’t scale. So you look at machine intelligence, but how is it going to determine questions like this? So you just automate it. And now the WSJ is writing nasty pieces about the failure of your automation.
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Get ready for a Covid-19 vaccine information war • The New York Times

Kevin Roose:

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It occurred to me that all the misinformation we’ve seen so far — the false rumors that 5G cellphone towers fuel the coronavirus, that drinking bleach or injecting UV rays can cure it, that Dr. Anthony Fauci is part of an anti-Trump conspiracy — may be just the warm-up act for a much bigger information war when an effective vaccine becomes available to the public. This war could pit public health officials and politicians against an anti-vaccination movement that floods social media with misinformation, conspiracy theories and propaganda aimed at convincing people that the vaccine is a menace rather than a lifesaving, economy-rescuing miracle.

Scariest of all? It could actually work.

I’ve been following the anti-vaccine community on and off for years, watching its members operate in private Facebook groups and Instagram accounts, and have found that they are much more organized and strategic than many of their critics believe. They are savvy media manipulators, effective communicators and experienced at exploiting the weaknesses of social media platforms. (Just one example: Shortly after Facebook and YouTube began taking down copies of “Plandemic” for violating their rules, I saw people in anti-vaccine groups editing it in subtle ways to evade the platforms’ automated enforcement software and reposting it.)

In short, the anti-vaxxers have been practicing for this. And I’m worried that they will be unusually effective in sowing doubts about a Covid-19 vaccine for several reasons.

First, because of the pandemic’s urgency, any promising Covid-19 vaccine is likely to be fast-tracked through the testing and approval process. It may not go through years of clinical trials and careful studies of possible long-term side effects, the way other drugs do. That could create an opening for anti-vaccine activists to claim that it is untested and dangerous, and to spin reasonable concerns about the vaccine into widespread, unfounded fears about its safety.

Second, if a vaccine does emerge, there is a good chance that leading health organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or the World Health Organization will have a hand in producing or distributing it.

«

Could be heavily dependent on whether you need vaccination (proven) to “get back to normal”. He speaks to the researchers who produced the study below.
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The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views • Nature

Neil Johnson and plenty of others:

»

Here we provide a map of the contention surrounding vaccines that has emerged from the global pool of around three billion Facebook users. Its core reveals a multi-sided landscape of unprecedented intricacy that involves nearly 100 million individuals partitioned into highly dynamic, interconnected clusters across cities, countries, continents and languages.

Although smaller in overall size, anti-vaccination clusters manage to become highly entangled with undecided clusters in the main online network, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are more peripheral. Our theoretical framework reproduces the recent explosive growth in anti-vaccination views, and predicts that these views will dominate in a decade. Insights provided by this framework can inform new policies and approaches to interrupt this shift to negative views.

«

“These views will dominate in a decade”. What’s the opposite of enlightenment?
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How Facebook could use Giphy to collect your data • OneZero

Owen Williams:

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What might not be obvious, however, is that each search and GIF you send with Giphy [which Facebook bought for $400m on Friday] is also a “beacon” that allows the company to track how and where the image is being shared, as well as the sentiment the image expresses. Giphy wraps each of its animated GIFs in a special format that helps the image load faster, and also embeds a tiny piece of Javascript that lets the company know where the image is being loaded, as well as a tracking identifier that helps follow your browsing across the web.

When embedded into third-party apps, Giphy can track each keystroke that’s searched using Giphy tools. Developers who install Giphy tools into their apps are required to give the service access to the device’s tracking ID. Such access allows Giphy (and now, Facebook) to better match the identity of a user across the apps they use on their phone.

Not every app that has historically integrated Giphy wants to give that data to another company. Secure messaging platform Signal, for example, has gone to lengths to ensure that Giphy was unable to identify users through their Giphy use by intercepting GIF requests and performing them on their own servers, then delivering the ultimate image match themselves. To Giphy, it looks like Signal is making the search, rather than a specific user.

Giphy is integrated everywhere from an iOS keyboard app to Twitter, that’s a good signal Facebook is betting big on using the service to peer inside the wider internet.

For Facebook, Giphy is a match made in heaven: Not only does the startup already get 50% of its traffic from the social media giant’s apps, but bringing it in-house provides a way to peek inside a vast swath of apps and websites beyond its own. That gives Facebook an opportunity to better understand user behavior in its own apps, and beyond, and ultimately could enhance its ad-tracking capabilities further. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how it plans to use Giphy’s tracking capabilities.

«

Talent or data; the only reasons Facebook buys stuff. As The Verge points out, Apple and others won’t like this and will probably take action to block it.
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The OnePlus 8 Pro doesn’t have an ‘x-ray’ camera, but here’s how it sees through things • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

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Here’s what’s happening here. Cameras are typically designed to capture light in the same wavelengths that humans can see. There’s no reason they have to be, and there are wavelengths of light that cameras are capable of capturing but simply don’t, because doing so would introduce visual artifacts into the spectrum bands that humans can see. In this case, OnePlus’ camera is picking up infrared light that our eyes can’t normally see. The combination of a slightly opaque (in visible light) surface and the OnePlus 8’s slightly infrared-friendly camera can combine to create output we wouldn’t normally get. The result? An x-ray (or “x-ray” camera).

Your brain is capable of seeing colors you don’t normally process if handed the input to do so. Some years ago, we wrote about the case of a man who had the lenses of his eye replaced with artificial ones. As sometimes happens in these cases, the new artificial lenses allowed him to see deeper into the ultraviolet than is typical for humans. Tests with precise spectrographic measuring equipment confirmed it. When handed deeper UV light than we typically see, your brain is capable of mapping it to visual output, to some modest extent.

Back to the OnePlus 8. In this case, the camera that’s doing the sensing is a low-quality sensor that doesn’t take very good photos. AndroidCentral has dismissed the privacy risk for this reason, given that the “Photochrom” mode apparently degrades image quality further. The overall privacy risk is small, the company claims, though we can understand why folks might be leery given how easily footage finds its way online these days. This also is a problem OnePlus really should have caught in-factory.

«

Useful? Not at all. Unless I’ve missed something. As Hruska points out, you’ll find out a lot more using a screwdriver.
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The comedian going viral for lip-syncing Trump: ‘People really hate him’ • The Guardian

Poppy Noor:

»

Sarah Cooper never expected to become internet famous during a pandemic, but now she is a viral TikTok celebrity who makes people laugh without saying anything. How? She lets Trump say it all for her: Cooper lip-syncs Trump’s worst comments from press conferences.

Her recent clips include her dubbing Elon Musk explaining without embarrassment the decision to name his child X Æ A-12, but her first viral moment came following that press conference, when Trump suggested Americans ingest disinfectant to cure the coronavirus.

As soon as she heard it, she knew it was comedy gold. “The thing of trying to put light into your body and inject[ing] household cleaner into your veins – it was so visual to me, and I thought, ‘I have to make this’,” she tells me.

Within hours of the press conference Cooper had uploaded the TikTok video, simply captioned “How to medical” and watched as millions of laughs and likes came rolling in.

«

She’s very, very funny. Of course, she’s got great material and doesn’t have to pay for it. But the performance, that’s all her.
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Glastonbury 5G report ‘hijacked by conspiracy theorists’ – BBC News

Rory Cellan-Jones:

»

Another witness [to Glastonbury town council’s deliberations about 5G] was Dr Andrew Tresidder, a former GP whose website offers flower remedies and emotional healing. His presentation focused on people claiming to suffer from “electromagnetic stress”, which he said was often not taken seriously by mainstream doctors.

Committee member Roy Procter, a spiritual healer who claims dowsing can heal “sick houses”, also gave a presentation. In the report, he speculates about a link between the coronavirus and 5G, and recommends that the council eliminate all wi-fi connections.

The committee’s chairman, Councillor Jon Cousins, told the BBC he strongly disagrees with the suggestion that the meetings were biased towards pseudo-science. “Equal weight was given to all contributions,” he says, adding that councillors “were able to take into account the prejudice, predetermination and bias displayed on all sides of the argument”…

…The committee did hear evidence from Mobile UK, the mobile operators’ trade body.
Its presentation was criticised by one member for being “glossy”, and others alleged there was no attempt to answer questions.

Gareth Elliott of Mobile UK denied that: “We answered everything that was asked of us.” However, he said it was a cordial meeting and his organisation respected the views of the committee.

He recounts an incident where one committee member arrived late to a meeting. She said that although she was hyper-sensitive to electromagnetic emissions, she deemed the meeting room to be safe.

“It was then noted that a Wi-Fi router was operating and was in the room,” he says.

«

It’s hilarious, principally because Glastonbury town council has absolutely no power to ban 5G. I can only imagine how much BBC legal teethsucking this piece provoked, even though Rory was painstakingly careful to allow everyone to speak.

(Long, long ago we told Guardian readers how they could figure out if they were really able to detect when a Wi-Fi router was on. The paper mentioned in that article looked at whether people have “sensitivity” to mobile mast emissions. Finding: nope.)
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The most trafficked mammal you’ve never heard of • CNN.com

John Sutter, in 2014:

»

It’s hard to overstate the amount of stress that trafficking routes put on pangolins. They’re not happy travelers. Often they haven’t had food or water for days and are perilously dehydrated. Forty% die within a day or two of arriving at the [rescue] center, Phuong told me. The rest are injected with hydrating fluids and kept in quarantine until they can be moved to a larger cage.

All of this made me a little nervous to meet “Lucky”.

After standing there for a minute, I saw him breathing. It was hard to notice at first, but the hexagonal scales on his back rose and fell in a slow, oceanic motion. He must have smelled us, because his slender, toothless snout started to peek out of the ball like a cobra rising from a snake charmer’s basket. Soon, he was looking at us with curious blueberry eyes, bobbing his head and sniffing the air.

The photographer, who asked not to be identified in this story because he lives in Vietnam and fears retribution, got right in his face — SNAP SNAP SNAP — and Lucky just kept investigating the scene, putting his nose right up against the lens.

“He’s performing,” Phuong said with a smile…

…[Sutter then went to a restaurant in Vietnam to follow the illegal trade:] I talked it over with Z, the wildlife investigator who was my tour guide and whose identity I’m withholding because he continues to investigate the wildlife trade in Vietnam undercover. He suggested that I not place the order – or that he didn’t want to be a part of it if I did. I’d be giving a substantial amount of money to a black-market industry, he said. And I’d also be ensuring that one specific live pangolin (I thought of Lucky in this moment) would end up dead.

That last part didn’t quite make sense to me. I figured pangolins, like chicken or whatever, would already be dead in a meat freezer in the kitchen. Consequently, I figured I could argue (to myself and to you) that I hadn’t actually killed a pangolin by ordering it. It was already dead.

But that’s not how it works. As the waitress explained, with the poise of a “Downton Abbey” cast member, the staff would bring the pangolin out to the table live — and slit its throat. Right in front of us.

«

Grisly. As Sutter explains, they’re charming creatures, and being hunted to extinction for people to have stupid meals. Also, pangolins do carry coronaviruses, of various types.
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SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence? • bioRxiv

Shing Hei Zhan, Benjamin Deverman and Yujia Alina Chan, in a preprint:

»

Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected. The sudden appearance of a highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 presents a major cause for concern that should motivate stronger international efforts to identify the source and prevent near future re-emergence. Any existing pools of SARS-CoV-2 progenitors would be particularly dangerous if similarly well adapted for human transmission. To look for clues regarding intermediate hosts, we analyze recent key findings relating to how SARS-CoV-2 could have evolved and adapted for human transmission, and examine the environmental samples from the Wuhan Huanan seafood market. Importantly, the market samples are genetically identical to human SARS-CoV-2 isolates and were therefore most likely from human sources.

«

What they’re saying (the TL;DR) in this not-peer-reviewed article is that you’d expect to see early, less well-adapted versions of SARS-Cov-2 in samples from people who were at the Wuhan wet market if that was the origin of its crossover into humans. But they say all the versions are tightly conserved (genetically speaking), which suggests they’re coming from a human (or humans) who had earlier, not-yet-found versions which were less well-adapted.

I’d go for pangolin truck drivers, myself.

One of the authors, Alina Chan, has been busy on Twitter saying no, this doesn’t mean it’s made by humans, but that we need to know more. Didn’t stop the Mail on Sunday describing it as a “landmark study”: the Mail seems to have an agenda where it wants the virus to have emerged from a laboratory. Nobody has that data, nor a smoking gun to it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A DJI Mavic drone – but you won’t find them in its Hong Kong stores. Why aren’t they on show? CC-licensed photo by Aaron Yoo 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘Call of Duty: Warzone’ cheaters are getting owned by 2FA • VICE

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Emanuel Maiberg:

»

If you’ve been getting owned in Call of Duty: Warzone a lot before you even hit the ground and thought it would be more fun to play if you could use cheats to see other players through walls, you’re not alone.

Last month, the developers of the hugely popular game banned more than 70,000 cheaters and promised to combat the game’s cheating problem.

“We are watching. We have zero tolerance for cheaters,” tweeted the official account of Infinity Ward, the game’s developer.

This week, Infinity Ward rolled out a new, basic security feature which appears to have had the added bonus of locking out many cheaters: two-factor authentication. Infinity Ward announced that new Warzone players on PC will have to use SMS to login to the free version of the game, “as another step to provide an additional layer of security for players.”

Infinity Ward and Activision did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but cheaters are currently complaining about the effect this simple move has had on them.

Two-factor authentication is a common and very effective security feature to stop hackers from taking over your email or Facebook accounts. Two-factor, also known as two-step, multi-factor, or 2FA, is a mechanism where a user has to provide another code or number (or even physical token) to login, after providing a password.

But, in this case, it also works as an anti-cheat feature, as it allows Infinity Ward to tie a cellphone number to known cheaters…

…In this case, two-factor authentication functions as just another method to identify a cheater. Since cheaters need to provide a phone number to play Warzone for free now, and since they can’t reuse the same phone number to create infinite accounts, many cheaters are locked out once their number is tied to a banned account.

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Difficult and expensive to get another SIM right now, of course. Smart move.
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Netflix saved its average user from 9.1 days of commercials in 2019 • Reviews.com

Rob Toledo:

»

Fast facts:

• The average Netflix subscriber spent over two hours a day streaming Netflix content in 2019.
• Network television averages 18 minutes of commercials per hour (and this number continues to increase)
• With no commercials, two hours of Netflix saves users from over 36 minutes of ads daily, or 219 hours of ads a year
• During COVID-19 quarantine, we estimate the average total daily usage of Netflix has gone up at least thirty minutes per user, meaning the service is saving people from an extra nine minutes of ads a day during the pandemic.

«

Related: people are cord-cutting in the US at a growing rate. Which is going to mean the advert load will go up, driving more people away to streaming services which don’t have adverts – if they can afford them, or get a fast enough connection. American TV networks have abused their viewers for decades by overloading programmes with annoying adverts. Now it’s payback time.
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Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown • Financial Times

Edward Luce:

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[On March 6] Trump proclaimed that America was leading the world. South Korea had its first infection on January 20, the same day as America’s first case, and was, he said, calling America for help. “They have a lot of people that are infected; we don’t.” “All I say is, ‘Be calm,’” said the president. “Everyone is relying on us. The world is relying on us.”

He could just as well have said baseball is popular or foreigners love New York. American leadership in any disaster, whether a tsunami or an Ebola outbreak, has been a truism for decades. The US is renowned for helping others in an emergency.

In hindsight, Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself.

South Korea, which has a population density nearly 15 times greater and is next door to China, has lost a total of 259 lives to the disease. There have been days when America has lost 10 times that number. The US death toll is now approaching 90,000.

What has gone wrong? I interviewed dozens of people, including outsiders who Trump consults regularly, former senior advisers, World Health Organization officials, leading scientists and diplomats, and figures inside the White House. Some spoke off the record.

Again and again, the story that emerged is of a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie, led by his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner – the property developer who Trump has empowered to sideline the best-funded disaster response bureaucracy in the world.

People often observed during Trump’s first three years that he had yet to be tested in a true crisis. Covid-19 is way bigger than that. “Trump’s handling of the pandemic at home and abroad has exposed more painfully than anything since he took office the meaning of America First,” says William Burns, who was the most senior US diplomat, and is now head of the Carnegie Endowment.

“America is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to America’s influence and reputation will be very hard to undo.”

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Thorough and damning.
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Exclusive: NextVR acquired by Apple (Updated) • 9to5Mac

Zac Hall:

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It’s no secret that Apple has ambitious plans for augmented reality and a future AR-focused headset. Apple is practically building the platform for its future headset out in the open with ARKit. What’s new is that Apple is believed to be in the process of acquiring a California-based virtual reality company called NextVR, 9to5Mac has learned.

[Update 5/14/2020: NextVR.com now only displays this message: “NextVR is Heading in a New Direction. Thank you to our partners and fans around the world for the role you played in building this awesome platform for sports, music and entertainment experiences in Virtual Reality.”]

NextVR, which is located in Orange County, California, has a decade of experience marrying virtual reality with sports and entertainment. The company currently provides VR experiences for viewing live events with headsets from PlayStation, Oculus, HTC, Microsoft, Lenovo headsets.

The icing on the cake may not be expertise in virtual reality, however, as NextVR also has holds patented technology that upscales video streams. NextVR uses this technology to support high quality video streams of music and sporting events to VR headsets. NextVR holds over 40 technology patents in total.

The company failed to secure a Series C round of funding in early 2019, however, which resulted in a 40% staff reduction at the time. NextVR’s focus on virtual reality was seen as a risk with the rise of augmented reality technology.

NextVR has partnerships in place with the NBA, Fox Sports, Wimbledon, and other live music and sporting event partners.

«

I can’t figure out what Apple thinks is going to come of this. Is it just a nice-to-have just-in-case? VR just isn’t a market. (Come at me in a year or two if this proves wrong, but I nailed it with Magic Leap, so one out of one, baby.)
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How apocalyptic is now? • UnHerd

John Gray is a political philosopher, who looks back in the rest of this essay at recent “apocalypses” (the Russian revolution, the Holocaust):

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The relevant comparison here is not with previous pandemics such as the Spanish Flu, but instead the more recent impact of terrorism. The numbers killed in terrorist incidents may be small. But the threat is endemic, and the texture of everyday life has altered profoundly. Video cameras and security procedures in public places have become part of the way we live.

Covid-19 may not be an exceptionally lethal pathogen, but it is fearful enough. Soon temperature checks will be ubiquitous and surveillance via mobile phones omnipresent. Social distancing, in one form or another, will be entrenched everywhere beyond the home. The impact on the economy will be immeasurable. Enterprises that adapt quickly will thrive, but sectors that relied on pre-Covid lifestyles — pubs, restaurants, sporting events, discos and airline travel, for example — will shrink or disappear. The old life of carefree human intermingling will fast slip from memory.

Some occupations may gain in power and status. Health and care workers need more than applause for their efforts. Better pay and conditions will be demanded, and may well be achieved. Workers in other low-paid jobs and the gig economy are likely to fare more badly than before.

The impact on the “knowledge classes” will be far-reaching. Higher education operates on a model of student living that social distancing has rendered defunct. Museums, journalism, publishing and the arts all face similar shocks. Automation and artificial intelligence will wipe out swathes of middle class employment. Accelerating a trend that has been underway for decades, the remains of bourgeois life will be swept away.

«

I think what a lot of these analyses miss is the attitude of the people who’ve had it. Some parts of Spain already have an estimated 11-14% seropositives, compared to less than 2% in others. There will be an urban-rural divide (city dwellers will be more likely to have had it) and a positive-negative divide. And into all that, you have economic turmoil. Quite a time coming.

And everyone worried it was AI coming for their jobs.
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Why have consumer drones vanished from DJI’s Hong Kong stores? • Abacus

Karen Chiu:

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DJI never had a problem filling its Hong Kong stores before. At least, not until last year.

Hong Kong’s drone shortage has persisted since last fall, when the city was rocked by waves of anti-government protests that turned violent at times. Under Hong Kong law, any recreational user can fly a drone no heavier than 7kg (15.4 pounds) without applying for a permit. Yet fans noticed that the newly released Mavic Mini, weighing just half a pound, wasn’t available in the city.

As stocks of older models dwindled, some people reported that they also had trouble buying drone parts from shopping sites in mainland China. Shipping agents warned customers that drones were classified as “sensitive items” that shouldn’t be forwarded from the mainland to Hong Kong.

DJI didn’t respond to our question on whether last year’s protests affected shipping of its drones across the border. Back in November, the company told us the availability of the Mavic Mini would be announced at a later date. But six months later, there’s still no sign of the drone — or the newer Mavic Air 2.

The continuous absence disappoints some local drone enthusiasts.

“I do think it’s a shame that DJI hasn’t been selling new drones,” said Blair Sugarman, who runs the drone photography site Beyond Visuals along with a few enthusiasts. “Not that anyone’s travelling at the moment, but back when people were travelling and they wanted to take drones with them abroad, you couldn’t get hold of one. You’d either have to wait till you get abroad or order it from somewhere else.”

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Very strange – surely related to the protests, but hard to figure out why.
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How Civil didn’t save journalism • Study Hall at Patreon

Allegra Hobbs:

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[In summer 2017] fruit juice and vape companies added “blockchain” to their names to capitalize on the trend’s cultural cachet. It was a different time. 

Civil was introduced in 2017 as an innovative force that would similarly use crypto to save journalism. The  company was founded by Matthew Iles, a former marketing executive at a start-up incubator, and funded by blockchain venture studio ConsenSys. Given the climate around crypto technology and the media industry at the time, it made sense. With its blockchain-enabled CMS and custom currency — the CVL token, built on the Ethereum blockchain — Civil promised to rescue the ailing industry from the clutches of Facebook and Google by facilitating crowd-supported newsrooms, placing power in the hands of actual journalists. “With open governance and crypto-economics, we can create a sustainable place for journalism  — even the kind of local, policy, and investigative journalism that has been most eroded,” reads a white paper document that Civil published in October of 2017. 

This was before the digital-subscription boom that has driven the New York Times and Washington Post to new heights, when confidence in digital media was at an ebb. The venture capital-backed models of Vice, BuzzFeed, and Vox Media looked shaky with their need to hit investors’ revenue targets. Meanwhile, publications like DNAinfo and Gawker were being destroyed by the whims of billionaires, their investigations and commentary erased. Maybe the strengths of cryptocurrency — digital permanence, trackability, and payments within closed systems — were exactly what the media industry needed. 

«

Maybe you can guess that they weren’t. It’s all a stupid intermediary: why not just admit that you’re crowdsourcing some money, and do that?
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QAnon is more important than you think • The Atlantic

Adrienne LaFrance:

»

Conspiracy theories are a constant in American history, and it is tempting to dismiss them as inconsequential. But as the 21st century has progressed, such a dismissal has begun to require willful blindness. I was a city-hall reporter for a local investigative-news site called Honolulu Civil Beat in 2011 when Donald Trump was laying the groundwork for a presidential run by publicly questioning whether Barack Obama had been born in Hawaii, as all facts and documents showed. Trump maintained that Obama had really been born in Africa, and therefore wasn’t a natural-born American—making him ineligible for the highest office. I remember the debate in our Honolulu newsroom: Should we even cover this “birther” madness? As it turned out, the allegations, based entirely on lies, captivated enough people to give Trump a launching pad.

Nine years later, as reports of a fearsome new virus suddenly emerged, and with Trump now president, a series of ideas began burbling in the QAnon community: that the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been created by the “deep state,” the star chamber of government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the world; that the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was part of a plot to hurt Trump’s reelection chances; and that media elites were cheering the death toll. Some of these ideas would make their way onto Fox News and into the president’s public utterances. As of late last year, according to The New York Times, Trump had retweeted accounts often focused on conspiracy theories, including those of QAnon, on at least 145 occasions.

…QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them. But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end.

«

Still, it would be worse if they had access to gu– oh.
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Huawei denies involvement in buggy Linux kernel patch proposal • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

Huawei denied on Monday having any official involvement in an insecure patch submitted to the Linux kernel project over the weekend; patch that introduced a “trivially exploitable” vulnerability.

The buggy patch was submitted to the official Linux kernel project via its mailing list on Sunday. Named HKSP (Huawei Kernel Self Protection), the patch allegedly introduced a series of security-hardening options to the Linux kernel.

Big tech companies that heavily use Linux in their data centers and online services, often submit patches to the Linux kernel. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others have been known to have contributed code.

On Sunday, the HKSP submission sparked interest in the Linux community as could signal Huawei’s wish to possibly contribute to the official kernel. Due to this, the patch came under immediate scrutiny, including from the developers of Grsecurity, a project that provides its own set of security-hardening patches for the Linux kernel.

In a blog post published on the same day, the Grsecurity team said that it discovered that the HKSP patch was introducing a “trivially exploitable” vulnerability in the kernel code — if the patch was to be approved.

Rumors and conspiracy theories almost immediately started online, accusing Huawei of trying to sneakily introduce vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel.

«

So either Huawei has bad coders, or evil coders. I’ll go with bad coders, but that doesn’t inspire confident either, does it?
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Huawei’s Google app loophole: just keep re-releasing old devices • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Huawei is doing its best to delay the effects of the export ban, though, and lately, it seems to have come up with a new loophole to keep shipping the Google apps: re-release old smartphones. The way the export ban has worked in practice is that Huawei devices that launched before the export ban (and some that launched even slightly after) can still be sold with Google apps. Devices that launched well after the ban, like the Mate 30 Pro, are stuck without the Google apps. So Huawei’s solution, and its interpretation of the law, is that re-releases of old devices can still ship with Google apps.

So meet the “New Editions” of old Huawei phones. This week, the company announced that the Huawei P30 Pro would be returning as the “Huawei P30 Pro New Edition,” and earlier this year it re-launched the P30 Lite as the “P30 Lite New Edition.” Both of these phones are from March 2019, so they’re well over a year old now, but they both have Google app licenses, so welcome back!

What’s new in a “new edition?” Well, first you get more RAM and storage. The P30 Pro New Edition has a new baseline of 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, which is up from the 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage on what I guess we’re now going to call the “Old Edition.” There’s also new software: Android 10 with Huawei’s EMUI skin (the old version launched with Android 9). And there’s a new color: silver. The Old Edition of the P30 Pro was a flagship smartphone with flagship smartphone pricing: €999 or $1,125. The New Edition is now a year-old smartphone, and the one confirmed price we have is for the UK, which is £699, or $852.

«

Makes perfect sense to me – the ones without Google’s suite aren’t selling (and this is the evidence). It can keep releasing old phones with updated internals, though I suspect the cameras won’t be, for quite a while, gently moving downmarket as the rest of the market also goes for economy.
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Facebook and the folly of self-regulation • WIRED

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the author of Antisocial Media:

»

In an op-ed in The New York Times, the [Facebook review] board’s new leadership declared: “The oversight board will focus on the most challenging content issues for Facebook, including in areas such as hate speech, harassment, and protecting people’s safety and privacy. It will make final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram (which Facebook owns).”

Only in the narrowest and most trivial of ways does this board have any such power. The new Facebook review board will have no influence over anything that really matters in the world.

It will hear only individual appeals about specific content that the company has removed from the service—and only a fraction of those appeals. The board can’t say anything about the toxic content that Facebook allows and promotes on the site. It will have no authority over advertising or the massive surveillance that makes Facebook ads so valuable. It won’t curb disinformation campaigns or dangerous conspiracies. It has no influence on the sorts of harassment that regularly occur on Facebook or (Facebook-owned) WhatsApp. It won’t dictate policy for Facebook Groups, where much of the most dangerous content thrives. And most importantly, the board will have no say over how the algorithms work and thus what gets amplified or muffled by the real power of Facebook…

…on Facebook, as in global and ethnic conflict, the environment is tumultuous and changing all the time. Calls for mass violence spring up, seemingly out of nowhere. They take new forms as cultures and conditions shift. Facebook moves fast and breaks things like democracy. This review board is designed to move slowly and preserve things like Facebook.

This review board will provide a creaking, idealistic, simplistic solution to a trivial problem. The stuff that Facebook deletes creates an inconvenience to some people. Facebook makes a lot of mistakes, and dealing with the Facebook bureaucracy is next to impossible. But Facebook is not the whole Internet, let alone the whole information ecosystem. And Facebook is not the only way people communicate and learn things (yet).

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Want one? Don’t trust the adverts on Facebook that shouldn’t be there anyway. CC-licensed photo by ~jar{} on Flickr.

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

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

Facebook banned mask ads, but it was still profiting from them • Buzzfeed News

Craig Silverman:

»

George Michailow was browsing Facebook on April 1 when he saw an ad for a forbidden product — a face mask.

Three weeks earlier, Facebook had banned ads for masks, over price gouging and first responder shortages. But when Michailow saw the video ad for the “MediCare Reusable Surgical Mask,” it seemed legit — and he was desperate.

“I’d been asked to get some masks for senior members of my church and I saw an opportunity to get them,” Michailow, the volunteer treasurer of his Virginia Beach church, told BuzzFeed News.

He bought 10 for $227.90.

An hour later, he was shown another Facebook video ad for masks. “They looked like better-quality masks,” he said, so Michailow bought three “AeroShield N95 Masks” for $118.95.

None of the masks, from either order, ever arrived. And contrary to what he thought, he didn’t buy from two separate US companies. Instead, PayPal receipts show the purchases came from the same entity: ZestAds, a company registered in Hong Kong with headquarters in Malaysia.

Founded in 2015, ZestAds sources cheap electronics, clothing, and household products from China to sell around the globe using slick and at times misleading Facebook ads. On its website, ZestAds claims to be one of the top e-commerce companies in Asia.

Since March, the company has made a mockery of Facebook’s ban by running ads that dangerously claimed its masks would “fully protect” from the virus, cited a fake expert, and falsely listed US companies as behind the ads.

Facebook’s inability to enforce its mask ad ban is a symptom of the company’s larger failure to police the scammers and shady e-commerce operators who use its powerful ad targeting tools to rip off people at scale.

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Facebook’s AI for hate speech improves; how much is unclear • WIRED

Tom Simonite:

»

In a call with reporters, Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer touted advances in the company’s machine learning technology that parses language. “Our language models have gotten bigger and more accurate and nuanced,” he said. “They’re able to catch things that are less obvious.”

Schroepfer wouldn’t specify how accurate those systems now are, saying only that Facebook tests systems extensively before they are deployed, in part so that they do not incorrectly penalize innocent content.

He cited figures in the new report showing that although users had appealed decisions to take down content for hate speech more often in the most recent quarter—1.3 million times—fewer posts were subsequently restored. Facebook also said Tuesday it had altered its appeals process in late March, reducing the number of appeals logged, because Covid-19 restrictions shut some moderation offices.

Facebook’s figures do not indicate how much hate speech slips through its algorithmic net. The company’s quarterly reports estimate the incidence of some types of content banned under Facebook’s rules, but not hate speech. Tuesday’s release shows violent posts declining since last summer. The hate speech section says Facebook is “still developing a global metric.”

The missing numbers shroud the true size of the social networks’s hate speech problem. Caitlin Carlson, an associate professor at Seattle University, says the 9.6 million posts removed for hate speech look suspiciously small compared with Facebook’s huge network of users, and users’ observations of troubling content. “It’s not hard to find,” Carlson says.

Carlson published results in January from an experiment in which she and a colleague collected more than 300 Facebook posts that appeared to violate the platform’s hate speech rules and reported them via the service’s tools. Only about half of the posts were ultimately removed; the company’s moderators appeared more rigorous in enforcing cases of racial and ethnic slurs than misogyny.

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Facebook’s numbers around hate speech (and fake users) are their equivalent of Jeff Bezos’s graphs – never including enough detail to give you a full picture, but always up and to the right.
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This Word Does Not Exist

Thomas Dimson:

»

brunery, n.

1. (chiefly in reference to men) frequenting or taking part in large parties

“there can’t be any more brunery in the world”

2. a word that does not exist; it was invented, defined and used by a machine learning algorithm.

«

The work of Thomas Dimson: you can generate your own word. They’re impressive. I do wonder whether you could use them in a book as a mountweazel (that one’s real, but you’ll have to look it up if you don’t know it).
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The Republic of Facebook • Just Security

David Kaye is the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, here considering the new Facebook oversight board:

»

What happens when a government complains about a decision of the board? Who wins that fight?

Further, difficult content problems often take place at local levels, in languages and code that may be impenetrable to those outside. Will the board ever have the bandwidth to address the massive impact Facebook will continue to have in communities worldwide? Will the board, in other words, be more like a Band-Aid on a massive wound than an appellate body to solve the crises of online speech?

And as laudable as Facebook’s effort is, it only solves Facebook’s problems of legitimacy. That is, it could help legitimize Facebook decisions but cannot legitimize content-moderation choices by all platforms. Neither can it legitimize practices that many find objectionable, such as the increased use of automation to make decisions about content. If the board’s decisions are rooted in the kinds of human rights standards that individuals around the world cherish, if they genuinely absorb the input of communities worldwide, Facebook’s legitimacy and influence may rise.

But that could come at an expense that other platforms, or platforms yet to be created, cannot afford. These other platforms, which also have massive impact on public speech, remain outside. Over time, an industry-wide process would build trust in content moderation and push them all toward transparency and respect for the public impact they have. It may even be that the Facebook Oversight Board could expand to take on that kind of industry-wide role. If it provides the possibility for small innovators to join at a lower cost, all the better. If it merely locks in the power of those companies that can afford it, it would be a net loss for innovation.

And even then, will the board – Facebook-only or beyond – be enough for governments and for the public worldwide?

«

He also has a longer discussion with Mathew Ingram at CJR.
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Eric Schmidt, who led Google’s transformation into a tech giant, has left the company • CNET

Richard Nieva:

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Schmidt’s exit [quietly, in February] marks another stage in Google’s evolution, and comes as Schmidt’s participation in government projects has raised questions about conflicts of interest. Late last year, Page and Brin, who started Google as Stanford University grad students in 1998, handed leadership of Alphabet and its sprawling operations to Sundar Pichai, who had been running the core search business since 2015. David Drummond, the company’s 14-year legal chief, retired in January after scrutiny over past relationships.

As the original management departs, employees and industry observers have questioned whether the world’s largest search engine, with more than 120,000 employees around the globe, can maintain its famously freewheeling culture. In the past three years, tensions between management and employees have mounted over the handling of sexual misconduct allegations directed at top executives, a censored search engine project in China and initiatives around artificial intelligence for the US Department of Defense. 

Schmidt’s role at Google had gradually diminished after he stepped down as CEO in 2011. Still, his ties to the company have spurred blowback as Schmidt increases his work on US military initiatives. He chairs the Defense Innovation Board, an advisory group aimed at bringing new technology to the Pentagon, including advancements in machine learning. He’s also chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which advises Congress on AI for defense. Critics, though, worry Schmidt could unfairly push Google’s financial interests when it comes to his work with the military. 

«

In other Google news: Google and James Damore, who complained bitterly about its “ideological echo chamber”, have (also quietly) settled their legal fight which had rumbled on since summer 2017. Neither is speaking about it, but if I worked in real estate I’d be wondering if Mr Damore wanted to look around some desirable properties.
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In a first, renewable energy is poised to eclipse coal in U.S. • The New York Times

Brad Plumer:

»

the coronavirus outbreak is pushing coal producers into their deepest crisis yet.

As factories, retailers, restaurants and office buildings have shut down nationwide to slow the spread of the coronavirus, demand for electricity has fallen sharply. And, because coal plants often cost more to operate than gas plants or renewables, many utilities are cutting back on coal power first in response.

“The outbreak has put all the pressures facing the coal industry on steroids,” said Jim Thompson, a coal analyst at IHS Markit.

In just the first four and a half months of this year, America’s fleet of wind turbines, solar panels and hydroelectric dams have produced more electricity than coal on 90 separate days — shattering last year’s record of 38 days for the entire year. On May 1 in Texas, wind power alone supplied nearly three times as much electricity as coal did.

The latest report from the Energy Information Administration estimates that America’s total coal consumption will fall by nearly one-quarter this year, and coal plants are expected to provide just 19% of the nation’s electricity, dropping for the first time below both nuclear power and renewable power, a category that includes wind, solar, hydroelectric dams, geothermal and biomass.

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The less of their capacity they use, the more likely they are to shut. And once you close a coal plant, it’s effectively shut forever.
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Wall Street mines Apple and Google mobility data to spot revival • Bloomberg Quint

Ksenia Galouchko:

»

To navigate these unprecedented times, market participants are getting creative with how they monitor economic activity.

As some countries relax their lockdowns, investors and strategists are poring over mobility data from Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to track the pace of economic recovery and estimate consumer spending across different regions. Such information can provide early clues on which countries will exit the worst recession in decades faster than others, and which will fall behind.

“Covid-19 is like no other shock and so most investors are discounting the traditional indicators,” John Roe, head of multi-asset funds at Legal & General Investment Management, said by email, referring to data such as unemployment and retail sales that are reported with a lengthy lag. “Instead it’s all about the shape of the recovery and so we’re tracking a number of innovative data sources that we believe will be more real time.”

LGIM’s asset allocation team takes Apple users’ requests for travel directions and adjusts them for weekly seasonality before projecting the data onto estimates for gross domestic product. So far, their analysis shows that the U.S. economy is holding up better than other regions and is gradually reopening, while there are signs of improvement in southern Europe as countries like Italy relax their movement restrictions.

«

But of course when Apple and Google published this data it was going to be used to try to make money. Of course. I almost kicked myself when I saw this story because, well, of course that’s what they’d do.
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BuzzFeed pulls plug on UK and Australian news operations • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

»

The company, which had been struggling before the coronavirus pandemic further hammered its lifeblood of advertising revenue, has furloughed its 10 UK news staff and four in Australia as part of the strategic cutback. BuzzFeed launched a local news operation in the UK just over six years ago.

According to sources, those furloughed are “highly unlikely” to return to BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed UK will keep staff covering news with a “global audience”, such as its investigations operation and celebrity news coverage, for now at least.

“For economic and strategic reasons, we are going to focus on news that hits big in the United States during this difficult period,” the company said.

“Therefore, we will notify staff in the UK and Australia that we are not planning to cover local news in those countries. We will be consulting with employees on our plans regarding furloughs and stand-downs in these regions.”

The company said that the cuts would also hit its flagship US operation as it looks to hit savings goals while continuing to produce “kinetic, powerful journalism”. “We [want to] reach the savings we need and produce the high-tempo, explosive journalism our readers rely on,” the company said.

BuzzFeed maintained that it was still “investing heavily” in its news operation, with a projection of investing $10m more this year than the division makes, and $6m in 2021.

Launched by Jonah Peretti in 2006, the outlet is among a generation of start-ups, also including Vice and Vox, that took the media world by storm only to run into financial difficulty as the advertising climate collapsed.

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10 writers in the UK: hardly gigantically overstaffed. But with venture funding, how do you make the returns they demand?
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Condé Nast to lay off 100 U.S. staffers • Axios

Sara Fischer:

»

Condé Nast, the media publisher known for its high-end magazine products like Wired, Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Glamour, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair and more, said Wednesday that it plans to lay off 100 U.S. employees and furlough about 100 more.

It’s the latest media company forced to take drastic measures to survive the economic fallout of the coronavirus. Magazine publishers in particular have been hit hard, as their businesses were vulnerable to sweeping changes for years prior to the pandemic.

In a note to staff, CEO Roger Lynch, a former Pandora radio and and Sling TV executive, said, “These decisions are never easy, and not something I ever take lightly. I want to be transparent about the principles and approach we used.”

Lynch said the company tried to identify specific areas where it could “bring down our costs without limiting our growth priorities.”

He said the company is providing severance packages “to help provide a bridge to people’s next roles” as well as job placement resources. The company will cover the full cost of healthcare premiums for furloughed employees.

Lynch also noted that with the job cuts, there will also be a handful of people with reduced work schedules.

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My Twitter feed has been filled with laid-off staffers from Wired and Buzzfeed. Magazines and internet companies: the coronavirus meteor doesn’t discriminate.
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Podcaster Luminary seeks fresh cash to buoy struggling business • Bloomberg

Lucas Shaw and Priya Anand:

»

Luminary, backed by investors such as Sinai Ventures, NEA and former HBO executive Richard Plepler, previously raised at least $130m to build what it said would be the Netflix of podcasts – a subscription service packed with top-notch, exclusive shows from journalists, TV hosts and celebrities. Its slate of original shows includes Guy Raz’s “Wisdom From the Top” and “The Trevor Noah Podcast.”

But the app has struggled to find an audience since its debut in April 2019. Only about 80,000 people who tried the app have remained paying subscribers, said the people.

Consumers have proven reluctant to pay for a service when so many of the top podcasts are available for free via Apple Inc. and Spotify Technology SA. What’s more, Spotify – the world’s top paid audio service – has bid aggressively for exclusive rights to shows, boosting the costs of many of the podcasts Luminary might have wanted.

Offering the most money in the market was a key part of Luminary’s initial sales pitch to podcast producers.

Luminary was burning through more than $4m a month before the coronavirus outbreak, while generating less than $500,000 in monthly revenue. To manage costs, the company has cut spending on marketing, new shows and staff.

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Amazed there are 80,000 people who would pony up $30/£30 per year. That means it’s only getting $2.4m in annual revenue (minus freebies and trials). That’s barely going to pay for the coffees.

Monetising podcasts is the new Big Idea, though. Fascinating contrast with the experiment by Ben Thompson and John Gruber, who are trying a 15-minutes thrice-weekly one called Dithering, priced at $5/mo or $50/year. Pricier than Luminary and less choice, but their overheads are WAY lower: they’ll never have to go cap-in-hand to venture capitalists.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Nope nope nope: crowded restaurants pose a huge potential risk for coronavirus spread CC-licensed photo by Kyle Mahan on Flickr.

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

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

Facebook will pay $52m in settlement with moderators who developed PTSD on the job • The Verge

Casey Newton:

»

In a landmark acknowledgment of the toll that content moderation takes on its workforce, Facebook has agreed to pay $52 million to current and former moderators to compensate them for mental health issues developed on the job. In a preliminary settlement filed on Friday in San Mateo Superior Court, the social network agreed to pay damages to American moderators and provide more counseling to them while they work.

Each moderator will receive a minimum of $1,000 and will be eligible for additional compensation if they are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or related conditions. The settlement covers 11,250 moderators, and lawyers in the case believe that as many as half of them may be eligible for extra pay related to mental health issues associated with their time working for Facebook, including depression and addiction.

“We are so pleased that Facebook worked with us to create an unprecedented program to help people performing work that was unimaginable even a few years ago,” said Steve Williams, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, in a statement. “The harm that can be suffered from this work is real and severe.”

In September 2018, former Facebook moderator Selena Scola sued Facebook, alleging that she developed PTSD after being placed in a role that required her to regularly view photos and images of rape, murder, and suicide.

«

Pocket change for Facebook, but it’s the principle again: it has had to acknowledge the nature of some of the content posted on its site.

And a triumph for journalism: Newton was the journalist who broke this story after finding moderators who would break NDAs to talk about their experiences.
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Twitter will allow some employees to work at home forever • Buzzfeed News

Alex Kantrowitz:

»

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey emailed employees on Tuesday telling them that they’d be allowed to work from home permanently, even after the coronavirus pandemic lockdown passes. Some jobs that require physical presence, such as maintaining servers, will still require employees to come in.

“We’ve been very thoughtful in how we’ve approached this from the time we were one of the first companies to move to a work-from-home model,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “We’ll continue to be, and we’ll continue to put the safety of our people and communities first.”

Twitter encouraged its employees to start working from home in early March as the coronavirus began to spread across the US. Several other tech companies did the same, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

That month, Twitter human resources head Jennifer Christie told BuzzFeed News the company would “never probably be the same” in the structure of its work. “People who were reticent to work remotely will find that they really thrive that way,” Christie said. “Managers who didn’t think they could manage teams that were remote will have a different perspective. I do think we won’t go back.”

Dorsey had announced the company’s intent to work in a “distributed” way before the virus, but the pandemic forced the company to move the timeline up.

«

I don’t think this will hold; people like being with people. More likely is that the trend will be towards satellite offices, perhaps with managers making scheduled visits. Could bring office and house prices down near some cities, particularly San Francisco.
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How the ‘Plandemic’ video hoax went viral • The Verge

Casey Newton:

»

The ground was seeded by a book that Mikovits, the star of “Plandemic,” published last month. Plague of Corruption “frames Dr. Mikovits as a truth-teller fighting deception in science,” Alba writes, and it won approving coverage from far-right outlets including the Epoch Times, Gateway Pundit, and Next News Network.

But it was the “Plandemic” clip that turned Mikovits into a star (she’s gained more than 130,000 Twitter followers in a month.) And the two have benefited each other: searches for Mikovits drove views of “Plandemic,” and viewings of “Plandemic” drove searches for Mikovits.

Erin Gallagher, a social media researcher who specializes in data visualizations, offers some clues. Gallagher used CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool for analyzing public posts, to investigate when “Plandemic” began to surge on the network. She found that posts referencing it appeared most often in Facebook groups devoted to QAnon, anti-vaccine misinformation, and conspiracy theories in general.

“The video spread from YouTube to Facebook thanks to highly active QAnon and conspiracy-related Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members which caused a massive cascade,” Gallagher writes. “Both platforms were instrumental in spreading viral medical misinformation.”

YouTube and Facebook both ultimately removed the video, but their responses differed in notable ways.

«

Facebook “demotes” content, but that doesn’t kill it, and determined posters will keep stuff going. Which means things like this ping-pong between them, gaining virality. The sort that makes people stupid.
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Face masks against Covid-19: an evidence review[v1] • Preprints

A slew of people, including Zeynep Tufekci (who has advocated this for a long time):

»

A primary route of transmission of COVID-19 is likely via small respiratory droplets, and is known to be transmissible from presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. Reducing disease spread requires two things: first, limit contacts of infected individuals via physical distancing and contact tracing with appropriate quarantine, and second, reduce the transmission probability per contact by wearing masks in public, among other measures.

The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces the transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected droplets in both laboratory and clinical contexts. Public mask wearing is most effective at stopping spread of the virus when compliance is high. The decreased transmissibility could substantially reduce the death toll and economic impact while the cost of the intervention is low.

«

Being a preprint, this has comments. And the first comment, oh my, says mask-wearing “impairs our quality of life. We like to feel fresh air on our faces.”

This is then taken apart by many other commenters who point out that you can’t feel the fresh air if you’re dead. The comments aren’t helpful. (Thanks Walt for the link.)
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The coronavirus risks: know them, avoid them • Erin Bromage

Bromage teaches and researches infectious diseases at UMass Dartmouth:

»

When you think of outbreak clusters, what are the big ones that come to mind? Most people would say cruise ships. But you would be wrong. Ship outbreaks, while concerning, don’t land in the top 50 outbreaks to date.

Ignoring the terrible outbreaks in nursing homes, we find that the biggest outbreaks are in prisons, religious ceremonies, and workplaces, such as meat packing facilities and call centers. Any environment that is enclosed, with poor air circulation and high density of people, spells trouble.

Some of the biggest super-spreading events are:
• Meat packing: In meat processing plants, densely packed workers must communicate to one another amidst the deafening drum of industrial machinery and a cold-room virus-preserving environment. There are now outbreaks in 115 facilities across 23 states, 5000+ workers infected, with 20 dead.
• Weddings, funerals, birthdays: 10% of early spreading events
• Business networking: Face-to-face business networking like the Biogen Conference in Boston in March.

As we move back to work, or go to a restaurant, let’s look at what can happen in those environments.

Restaurants: Some really great shoe-leather epidemiology demonstrated clearly the effect of a single asymptomatic carrier in a restaurant environment (see below). The infected person (A1) sat at a table and had dinner with 9 friends. Dinner took about 1 to 1.5 hours. During this meal, the asymptomatic carrier released low-levels of virus into the air from their breathing. Airflow (from the restaurant’s various airflow vents) was from right to left. Approximately 50% of the people at the infected person’s table became sick over the next 7 days. 75% of the people on the adjacent downwind table became infected. And even 2 of the 7 people on the upwind table were infected (believed to happen by turbulent airflow).

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Oh well, that’s your evening out spoiled.
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Former Apple engineer: here’s why I trust Apple’s Covid-19 notification proposal • TidBITS

David Shayer worked at Apple for 14 years, and experienced how insistent it was about not including identifying information in data sent back. The notification stuff, fine. But this caught my eye:

»

I also wrote iPhone apps for a mid-size technology company that shall remain nameless. You’ve likely heard of it, though, and it has several thousand employees and several billion dollars in revenue. Call it TechCo, in part because its approach to user privacy is unfortunately all too common in the industry. It cared much less about user privacy than Apple.

The app I worked on recorded every user interaction and reported that data back to a central server. Every time you performed some action, the app captured what screen you were on and what button you tapped. There was no attempt to minimize the data being captured, nor to anonymize it. Every record sent back included the user’s IP address, username, real name, language and region, timestamp, iPhone model, and lots more.

Keep in mind that this behavior was in no way malicious. The company’s goal wasn’t to surveil their users. Instead, the marketing department just wanted to know what features were most popular and how they were used. Most important, the marketers wanted to know where people fell out of the “funnel.”

«

And then pretty much anyone senior in the company could see everything that any user did, just by logging on. Marketing loved it. The engineers knew it was both a privacy and a security risk. Of course they were ignored.

Oh, the only company on Shayer’s LinkedIn profile that’s large and isn’t Apple is GoDaddy, where he worked from 2016 to 2019. You may think that that must be his mid-sized company. I couldn’t possibly comment.
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The secrets behind the runaway success of Apple’s AirPods • WIRED UK

Jeremy White:

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Compared with, say, the Apple Watch, which took years to gain momentum, AirPods are a much easier, and cheaper, product to market. “Everyone’s using a smartphone, and so therefore headphones,” says Neil Cybart, founder of Apple analyst firm Above Avalon, “whereas the younger demographic is moving away from wristwatches.”

According to [Apple vp of product marketing, Greg] Joswiak, Apple “had a vision for our wireless future for many years” before the first AirPods were unveiled. “We had this incredible wireless product, the iPhone,” he says. “And yet, what began to feel odd is when you saw somebody using wired headphones. Right then you thought, why would you attach the wire?”

One of the more interesting aspects of the AirPods’ development is one of the oldest. In 2009, Apple, eight years after subjecting consumers to its first (rightly maligned) earbuds, finally revealed a much-needed overhaul of its wired headphones, EarPods. Looking to combat the poor fit and sound bleed, the company worked with Stanford University in the US to capture data on ear dimensions. After the EarPods launch, Apple continued to map ears, building a larger data set to create a new, more accurate model that eventually led to the creation of the AirPod Pros, first in simulation then in physical prototype.

“We had done work with Stanford to 3D-scan hundreds of different ears and ear styles and shapes in order to make a design that would work as a one-size solution across a broad set of the population,” Joswiak says. “With AirPods Pro, we took that research further – studied more ears, more ear types. And that enabled us to develop a design that, along with the three different tip sizes, works across an overwhelming percentage of the worldwide population.”

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OK, though I’m struggling to understand why they needed to do all that scanning when cheap headphones have offered different tip sizes for ages. As a reminder, if you were quick you might have got a pair of the original AirPods in December 2016; they were announced in September 2016.
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LG is reportedly developing a dual-screen handset with a swivelling display • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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LG has a new dual-screen phone on the way, with a main display that swivels sideways to reveal a secondary screen underneath, the Korean Herald reports. The phone, which ETNews reports is codenamed “Wing,” will reportedly have a main 6.8-inch display alongside a smaller 4-inch screen with a 1:1 aspect ratio. It’s expected to cost a bit more than the new Velvet phone when it arrives later this year.

This wouldn’t be the first swivel phone that LG has released. Over a decade ago it released several phones using this form-factor, including the LB1500 and LU1400. In addition to their rotating displays, the other major selling point of these “DMB phones” was that they had the hardware to receive digital TV broadcasts. Unsurprisingly the hardware was basic by modern standards. Their main, non-touchscreen displays were tiny, and when they swiveled they tended to reveal a T9 keypad rather than a second screen.

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Seems that LG has decided that it’s not losing quite enough money, even though in the first quarter its revenues were down 34% to US$843m, on which it lost $201m (also worse than the year before). There’s no way this phone will make money: the engineering will be pricey, and the price will limit sales. LG’s phone division has been circling the drain for years now, not making a penny of profit. Wonder if Covid-19 will finally take it off life support.
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Behind the wall • Rest of World

Mara Hvistendahl:

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As the [Chinese] government introduced tighter censorship regulations, and the propaganda machine went into overdrive, that playfulness became a key form of subversion. This spring, some in the Chinese Communist Party attempted to redirect public anger by pushing the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 had been brought to China by the U.S. military. Authorities detained citizen journalists and activists, including three of the people who had been memorializing posts on GitHub.

But a group of activists doubled down on efforts to spread the truth, circulating articles about how the virus originated in Wuhan. To evade censorship this time, they wrote in Morse code and Braille, swapped out the simplified characters used in China with obscure classical script, and rendered text backwards, in an attempt to defeat censorship engines searching for specific character combinations.

One popular target was a deleted profile in the magazine Renwu of Ai Fen, the doctor in Wuhan who had inadvertently tipped off Li Wenliang about the SARS-like cases. “If I had known what was about to happen, I would not have cared about being reprimanded,” Ai had told her interviewer. “I would have fucking talked about it to whoever, wherever I could.” People circulated so many different iterations of the article that the journalist Isabelle Niu called its preservation a sort of “digital performance art project.” In the most imaginative version, someone told the story almost entirely using emojis. “SARS corona ☄️ illness ☠️,” read one sentence.

«

Rest Of World is a new publication which aims to look at technology use in the rest of the world. The first set of features are a bit portmanteau – trying to cover the most ground possible rather than a narrow focus. That makes sense in trying to build up a catalog onto which shorter, fresher stories can be layered.

Definitely worth keeping tabs on. And, journalists, they’re hiring (or at least commissioning).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When the lockdowns end will the office turn out to be dead, or just in limbo? CC-licensed photo by Roberta on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. “Pressure’s building, overspill”. Name the song (without search, if you can.) I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar • The Conversation

Sam Goree is a PhD student at Indiana University:

»

We found that across all three metrics – color, layout and AI-generated attributes – the average differences between websites peaked between 2008 and 2010 and then decreased between 2010 and 2016. Layout differences decreased the most, declining over 30% in that time frame.

The graph shows website similarity of companies in the Russell 1000. Lower values mean that the sites studied were more similar, on average. Sam Goree, Author provided

These findings confirm the suspicions of web design bloggers that websites are becoming more similar. After showing this trend, we wanted to study our data to see what kinds of specific changes were causing it.

You might think that these sites are simply copying each other’s code, but code similarity has actually significantly decreased over time. However, the use of software libraries has increased a lot.

…What should be made of this creeping conformity?

On the one hand, adhering to trends is totally normal in other realms of design, like fashion or architecture. And if designs are becoming more similar because they’re using the same libraries, that means they’re likely becoming more accessible to the visually impaired, since popular libraries are generally better at conforming to accessibility standards than individual developers. They’re also more user-friendly, since new visitors won’t have to spend as much time learning how to navigate the site’s pages.

On the other hand, the internet is a shared cultural artifact, and its distributed, decentralized nature is what makes it unique. As home pages and fully customizable platforms like NeoPets and MySpace fade into memory, web design may lose much of its power as a form of creative expression. The Mozilla Foundation has argued that consolidation is bad for the “health” of the internet, and the aesthetics of the web could be seen as one element of its well-being.

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Jakob Nielsen pointed out long ago that it made sense for smaller sites to copy the layout of the big ones, for example in the placement of a search icon, menu, and so on. It’s an accretive, gravitational pull.
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The office is dead • Marker

Courtney Rubin:

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It’s something no one could have foreseen three months ago. After a decade of economic expansion, commercial rents had risen to an average of nearly $30 per square foot, or 3.4% over last year, according to an April report from Newmark Knight Frank, a New York-based commercial real estate brokerage firm with offices in some 100 U.S. cities. Many companies had an aversion to remote work — IBM, for one, canceled working from home in 2017 — and few had the technology or infrastructure to make it work seamlessly. IBM was hardly alone: At the outset of the crisis, remote work evangelist and Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson Twitter-shamed dozens of companies — including Accenture, ATT, Cognizant, Epic Systems, Tesla, SpaceX, and Wells Fargo — for dragging their heels in allowing employees work from home.

Now, more than two months in, the mass work-from-home experiment has forced many businesses out of their comfort zone, pushing them to make the necessary small investments in virtual infrastructure. Even typically staid financial firms like Morgan Stanley and Barclays have adapted, finding solutions to security hurdles that previously prevented a distributed workforce. Many of these companies are realizing that it is not only less scary than they imagined, but their employees are actually more productive. One analysis of server activity found that workers are putting in longer workdays; imagine what that kind of productivity boost might look like when kids finally go back to school. Now, staring down the barrel of a recession, companies are shifting into cost-cutting survival mode — and the huge fixed cost of office space will, for many, be first on the chopping block.

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I think to call the office dead is an overstatement. But the bargaining power is going to be with those seeking to rent, not those with the buildings. We’ve discovered that we can do OK without. Bad time to be in commercial real estate.
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Apple quietly hiring some of the world’s best cloud talent • Protocol

Tom Krazit:

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Over the past few months, Apple has gone on a cloud computing hiring spree, snapping up several well-known software engineers working across a range of modern technologies, especially containers and Kubernetes. The quantity and quality of the new hires has caused a stir in the tight-knit cloud community, and could indicate that Apple is finally getting serious about building tech infrastructure on par with companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

The new employees include:
• Michael Crosby, one of a handful of ex-Docker engineers to join Apple this year. “Michael is who we can thank for containers as they exist today. He was the powerhouse engineer behind all of it,” said a former colleague who asked to remain anonymous.
• Arun Gupta, who joined Apple in February from AWS and is now leading Apple’s open-source efforts.
• Maksym Pavlenko, another former AWS employee who worked on its managed container services such as AWS Fargate.
• Francesc Campoy, an ex-Googler who will be working on Kubernetes for Apple.

It’s not entirely clear what Apple has in mind, but numerous job postings indicate that the company is in the midst of building new tools for its internal software development teams. Apple declined to comment on its plans for the new hires.

Apple runs a massive web operation, including the iCloud file storage service, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+ and its own ecommerce site. However, it has for years been considered a bit of a backwater in the tech infrastructure community, far behind companies like AWS, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Netflix.

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Wouldn’t they want them for their web and cloud operations? Just a thought. Why wouldn’t you want the best people so they can choose from the best outside services, if that’s what they’re going to do, or build the best in-house ones?
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Microsoft now blocks reply-all email storms to end our inbox nightmares • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Reply-all email storms are a problem that affect businesses large and small, and have been occurring for decades. Microsoft had its own infamous incident back in 1997, which employees fondly refer to as Bedlam DL3. Around 25,000 people were on a distribution list and kept replying to the thread, generating 15,000,000 email messages and 195 gigabytes of data. The incident overwhelmed Microsoft’s own Exchange mail servers, and the company rolled out a message recipient limit in Exchange to try and tackle future problems.

Microsoft still suffers from reply-all email storms, though. Last year a GitHub notification triggered an email storm for thousands of Microsoft employees. Back in March, thousands of Microsoft employees were also caught in a reply-all email thread that was quickly shut down within 30 minutes.

Microsoft’s new reply-all email block feature will stay in place for four hours after it’s automatically triggered, enough time to stop people from asking “why am I on this email thread?” hundreds of times. The new feature appears to be working for Microsoft’s own employees. “Humans still behave like humans no matter which company they work for,” says the Exchange team. “We’re already seeing the first version of the feature successfully reduce the impact of reply-all storms within Microsoft.”

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It’s “initially being rolled out to detect 10 reply-all emails to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes.” That 5,000 figure is something of a high bar. Configurable would be better. Wonder how soon Google will do the same for G Suite?
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People, Power and Technology: the 2020 Digital Attitudes Report • doteveryone

Catherine Miller:

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This year’s research finds people continue to feel the internet is better for them as individuals than for society as a whole. 81% say the internet has made life a lot or a little better for ‘people like me’ while 58% say it has had a very positive or fairly positive impact on society overall.

In discussions held shortly after the start of the pandemic lockdown, people were particularly grateful for their ability to continue to work, maintain friendships and access information thanks to technology.  

»

There’s a personal thing where, on a day to day basis, these things are so useful – the speed at which we can order things, we can talk to people, we don’t have to leave the house. Brilliant! But I think there is a big picture in what is it doing to society and where is it going to take us? Because ultimately, if we have machines that do everything, we don’t even need to get out of bed in the morning, we don’t have a purpose anymore. –People, Power and Technology 2020 research participant

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However, there’s been a significant drop in the strength of people’s enthusiasm over the past two years with 38% saying the internet has made life a lot better for people like them, compared to 50% in 2018.  

And it finds most people (58%) think the industry is under-regulated. They identify government (53%) and independent regulators (48%) as having most responsibility for directing the impacts of technology on people and society. 

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The split between thinking it’s good for you as an individual, yet less good for society, is fascinating. A bit like cars being good for you individually – so convenient! – but bad for cities and, ultimately, the planet.
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Coronavirus hit household spending much harder than BoE assumed • Financial Times

Chris Giles:

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Household spending dropped more than 40% in April, according to real-time data from a large survey of bank accounts, suggesting the Bank of England was too optimistic in its assumptions when it forecast that the coronavirus crisis would lead to the worst recession in over 300 years.

In its bleak assessment last week, the central bank pointed to data showing a “reduction in the level of household consumption of around 30%”.

But the research by the London Business School published on Monday showed spending had fallen much further last month than estimated by the BoE, while incomes had come under greater strain, pushing some families deeper into debt and exacerbating inequality.

The 40% drop in household expenditure does not translate simply to gross domestic product, but suggests a deeper downturn than either the BoE or Office for Budget Responsibility have predicted.

The study used anonymised financial information for over 30,000 people from the Money Dashboard app, which links to all users’ bank accounts, debit and credit cards, enabling researchers to see exactly where spending was hit hardest.

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Personally, based on my credit card spending, my discretionary spending (including food) was down over 60% in April compared to typical months; on fuel, by 80% (that’s rural living).
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5G will not kill us all, but stupidity might • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

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On Friday, The New Republic published an article by Christopher Ketcham, under the thoughtful and modest title, “Is 5G Going to Kill Us All?”

It’s astonishing to see an article like this run in a publication of The New Republic‘s history and caliber, particularly at a time when 5G conspiracy theorists are actively destroying cell phone towers and wrecking installations thanks to baseless conspiracy theories linking 5G to coronavirus. There have been 77 arson attacks since March 30, with staff reporting 180 incidents of abuse. Articles like Ketcham’s only fan the flames.

I can’t speak to any of Christopher Ketcham’s writing on any other topic, but when it comes to wireless technology, he’s been banging the same drum for a decade — and using exactly the same rhetorical techniques to do it.

In a story written in 2010, Ketcham begins by telling us the story of Allison Rall back in 1990, a young mom with three children whose cattle sicken and children fall ill after a cellular tower is installed nearby. He immediately ties her case to a statement by an EPA scientist named Carl Blackman, who tells us/her, “With my government cap on, I’m supposed to tell you you’re perfectly safe,” Blackman tells her. “With my civilian cap on, I have to tell you to consider leaving.”

In the most recent story, we are introduced to Debbie Persampire, a woman “who believes cell phones are poisoning her children.” Ketcham presents this statement uncritically, even as he describes how the woman covers the rooms of her house in an EMF-reducing paint that sells for ~$66 per liter. Her family, we are told, “trusts her.” Whether her doctor trusts her is not discussed.

From that point, Ketcham pivots. Now, we’re told that a 2018 study by the National Toxicology Program discovered evidence that exposing rats to cell phone radiation can cause various forms of cancer. Again, it’s the exact same story structure — a sympathetic emotional hook, a mother in desperate straits, and finally, a government figure or body with critical information showing a major problem that somehow, somehow, has been swept under the rug.

The only problem is, it’s claptrap from start to finish.

Let’s talk about why.

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For ages, we’ve fallen behind in the manufacture of debunking. But now, our factories are getting back to speed.
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I’m an investigative journalist. These are the questions to ask about the Plandemic video • ProPublica

Marshall Allen:

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Sensational videos, memes, rants and more about COVID-19 are likely to keep coming. With society polarized and deep distrust of the media, the government and other institutions, such content is a way for bad actors to sow discord, mostly via social media. We saw it with Russia in the 2016 election and we should expect it to continue.

But what surprised me is how easily “Plandemic” sank its hooks into some of my friends. My brother also felt alarmed that his own church members and leaders in other churches might be tempted to buy into it.

The purpose of this column is not to skewer “Plandemic.” My goal is to offer some criteria for sifting through all the content we see every day, so we can tell the difference between fair reporting and something so biased it should not be taken seriously.

Here’s a checklist, some of which I shared with my friends on Facebook, to help interrogate any content — and that includes what we publish at ProPublica.

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Useful list of questions to ask about any of these things (whether sensible or not) you come across. I particularly noted this:

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Every time I write a story that accuses someone of wrongdoing I call them and urge them to explain the situation from their perspective. This is standard in mainstream journalism. Sometimes I’ve gone to extreme lengths to get comments from someone who will be portrayed unfavorably in my story — traveling to another state and showing up at their office and their home and leaving a note if they are not there to meet me.

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If you want actual takedowns of the “Plandemic” thing (removed from every reliable platform), there’s Ars Technica and Science magazine. It’s nonsense, though on a level that’s probably resistant to actual facts.
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How Trump and the CDC failed the COVID-19 test • Rolling Stone

Tim Dickinson:

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The government leaders who failed to safeguard the nation are CDC Director Redfield; FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn; Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar; and of course, President Trump. Together, these men had the power to change the direction of this pandemic, to lessen its impact on the economy, and constrain the death toll from COVID-19. Each failed, in a series of errors and mismanagement that grew into a singular catastrophe — or as Jared Kushner described it on Fox & Friends, “a great success story.”

Defeating an invisible enemy like the coronavirus requires working diagnostics. But when the CDC’s original test kit failed, there was no Plan B. The nation’s private-sector biomedical establishment is world-class, but the administration kept these resources cordoned behind red tape as the CDC foundered. Precious weeks slipped by — amid infighting, ass covering, and wasted effort — and the virus slipped through the nation’s crippled surveillance apparatus, taking root in hot spots across the country, and in particular, New York City.

The mismanagement cost lives. With adequate testing from the beginning, says Dr. Howard Forman, a Yale professor of public-health policy, “we would have been able to stop the spread of this virus in its tracks the way that many other nations have.” Instead, says Sen. Murray, the administration’s response was “wait until it’s too late, and then try and contain one of the most aggressive viruses that we’ve ever seen.”

Blind to the virus’s penetration and unable to target mitigation where it was needed, the administration and state governors had to resort to the blunt instrument of shuttering the economy, says Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. And the lack of testing kept us in limbo. “Our economy is shut down because we still do not have adequate testing,” Jha says. “We have been woefully behind from the beginning of this pandemic.”

If the president’s deputies made trillion-dollar mistakes, accountability for the pandemic response lies with Trump, who waived off months of harrowing intelligence briefings, choosing to treat the coronavirus as a crisis in public relations, rather than a public-health emergency. Having staked his re-election on a strong economy, Trump downplayed the virus.

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Political, not capable appointees with political, not health aims. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Coronavirus impact: Indian smartphone market sees zero sales in April, no clear picture for May • Yahoo News

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The extended lockdown in India has resulted in zero shipments for the smartphone players in India in the month of April as factories are shut and it will take two-four weeks time for the manufacturing units to resume normal operations once lockdown is relaxed. The month of March saw a steep annual decline in smartphone shipments, at -19%, due to COVID-19 nationwide lockdown that settled in from March 24.

Since then, factories are closed, retail shops are shut and online sellers are busy delivering groceries and other essential items. Result: April has seen almost zero sales.

“We see zero activity on smartphone shipments part in April and lockdown now entering May amid uncertainties, the Q2 2020 is going to be really challenging for the smartphone makers in the country,” Tarun Pathak, Associate Director, Counterpoint Research, told IANS.

“We have been hearing some absolute essential sales happened behind the scenes during the lockdown but yes, those will be in hundreds as against potential 11-12 million smartphone sales which happen in a normal month,” Pathak added.

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Zero. Zero.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Animal Crossing: a way to earn money if you can’t earn money. CC-licensed photo by HeyGabe WW 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. If it keeps on raining… I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Sure, the velociraptors are still on the loose, but that’s no reason not to reopen Jurassic Park • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Carlos Greaves with one of the very finest pieces of laser-accurate satire you’ll ever see:

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Hello, Peter Ludlow here, CEO of InGen, the company behind the wildly successful dinosaur-themed amusement park, Jurassic Park. As you’re all aware, after an unprecedented storm hit the park, we lost power and the velociraptors escaped their enclosure and killed hundreds of park visitors, prompting a two-month shutdown of the park. Well, I’m pleased to announce that, even though the velociraptors are still on the loose, we will be opening Jurassic Park back up to the public!

Now, I understand why some people might be skeptical about reopening an amusement park when there are still blindingly fast, 180-pound predators roaming around. But the fact of the matter is, velociraptors are intelligent, shifty creatures that are not going to be contained any time soon, so we might as well just start getting used to them killing a few people every now and then. Some might argue that we should follow the example of other parks that have successfully dealt with velociraptor escapes. But here at Jurassic Park, we’ve never been ones to listen to the recommendations of scientists, or safety experts, or bioethicists, so why would we start now?

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You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing, particularly the paragraph about how the paramedics will be rewarded. That one works for any country.
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Twitter disputes State Department claims China coordinated coronavirus disinformation accounts • CNNPolitics

Jennifer Hansler, Donie O’Sullivan and Kylie Atwood:

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Lea Gabrielle, head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) – which works to coordinate efforts to expose foreign disinformation and propaganda – said the US “has uncovered a new network of inauthentic Twitter accounts, which we assess were created with the intent to amplify Chinese propaganda and disinformation.”

However, an initial review from Twitter of more than 5,000 accounts turned over to them by the State Department cast doubt on the claims. According to Twitter, they have instead found that numerous accounts belong to government entities, nongovernmental organizations, and journalists. The review was ongoing, the company said, noting that it planned to follow up with the GEC on its findings.

A State Department spokesperson told CNN that “the GEC provided Twitter with a small sample of the overall dataset that included nearly 250,000 accounts,” adding that it was “was not surprising that there are authentic accounts in any sample.”

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The point is, State Department, that you’re meant to provide a dataset that only includes the inauthentic ones. The US government’s slide into corruption means it should now be regarded as an untrustworthy source on pretty much anything, and especially about China.
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The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months • The Guardian

Rutger Bregman:

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I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip … Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”

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This is a wonderful story which is being widely shared, with good reason. Bregman had to follow all sorts of twisty routes and clues to unearth a story that hasn’t received the publicity it deserves.
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Here’s what public health experts think our pandemic summer will look like • Buzzfeed News

Dan Vergano:

»

In all of the scenarios, US deaths dip below the current rate of roughly 2,000 deaths a day for the next two weeks. Then they shoot upwards again in the familiar pandemic exponential curve for the loosened states. By June 1, the middle scenario resulted in more than 43,000 new cases and 1,800 deaths per day. An increasing loosening of restrictions every week would lead to median estimates of more than 63,000 new cases and 2,400 deaths per day.

By the middle of June, the projections would reach potentially devastating heights: 3,000 deaths per day in the onetime loosening scenario, and more than 6,000 a day if restrictions continue to loosen.

“The dip is very worrisome, people see lower cases and think there isn’t a problem, so they increase their contacts,” which leads to more deaths weeks later, Columbia’s Sen Pei, a coauthor on the analysis, told BuzzFeed News. “We expect people will change their behavior once they see deaths racing upward again,” he said.

Because of the two- to three-week lag between initial infection and death, combined with a long-running deficit in testing and a perilously slow mobilization of contact tracing to track exposures to new cases, governors are essentially steering by looking in the rearview mirror, driving straight into outbreaks they can’t see ahead. That means deaths and cases will continue to go up, even after the brakes are slammed on again.

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The estimate I’ve heard from an informed reader is 4,500 dying per day in July, which is 50% higher than the White House estimate. Either number is very high, don’t forget.
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Why we fail to prepare for disasters • Tim Harford

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Part of the problem may simply be that we get our cues from others. In a famous experiment conducted in the late 1960s, the psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley pumped smoke into a room in which their subjects were filling in a questionnaire. When the subject was sitting alone, he or she tended to note the smoke and calmly leave to report it. When subjects were in a group of three, they were much less likely to react: each person remained passive, reassured by the passivity of the others.

As the new coronavirus spread, social cues influenced our behaviour in a similar way. Harrowing reports from China made little impact, even when it became clear that the virus had gone global. We could see the metaphorical smoke pouring out of the ventilation shaft, and yet we could also see our fellow citizens acting as though nothing was wrong: no stockpiling, no self-distancing, no Wuhan-shake greetings. Then, when the social cues finally came, we all changed our behaviour at once. At that moment, not a roll of toilet paper was to be found.

Normalcy bias and the herd instinct are not the only cognitive shortcuts that lead us astray. Another is optimism bias. Psychologists have known for half a century that people tend to be unreasonably optimistic about their chances of being the victim of a crime, a car accident or a disease, but, in 1980, the psychologist Neil Weinstein sharpened the question. Was it a case of optimism in general, a feeling that bad things rarely happened to anyone? Or perhaps it was a more egotistical optimism: a sense that while bad things happen, they don’t happen to me. Weinstein asked more than 250 students to compare themselves to other students. They were asked to ponder pleasant prospects such as a good job or a long life, and vivid risks such as an early heart attack or venereal disease. Overwhelmingly, the students felt that good things were likely to happen to them, while unpleasant fates awaited their peers.

«

Ask yourself: if you haven’t yet had Covid-19, do you expect that your encounter with it will be mild or serious? Why?
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The big Facebook crash of 2020 and the problem of third-party SDK creep • Rambo Codes

Guilherme Rambo on the fallout from a flaw in Facebook’s SDK, used in loads of apps, which made them all fail last week when it moved fast and, well, broke things:

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It’s quite possible that every single app you use on any particular day is running code from Facebook, Google and other data-gathering and data-mining companies. Because of the way this code is integrated — by linking to a dynamic library at build time — it means these companies can effectively control those apps, or worse, access all of the data those apps have access to.

We saw a demonstration of this power yesterday: it was as if Facebook had an “app kill switch” that they activated, and it brought down many of people’s favorite iOS apps — Apple’s appocalypse video never felt so real. Of course it was a bug and not something done intentionally, but it highlights the point that they do have control over apps that include their code.

Even if you don’t sign in with Facebook in a particular app, the app will run Facebook’s code in the background just for having the SDK included. You don’t need a Facebook account for it to track you either, they can track people very well without one.

There are some technical workarounds which could be applied to this problem. It’s clear that many people want to use Facebook as a login method, so “just remove it” is not as easy as it might seem. The same thing goes for “Just implement Sign in with Apple”. Whenever someone starts a phrase about programming with “just”, any senior developer’s eyebrows rise…

…Having analytics SDKs isolated from main app code would prevent those SDKs from slurping user data without the app explicitly sending it to the SDK, it could also be used to implement some form of permission dialog. Imagine launching an app and seeing a prompt that reads “This app would like to send your location to Facebook. Is that ok?”.

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Now that would be proportional.
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Jared Kushner always declares his failures are successes • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Speirs:

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Kushner’s modus operandi [is] painfully familiar to me because he was my boss when I was the editor in chief of the New York Observer, which he had bought when he was 25. (I’ve written before about what he was like as a businessman.) One of the more memorable instances of this I witnessed was at a memorial service for a beloved longtime Observer staffer, Tyler Rush, who’d joined the paper well before Kushner bought it.

When it came time for Kushner to say a few words, he launched into a supercilious monologue crediting himself with finally getting the paper published on time after what he described as chaos when he arrived. He also told an anecdote about Rush approaching him when he bought the paper to note that his staff was underpaid, which was true at the time, and true when I took the editor job years later. Kushner congratulated himself during the memorial for giving Rush and his production team the only raise that year because “unlike everyone else,” Rush hadn’t been lying to Kushner.

This line didn’t land the way Kushner hoped, because no one had been lying. Everyone was underpaid. But he didn’t like what he heard from the other staffers, so he proceeded to make his own assessment about what their experience and expertise were worth. This was not based on market comparables or the technical intricacies of a job, apparently, but his personal valuation of what a writer or a production manager or salesperson was worth — which always, at least in my conversations with him, seemed to be rooted in an idea that people who choose occupations that are not explicitly and primarily designed to make money were dilettantes of a sort, and essentially unserious. Why would you choose to be a journalist when you could make so much more money as a commercial real estate developer?

The conclusion he drew was that people who chose less remunerative career paths had not figured out how the world worked. To use a phrase he routinely deployed, they “didn’t get it.” And as such, they were disposable workers whose knowledge base could probably be replaced by a rigorous Google search. If their expertise was actually valuable, if they were so smart, they’d be monetizing it better.

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As she points out, anyone who had had such a string of failures in any organisation that actually cared about results would have fired him long ago.
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How Animal Crossing’s fake industries let players afford real rent amid COVID-19 • Ars Technica

Alexis Ong:

»

Animal Crossing New Horizons is about as far as you can get from a communications super-app geared toward in-app sales or collaboration. In fact, as a franchise originally made for children, it barely has a proper chat function. But as we watch real-world society grind to a painful halt, many players are now also using this game as an unexpected economic and creative lifeline.

Here’s the story of how this Nintendo Switch game has become an experimental playground for real-world businesses and creative experiences, letting players find new ways to mirror conventional culture with in-game resources.

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Bells and turnips: my teenagers (who play the game) told me a couple of weeks back that they knew of people who were charging quite good money for access to their islands depending on the price of turnips and bells. Bet Nintendo has been surprised, to say the least.
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Global smartwatch shipments grow 20% to 14 million in Q1 2020 • Strategy Analytics

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Steven Waltzer, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, said, “Global smartwatch shipments grew 20% annually from 11.4 million units in Q1 2019 to 13.7 million in Q1 2020. Despite considerable headwinds from the Covid-19 scare, global demand for smartwatches continued to grow. Smartwatches are selling well through online retail channels, while many consumers have been using smartwatches to monitor their health and fitness during virus lockdown.”

Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Apple Watch shipped 7.6 million units worldwide in Q1 2020, rising an above-average 23% from 6.2 million in Q1 2019. Apple’s global smartwatch marketshare has grown from 54% to 55 percent, its highest level for two years. Apple Watch continues to fend off strong competition from hungry rivals like Garmin and Samsung. Apple Watch owns half the worldwide smartwatch market and remains the clear industry leader.”

Steven Waltzer, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics, added, “Samsung shipped 1.9 million smartwatches worldwide in Q1 2020, inching up slightly from 1.7 million a year ago. Samsung’s global smartwatch marketshare has dipped from 15% to 14% during the past year. Samsung remains the world’s number two smartwatch vendor, but its growth was slowed by the coronavirus lockdown at home in South Korea and renewed competition from hungry competitors like Garmin.”

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So Apple sold four times as many as its nearest competitor. Like the tablet business, where Apple also dominates, all the profit and a significant chunk of the volume is at the top end. What other industries see that?
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Google unifies all of its messaging and communication apps into a single team • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

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Prior to joining Google, [VP and general manager of G Suite, Javier Soltero] had a long career that included creating the much-loved Acompli email app, which Microsoft acquired and essentially turned into the main Outlook app less than two months after signing the deal.

Soltero has also moved rapidly (at least by the standards of Google’s communication apps) to clean up the Hangouts branding mess, converting Hangouts Video to Google Meet and Hangouts Chat to Google Chat — at least on the enterprise side. Google Meet also became free for everybody far ahead of the original schedule because of the pandemic.

Cleaning up the consumer side of all that is more complicated, but Soltero says, “The plan continues to be to modernize [Hangouts] towards Google Meet and Google Chat.”

The way Soltero characterizes his job is to “drive more innovation and more clarity around how these products can fulfill their specific missions.” This suggests he doesn’t intend to integrate all of Google’s chat apps in the way that Facebook is planning to do with Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. In fact, he says that “these products are playing an important role in people’s lives” and “it would be irresponsible” to make too-rapid chances to these products as people depend on them.

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Bizarre to say it, but the messaging problem shows that Google has a problem with institutional focus, which is a remarkable thing to say about a company that revolutionised search by focussing madly on its search index, and returning results really fast. (The latter is essential. You don’t notice it because it’s done so well)

Yet the messages mess echoes the Chromebook mess. A reader got in touch last week and pointed out that the reason Chromebooks haven’t taken over in places like call centres is that many businesses rely on custom-written Windows line-of-business apps. To displace them, you’d need to be able to write ChromeOS or Android apps for the Chromebooks. But Google hasn’t focussed on making that happen. So a huge opportunity is missed.
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Why America can make semiconductors but not swabs • Bloomberg Opinion

Dan Wang:

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in China, a vast pool of experienced engineers and a culture of nimble manufacturing have allowed companies to quickly shift production to critically needed goods during this crisis. Manufacturers such as BYD Co.(an automaker) and Foxconn (an electronics assembler) have helped to quadruple China’s mask production since the beginning of the pandemic. Taiwanese companies, which make machine tools and can draw on deep pools of manufacturing expertise, were reportedly able to increase mask production tenfold.

Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should think of bolder proposals than sensible but long-proposed tweaks to R&D policies, re-training programs and STEM education.

What the U.S. really needs to do is reconstitute its communities of engineering practice. That will require treating manufacturing work, even in low-margin goods, as fundamentally valuable. Technological sophisticates in Silicon Valley would be wise to drop their dismissive attitude towards manufacturing as a “commoditized” activity and treat it as being as valuable as R&D work. And corporate America should start viewing workers not purely as costs to be slashed, but as practitioners keeping alive knowledge essential to the production process.

The U.S. government has a crucial role to play. Bills winding through in Congress to re-shore some of the medical supply chain should be only the start. For too long, tax laws have encouraged offshoring; it’s time for political leaders to remove the excuse for manufacturers not to bring production back home.

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Plenty of people pointing out that it’s not as simple as Andreessen’s “let’s just *want* to build”.
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The VR winter • Benedict Evans

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…if we can’t work out a form of content that isn’t also deep and narrow [as games console content is], I think we have to assume that VR will be a subset of the games console. That would be a decent business, but it’s not why Mark Zuckerberg bought Oculus. It’s another branch off the side of tech, not the next platform after smartphones.

There’s a bunch of ideas that float around here. One is that you can’t really do apps and productivity yet because the screens aren’t high enough resolution to read text, so we can’t yet work in a 360 degree virtual sphere, and that will come. Another is that the headsets need to be even smaller and even lighter, and do pass-through so you can see the room around you. Yet another is that we just have to keep waiting, and in particular wait for a larger installed base (presumably driven by those deep-and-narrow games sales), and the innovation will somehow kick in.

There’s nothing fundamentally illogical about any of these ideas, but they do remind me a little of Karl Popper’s criticism of Marxists – that when asked why their supposedly scientific prediction hadn’t happened yet they would always say ‘ah, the historical circumstances aren’t right – you just have to wait a few more years’. There is also, of course, the tendency of Marxists to respond to being asked why communist states seem always to turn out badly by saying ‘ah, but that isn’t proper communism’. I seem to hear ‘ah, but that isn’t proper VR’ an awful lot these days.

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He’s not quite prepared to say it, but I will: another VR winter is coming. See you all in 2040.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Finding Zoom calls strangely exhausting? It’s not just you – video calls aren’t relaxing CC-licensed photo by Liz Henry on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Another week survived! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Will Facebook’s new oversight board be a radical shift or a reputational shield? • The Guardian

Julia Carrie Wong:

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will Facebook’s oversight board live up to its lofty promises and reshape how Facebook shapes the world? Or will it just be a reputational shield for a company whose pathologies run deeper than the question of whether individual pieces of content should be allowed or taken down?

“We are all committed to freedom of expression within the framework of international norms of human rights,” the four co-chairs of the board – Catalina Botero-Marino, Jamal Greene, Michael W McConnell and Helle Thorning-Schmidt – wrote in a New York Times op-ed introducing themselves to the public Wednesday. “We will make decisions based on those principles and on the effects on Facebook users and society, without regard to the economic, political or reputational interests of the company.”

“I wish I could say that the Facebook review board was cosmetic, but I’m not even sure that it’s that deep,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and author of a book on Facebook. “If Facebook really wanted to take outside criticism seriously at any point in the past decade, it could have taken human rights activists seriously about problems in Myanmar; it could have taken journalists seriously about problems in the Philippines; it could have taken legal scholars seriously about the way it deals with harassment; and it could have taken social media scholars seriously about the ways that it undermines democracy in India and Brazil. But it didn’t. This is greenwashing.”

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Seems like this is going to be complicated. Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian, was also picked for the 20-strong board, and he says that he joined because

»

The global Covid-19 crisis we’re currently living through exemplifies the mortal dangers of a world of information chaos. Societies and communities can’t function unless there is some consensus around facts and truth. And the coronavirus is, in some ways, merely a dress rehearsal for the even greater challenges of climate change.

At the same time, there is a crisis of free expression — with oligarchs, populist leaders, and some corporations trying to delegitimize and repress the voices of those who would challenge them. Finally, there is a crisis of journalism: both the economic model which sustains it, and in the generally low levels of trust much of it enjoys.

Facebook sits at the heart of these interlocking crises — and it’s not hard to see why it’s tied itself in knots trying to solve even some of them.

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I’d be wary of quite how overruled Zuckerberg can be. And how long he’ll tolerate it. What if the board says that any physical abuse video should be taken down? That factchecked-as-wrong content should be removed, not just downranked?
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As shipment skyrockets in 2Q20, Chromebooks to set record by occupying 25% of notebook computer shipment for first time ever • TrendForce

:

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TrendForce forecasts global Chromebook shipment in 2Q20 to reach up to 11.6 million units, a historical high in single-quarter shipment. Furthermore, 2Q20 marks the first time ever for Chromebooks to occupy 25% of total quarterly notebook shipment.

TrendForce considers the explosive growth of Chromebooks to be caused by the following factors: First, many countries have turned to distance learning at all levels of the education system due to the pandemic. As the education market has always been the primary market for Chromebooks, Chromebooks have now become the hardware purchase of choice for the student population in North America and Europe, since many families are taking extra care when budgeting during the pandemic. In sum, the transformation of the education system under the pandemic’s influence is the primary factor responsible for the surge of Chromebook shipment.

Secondly, in early 2020, most notebook brands did not view Chromebooks as an important product in their yearly strategy. But the subsequent onset of the pandemic introduced a breakage in the Chinese supply chain, while at the same time market demand for Chromebooks began rising. These events led to a large number of urgent Chromebook orders being placed in 2Q20; the traditional seasonal peak demand for Chromebooks due to the start of the school year in third quarters is thus emerging ahead of time this year in 2Q20 instead, in turn becoming another key factor facilitating the surge of Chromebook shipment. Also, the retail prices of Chromebooks are considerably more consumer-friendly relative to those of Windows notebooks. This has given Chromebooks an edge in securing public educational project bids. A notable example of this is the recent adoption of Chromebooks in the Japanese education market for the first time.

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I’ve been expecting Chromebooks to take over in call centres and similar for absolutely years, and it hasn’t happened. Even so: the forecast here is to sell a grand total of 20 million over the year, for a share (of laptops) of 13%.
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How Kushner’s volunteer force led a fumbling hunt for medical supplies • The New York Times

Nicholas Confessore, Andrew Jacobs, Jodi Kantor, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Luis Ferré-Sadurní:

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Dr. Jeffrey Hendricks had longtime manufacturing contacts in China and a line on millions of masks from established suppliers. Instead of encountering seasoned FEMA procurement officials, his information was diverted to a team of roughly a dozen young volunteers, recruited by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and overseen by a former assistant to Mr. Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump.

The volunteers, foot soldiers in the Trump administration’s new supply-chain task force, had little to no experience with government procurement procedures or medical equipment. But as part of Mr. Kushner’s governmentwide push to secure protective gear for the nation’s doctors and nurses, the volunteers were put in charge of sifting through more than a thousand incoming leads, and told to pass only the best ones on for further review by FEMA officials.

As the federal government’s warehouses were running bare and medical workers improvised their own safety gear, Dr. Hendricks found his offer stalled. Many of the volunteers were told to prioritize tips from political allies and associates of President Trump, tracked on a spreadsheet called “V.I.P. Update,” according to documents and emails obtained by The New York Times. Among them were leads from Republican members of Congress, the Trump youth activist Charlie Kirk and a former “Apprentice” contestant who serves as the campaign chair of Women for Trump.

Trump allies also pressed FEMA officials directly: a Pennsylvania dentist, once featured at a Trump rally, dropped the president’s name as he pushed the agency to procure test kits from his associates.
Few of the leads, V.I.P. or otherwise, panned out, according to a whistle-blower memo written by one volunteer and sent to the House Oversight Committee.

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I know – astonishing isn’t it that someone with no experience organising a life-or-death large-scale procurement could be sure they knew how to do it. Oh, but of course. Anyway, it’ll be great for Joe Biden to hire Hunter (or partner) to organise everything in the White House next year. The GOP will be totally fine with that and won’t hear a word against it.
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Finding endless video calls exhausting? You’re not alone • The Conversation

Andre Spicer:

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When we interact with another person through the screen, our brains have to work much harder. We miss many of the other cues we’d have during a real-life conversation like the smell of the room or some detail in our peripheral vision. This additional information helps our brains make sense of what is going on.

When that extra information is gone, our brains have to work harder to make sense of what is happening. This can sometimes put us at a disadvantage. For instance, a meta-analysis of job interviews found that people tended to fare worse when they were interviewed through video link than in person.

The greater effort it takes to make sense of what’s going on means we often take mental shortcuts. This can result in mistakes. One study found that medics who attended a seminar via video conferencing tended to focus on whether they liked the presenter, while those who attended in person focused on the quality of presenter’s arguments.

Another study found that when courts made decisions about a refugee’s appeal using a video call, they were less trusting and understanding. Applicants were more likely to lie and judges were less likely to spot falsehoods. A third study found that court sketch artists made less accurate drawings when gathering information via video call.

Our biases can get worse if the line is glitchy. Even a one second delay can make us think people on the other end of the line are less friendly. One experiment found that when the video quality was low, people were much more cautious in their communication.

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Hmm, maybe these “office” things will prove resilient after all.
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From blood clots to ‘Covid toe’: the medical mysteries of coronavirus • Financial Times

Clive Cookson:

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less than five months after it was first identified, this new coronavirus is managing to throw up a series of medical mysteries — from blood clots and strokes to digestive problems — that are confounding the scientific community.

From head to foot, Covid-19 causes a fiendish variety of symptoms. Some are relatively mild, such as loss of smell and taste or chilblain-like sores on toes. But others may be fatal, such as when what doctors call an immune storm destroys vital organs. The more this virus is studied, the more complex it appears to be.

“Every day we’re learning of new tricks that the virus plays,” says Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London. “It is remarkable to see a disease unfolding in front of our eyes with so many twists and turns.”

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(There’s no paywall on this article.) This is a veritable kitchen sink of an article – absolutely everything you could want, plus a big graphic.
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Staying alive: background tracing and the NHS COVID-19 app • Reincubate

Aidan Fitzpatrick:

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How then, can the British NHS COVID-19 effectively trace new devices whilst backgrounded, without “falling asleep” (technically, “being suspended”) and thus being rendered ineffective? From our testing with version 1.0.1b341 of “NHS COVID-19” app, we can see does indeed communicate effectively in the background. It appears that this is done through use of a series of clever workarounds using keepalives and notifications. Force quitting the app will stop background tracing, however, if instead the phone is powered off and back on, it will continue to communicate properly in the background. This workaround may or may not fall foul of Apple, but at this point it hasn’t been disclosed, and Apple have approved the builds of the app they’ve seen so far.

We’re continuing to look into this and will be publishing more detail as things develop.

Does the NHS COVID-19 app store sensitive data?

No. The app seems very well put together, using sensible security practises, and without storage of unnecessary data. It revolves around a linkingId that gets generated for each install of the app. This ID persists across install of the app, so uninstalling and reinstalling it won’t reset the identifier.

Looking at data from the app using iPhone Backup Extractor under the uk.nhs.nhsx.sonar path, we can see there are a series of files coupled to Google Firebase and a collection of small Plists (configuration files) for the rest of the app’s data.

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Doesn’t ask for location. And can’t (yet) use the Apple-Google API (because it hasn’t been released, at least for iOS devices). Quite a dig into it.
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Sidewalk Labs announces it will “no longer pursue” Quayside project • BetaKit

Isabelle Kirkwood:

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Sidewalk Labs has announced it will no longer pursue its project at Quayside in Toronto. The company noted the decision was due to the current “unprecedented economic uncertainty.” Sidewalk Labs and Google will both remain in Toronto.

The company, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, has worked on its smart city proposal for the Quayside neighbourhood over the last two-and-a-half years, alongside Waterfront Toronto, the tri-government agency overseeing the development. In January, the deadline to decide whether to move ahead with Sidewalk Labs’ smart city development proposal was pushed from March 31 until May 20.

“In October 2017, Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto set out to plan a shared vision for Quayside, a fundamentally more sustainable and affordable community resulting from innovations in technology and urban design,” CEO Dan Doctoroff in a statement. “Since the project began, I’ve met thousands of Torontonians from all over the city, excited by the possibility of making urban life better for everyone.”

Doctoroff said the economic circumstances made it “too difficult” to make the 12-acre project financially viable without sacrificing “core parts” of its plan. Sidewalk Labs, which has a 30-person office on the waterfront, will continue to work on some of its proposed innovations, including mass timber construction, a digital master-planning tool, and its approach to all-electric neighbourhoods.

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Doctoroff is surely talking bullshit about those excited Torontonians. I’d love to know what part of the economic circumstances has so abruptly shut this down. I think we’ll see play out many times in the future: sketchy projects that were on life support will be terminated. Sidewalk won’t be mourned.
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Zoom acquires Keybase to get end-to-end encryption expertise • TechCrunch

Ron Miller:

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Keybase, which has been building encryption products for several years including secure file sharing and collaboration tools, should give Zoom some security credibility as it goes through pandemic demand growing pains.

The company has faced a number of security issues in the last couple of months as demand as soared and exposed some security weaknesses in the platform. As the company has moved to address these issues, having a team of encryption experts on staff should help the company build a more secure product.

In a blog post announcing the deal, CEO Eric Yuan said they acquired Keybase to give customers a higher level of security, something that’s increasingly important to enterprise customers as more operations are relying on the platform, working from home during the pandemic.

“This acquisition marks a key step for Zoom as we attempt to accomplish the creation of a truly private video communications platform that can scale to hundreds of millions of participants, while also having the flexibility to support Zoom’s wide variety of uses,” Yuan wrote.

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Keybase, though, doesn’t know quite why Zoom has bought it: according to Keybase’s announcement,

»

Initially, our single top priority is helping to make Zoom even more secure. There are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet. Ultimately Keybase’s future is in Zoom’s hands, and we’ll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice.

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Cuomo faces backlash for enlisting billionaires Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates to ‘reimagine’ NY after reopening • Forbes

Rachel Sandler:

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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has enlisted former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates this week to “reimagine” how the state’s approach to education and technology might change during and after the pandemic—but the move has drawn backlash from local officials and education advocates who say the state shouldn’t be depending on wealthy unelected officials.

Schmidt and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have both been tasked in separate efforts to help determine what the state may look like after the pandemic subsides and when schools reopen.

Some progressive local officials slammed Cuomo for leaning on billionaires for assistance, with Deputy State Senate Majority Leader Mike Gianaris saying, “These are not people who should determine for us how best to provide services to everyday New Yorkers.”

Local education advocates in particular blasted the Gates Foundation, which has a fraught history among teachers and parent groups over its support for Common Core, a controversial standardized testing program implemented in New York and elsewhere.

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There’s always this huge temptation to say “oooh, X made lots of money at a tech company, they must be really visionary and know how to shape society”. Bill Gates has, but through the medium of vaccination – a centuries-old technique – made cheaper. Schmidt, well, has he done anything beyond Google? And it’s hardly as though that was his idea. He drove the business thinking.

A few years ago Mark Zuckerberg had a big idea about remaking education. Went nowhere, as I recall.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This person hooked his smart doorlock up to a Wink Hub in 2014. Now the company wants $5 a month, or the hub dies. CC-licensed photo by Marcus Kwan on Flickr.

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

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

NHS tracing app in question as experts assess Google-Apple model • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw, Sarah Neville and Helen Warrell:

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The UK’s decision to go it alone has been criticised by privacy campaigners and technologists, who say the app will be less effective than incorporating Apple and Google’s software, while also gathering too much personal information in a central database. It has also raised concerns about whether the UK app will be compatible with those under development by other countries which are using the Apple and Google model. If not, this could present barriers for Britons travelling abroad in the future.

Contract documents obtained by Tussell, a data provider on UK government contracts and expenditure, and shared with the Financial Times, show that the London office of Zuhlke Engineering, a Switzerland-based IT development firm, has been awarded a new multimillion pound contract by NHSX, the state-funded health service’s digital innovation arm. The six-month contract to develop and support the Covid-19 contact tracing app is worth £3.8m and was due to begin on Wednesday, the documents show. 

The contract includes a requirement to “investigate the complexity, performance and feasibility of implementing native Apple and Google contact tracing APIs [application programming interfaces] within the existing proximity mobile application and platform”. The work is described as a “two week timeboxed technical spike”, suggesting it is still at a preliminary phase, but with a deadline of mid-May. An application programming interface is the means by which software developers access certain functions of a device’s operating system.

…Downing Street has been tracking developments in Australia, which like the UK has developed its own contact-tracing app without Apple and Google software, but has now run into technical difficulties. One person close to the NHS development process said British officials had been concerned when Germany, which had also been developing its own app, suddenly reverted to the Apple and Google-assisted model last month, leaving Britain more of an outlier within Europe.

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Germany hasn’t put a foot wrong through the whole crisis, so maybe Downing Street might want to catch a clue on this one, at least.

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Introducing Wink Subscription • Wink Blog

Somebody Who Understandably Doesn’t Want To Put Their Name To This:

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Wink has taken many steps in an effort to keep your Hub’s blue light on, however, long term costs and recent economic events have caused additional strain on our business. Unlike companies that sell user data to offset costs associated with offering free services, we do not. Data privacy is one of Wink’s core values, and we believe that user data should never be sold for marketing or any purpose.

We have a lot of great ideas on how to expand on Wink’s capabilities and satisfy the many requests from our user base. In order to provide for development and continued growth, we are transitioning to a $4.99 monthly subscription, starting on May 13, 2020. This fee is designed to be as modest as possible. Your support will enable us to continue providing you with the functionality that you’ve come to rely on, and focus on accelerating new integrations and app features.

Should you choose not to sign up for a subscription you will no longer be able to access your Wink devices from the app, with voice control or through the API, and your automations will be disabled on May 13. Your device connections, settings and automations can be reactivated if you decide to subscribe at a later date.

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So basically they sold them at too low a price, and now they’re holding a gun to folks’ heads to pay up. (Also, what are “long term costs”?) An absolutely disastrous tactic. Five years old and linked to “more than 4 million connected devices”: that suggests, what, 1-2 million hubs? Given the short deadline, it looks more like an attempt to say “oh well we tried” when some miniscule number of people (10,000?) sign up, and it has to declare bankruptcy, as it did in 2015. Apparently it was bought from Flextronics in July 2017 by will.i.am’s company.

I think though that two things will happen: lots of people will migrate away; and some hackers will try to create an open source version that can be installed instead. If Wink doesn’t reverse this decision, it’s dead. But possibly it’s dead if it does too.
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Magic Leap in talks to raise money from ‘major health care company,’ CEO tells staff • The Information

Alex Heath:

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The deal is in due diligence, the emails said, and could still fall apart. The potential health care investor would use the headsets in surgical procedures and training, [Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony] Abovitz said in a recent memo to employees seen by The Information. Abovitz’s previous company, which made technology for use in surgeries, sold for $1.65bn in 2013.

The funding talks, which Abovitz disclosed last week to employees, follow the company’s decision to lay off roughly 1,000 employees and abandon its plan to sell its headsets to consumers. Remaining Magic Leap employees have been told that if the company is “unable to obtain financing or realize an alternative corporate option” by June 21, they, too, would be let go. Abovitz also recently told employees that the company would postpone a plan to pay their 2019 bonuses over monthly installments.

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So Magic Leap has six weeks, or it’s toast. (Noticing any trends lately?)

Though the potential for surgical training sound good, there would be a ton more investment needed to turn that into a real product: what are you trying to train people to do, how do you create the scenarios and objects, and so on. And it always runs up against the question: haven’t we been doing this more cheaply and just as effectively for ages?
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Uber layoffs: 3,700 employees, or 14% of workforce due to coronavirus • CNBC

Lauren Feiner:

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Uber said Wednesday it will lay off 3,700 employees and that CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will forgo his base salary for the rest of the year.

The layoffs to its customer support and recruiting teams represent about 14% of its 26,900 employees, based on Uber’s most recent headcount.

Khosrowshahi made $1m in base salary in 2019 but gained the vast majority of his compensation from bonuses and stock awards.

The moves were announced in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Uber’s stock was down more than 2% Wednesday.

Uber has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, which has crushed the travel industry because of lockdowns to stop the spread of the virus. Uber’s global gross bookings are down 80%, according to a report from The Information last month. Investors will get a greater sense of the impact on Thursday when Uber reports earnings.

Khosrowshahi hinted in a memo to employees Wednesday that more cost cuts are on the way.

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AirBnB, now Uber. Who’s next? (Also, that’s quite a base salary, isn’t it?)
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COVID and cascading collapses • Benedict Evans

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We are having a similar kind of external shock to the one that reset the print ad market in 2008/9, and a lot of new services and infrastructure have built up penetration and capability that is not perhaps captured by gravity. And now we’re all forced to try to use all of them. A bunch of industries look like candidates to get a decade of inevitability in a week.

The really obvious one is retail. Everything that the internet did to print media is happening to retail – a lot of retailers, like newspapers or magazines, are fixed-cost bundles that are now being unbundled, and are defended by barriers to entry that are now meaningless. Hence we’ve been talking about the ‘retail apocalypse’ for a year or two now, as the internet reached a level of penetration that made those fixed costs unsustainable and consumer behaviour peeled off more and more of the bundle. This is a ‘boiling the frog’ chart – you can’t see the collapse yet, but…

We all know that this next chart will not look good this year (and it will show a lot of human suffering), but the real question is whether in 5 years it looks like the print advertising chart we began with – except that this will affect 10% of the work force. Is today’s step down followed by a step back up?

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America, as he points out, is particularly overserved for retail space. Not a good time to own an American mall, or stocks in a company that owns an American mall.
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Will we shrug off coronavirus deaths as we do gun violence? • The New York Times

Charlie Warzel:

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The coronavirus scenario I can’t stop thinking about is the one where we simply get used to all the dying.

I first saw it on Twitter. “Someone poke holes in this scenario,” a tweet from Eric Nelson, the editorial director of Broadside Books, read. “We keep losing 1,000 to 2,000 a day to coronavirus. People get used to it. We get less vigilant as it very slowly spreads. By December we’re close to normal, but still losing 1,500 a day, and as we tick past 300,000 dead, most people aren’t concerned.”

This hit me like a ton of bricks because of just how plausible it seemed. The day I read Mr. Nelson’s tweet, 1,723 Americans were reported to have died from the virus. And yet their collective passing was hardly mourned. After all, how to distinguish those souls from the 2,097 who perished the day before or the 1,558 who died the day after?

Such loss of life is hard to comprehend when it’s not happening in front of your own two eyes. Add to it that humans are adaptable creatures, no matter how nightmarish the scenario, and it seems understandable that our outrage would dull over time. Unsure how — or perhaps unable — to process tragedy at scale, we get used to it.

There’s also a national precedent for Mr. Nelson’s hypothetical: America’s response to gun violence and school shootings.

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As he points out, Americans fail to impose the view of the majority on the minority in so many instances, especially around guns (you could ban AR-15s, you know) and public health. It’s a country in thrall to extremists.
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Ousted vaccine director files whistleblower complaint alleging coronavirus warnings were ignored • CNN Politics

Kaitlan Collins, Jeremy Diamond and Kevin Liptak:

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Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted director of the office involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine, formally filed an extensive whistleblower complaint Tuesday alleging his early warnings about the coronavirus were ignored and that his caution at a treatment favored by President Donald Trump led to his removal.

“I was pressured to let politics and cronyism drive decisions over the opinions of the best scientists we have in government,” Bright said on a call with reporters after filing his complaint.

Bright said in the complaint he raised urgent concerns about shortages of critical supplies, including masks, to his superiors in the Trump administration but was met with skepticism and surprise.

While Bright said some officials shared his concerns – including top White House trade adviser Peter Navarro – he describes an overall lack of action at the top of the administration even as the virus was spreading outside of China.

Bright had led the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority since 2016 when he was reassigned last month to a narrower position at the National Institutes of Health.

An attorney for Bright told reporters on Tuesday he was scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill next week. Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo of California, the chairwoman of the House’s Health Subcommittee, told CNN last month she planned to call in Bright to testify before her panel as she reviews the circumstances of his removal.
In his whistleblower complaint, Bright says he raised concerns about US preparedness for coronavirus starting in January but was met with “indifference which then developed into hostility” by leaders at the Department of Health and Human Services.

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Should make for a fun hearing.
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What is the value of exposure when exposure is all there is? • Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan:

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Streaming has been the change agent that turned around 15 years of decline. But it also completely reframed artist income from recorded music. In the old sales model artists would get a large sum of money in a relatively short period of time. Streaming income is more like an annuity, a longer-term return where the music keeps paying long after release. In the old model artists had smaller but high-spending audiences. With streaming they have larger but lower-value audiences.

For example, a recouped independent artist might expect to earn $4,500 for selling 1,500 copies of an album. That is roughly how much an artist would get from 5,000 people streaming the album 20 times each. The average revenue per user (ARPU) has gone from $3.00 to $0.90 for streaming. The artist has traded ARPU for reach.

This model worked fine when live and merch were booming because more than three times as many monetised fans meant three times more opportunity for selling tickets and t-shirts. This of course is the ‘exposure’ argument streaming services are fond of, which works until it does not. Now that live and merch have collapsed, as the trope goes ‘exposure does not pay the rent’. The previously interconnected, interdependent model has become decoupled.

Put simply, artist streaming economics do not work without live.

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The solution doesn’t lie in changing royalty structures (because that would wreck the streaming companies; they go bust or give up). See if you can figure out what the solution is.
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SARS-CoV-2 has not mutated into different types, new research confirms • University of Glasgow

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Recent research had suggested that more than one type of SARS-CoV-2 was now circulating in the pandemic, with one strain being more aggressive and causing more serious illness than the other. Now, using analysis of SARS-CoV-2 virus samples from the pandemic, scientists have been able to show that only one type of the virus is currently circulating. Their research is published in the journal Virus Evolution.

Viruses, including the one causing COVID-19, naturally accumulate mutations – or changes – in their genetic sequence as they spread through populations. However, most of these changes will have no effect on the virus biology or the aggressiveness of the disease they cause.

Earlier this year, it was reported that scientists had found two or three strains of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in the population, evidenced by certain mutations that had been detected. However, thanks to extensive analysis of the virus genomes annotated by the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research’s CoV-GLUE resource, scientists at the University of Glasgow have demonstrated that these detected mutations are unlikely to have any functional significance, and importantly, don’t represent different virus types.

CoV-GLUE tracks SARS-CoV-2’s amino acid replacements, insertions and deletions, which have been observed in samples from the pandemic. To date the database has catalogued 7,237 mutations in the pandemic. While this may sound like a lot of change, scientists confirm that it is a relatively low rate of evolution for an RNA virus, and they expect more mutations will continue to accumulate as the pandemic continues.

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This is the thing that I didn’t write about yesterday, because there was doubt about its accuracy. Didn’t stop a ton of much bigger sites writing it with huge certainty that OMG VIRUS EVIL CALAMITY. In science like this, it does pay to hold off sometimes.
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Michigan security guard killed in mask dispute; suspect said he ‘disrespected’ them • NBC News

Ben Kesslen and Corky Siemaszko:

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Three people were charged Monday with killing a Michigan store security guard who they say “disrespected” a relative by insisting that she don a mask to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Two of the suspects, Ramonyea Bishop, 23, and Larry Teague, 44, were still being sought, Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said.

The third suspect, Sharmel Teague, 45, has been arrested, Leyton said.

All are charged with first-degree murder in Friday’s shooting of Calvin Munerlyn, 43, a father of eight, at a Family Dollar store in the city of Flint.

“From all indications, Mr. Munerlyn was simply doing his job in upholding the governor’s executive order related to the COVID-19 pandemic for the safety of store employees and customers,” Leyton said in a press release.

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Following up from Monday.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified