A nuclear error? Don’t worry, the US Department of Transport has road signs for the post-nuclear world. CC-licensed photo by The Official CTBTO Photostream 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Radiating. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sonos’ chief product officer is leaving the company • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

A day after Sonos announced a CEO transition, the company is making more moves. Chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin will also be leaving his position. Some employees have told me that Bouvat-Merlin shares a significant amount of blame for the brand damage that Sonos has endured over the last year after deciding to release an overhauled mobile app well before it was ready for customers. There have been reports that top executives at the company ignored warnings from engineers and app testers that the new software wasn’t up to par ahead of its May rollout. Those alarms didn’t stop it from shipping.

In an email to staff, interim CEO Tom Conrad — who himself has plenty of product experience [including at Apple] — said the CPO position is now “redundant” and that Bouvat-Merlin’s job is being eliminated. “I know this is a lot of change to absorb in two days and I want to thank you for being resilient,” Conrad wrote.

“Max’s tenure represents an iconic era for Sonos products, including the award-winning Sonos One, Beam, Move, Ace, Arc, and Arc Ultra, establishing Sonos as the world leader in home theater audio and setting the foundation for our next chapter,” Conrad’s email reads.

Bouvat-Merlin will serve as an adviser to Conrad before fully exiting the company.

«

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting where Conrad told Bouvat-Merlin that the CPO job was redundant. Though I also think it was probably very short, and that Conrad did pretty much all the talking. Also Bouvat-Merlin’s “adviser” role will consist of being asked “what would you do?” and them then doing the opposite.

Bouvat-Merlin and departed CEO Patrick Spence have to take the blame for ignoring all the people inside the company telling them not to release the updated app. When bad news can’t travel up a company, there will be calamities. (In passing, I wonder how well Tim Cook and those around him can hear any bad news from inside the company.)
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Apple will soon receive ‘made in America’ chips from TSMC’s Arizona fab • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

»

Apple is already testing the initial batch of processors produced for its devices by TSMC Arizona, reports Nikkei Asia. To begin with, the tests intend to compare the Arizona output to see if the quality is similar to chips produced in TSMC’s cutting-edge fabs in Taiwan. If the chip quality verification testing does not encounter any hiccups, the source says that the first batch of mass-produced chips from the Arizona fab is expected to arrive at iDevice makers as early as this quarter. If this is the case, Apple will likely be TSMC’s first American customer to use locally made chips. AMD and Nvidia will likely follow suit soon, as they’re also running wafer test production there.

The entry of locally produced chips in the American market is a big win for the United States’ push for silicon independence, especially as it massively relies on Taiwan for the majority of its most advanced chips. Taiwan is located in a high-risk location, with the belligerent CCP-controlled China having the island in its sights. The island is also prone to natural disasters, which can disrupt semiconductor production and result in supply crunch situations.

However, even if Apple gives the go signal to TSMC and the latter starts making chips in Arizona, the processors still need to be shipped back to Amkor in Taiwan for packaging until TSMC completes its facility in Peoria, Arizona. But whatever the case, this is a significant push in the right direction for the U.S., especially as the Arizona fab has been delayed for about a year due to various issues. Aside from TSMC and Amkor, other suppliers to these companies, like LCY Chemical, are also setting up in Arizona. That way, they could stay near their client and simplify logistics.

Despite importing about half of its employees from Taiwan, it seems that the common American is also slowly benefitting from TSMC’s presence in Arizona, especially as it’s reported that the company has started aggressive recruitment from American universities.

«

“The common American”? An earlier report on this site says that the processors are 4nm versions of the A16 Bionic system-on-chip used in Apple’s iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus and the main processor of Apple’s S9 system-in-package for smartwatches, which has two 64-bit cores and a quad-core neural engine.
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If you ever see this speed sign, you’re probably going to die (and everyone else probably has) • The Autopian

Lewin Day:

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Back in the mid-20th century, America was tangling with the realities of nuclear war. Top generals contemplated targeting strategies, while engineers mused over whether there was anything to be done top stop a torrent of enemy missiles falling across the nation. These superweapons seemed to promise destruction on an overbearing scale, threatening the very existence of human civilization itself.

Against this bleak backdrop, government administrators turned to the concept of Civil Defense. The idea was to do whatever could be done to protect the citizens of the nation from the horrors of nuclear war and, crucially, its immediate aftermath. In turn, the Department of Transport worked up some rather depressing road signs to help people get where they needed to be in these bleak and trying times.

Flip open the 1961 edition of the MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, ie traffic signs and signals), and you’ll find an important section on Civil Defense. It featured a handful of designs for traffic management in a post-nuclear world. Perhaps most interesting was the “MAINTAIN TOP SAFE SPEED” sign, designated CD-4. Its purpose was highly unique:

»

The “MAINTAIN TOP SAFE SPEED” sign may be used on highways where radiological contamination is such as to limit the permissable exposure time for occupants of vehicles passing through the area. Since any speed zoning would be impractical under such emergency conditions, no minimum speed limit can be prescribed by the sign in numerical terms. Where traffic is supervised by a traffic regulation post, official instructions will usually be given verbally, and the sign will serve as an occasional reminder of the urgent need for all reasonable speed.

«

«

Yes! You’re driving through the Death Zone, perhaps trying to reach the fallout shelter, hoping they’ve kept it open for you and have room. And plenty of food.
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Meta to cut 5% of employees deemed unfit for Zuckerberg’s AI-fueled future • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Anticipating that 2025 will be an “intense year” requiring rapid innovation, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly announced that Meta would be cutting 5% of its workforce—targeting “lowest performers.”

Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta’s internal Workplace forum Tuesday. In it, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta was shifting its strategy to “move out low performers faster” so that Meta can hire new talent to fill those vacancies this year.

“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management,” Zuckerberg said. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”

Cuts will likely impact more than 3,600 employees, as Meta’s most recent headcount in September totaled about 72,000 employees. It may not be as straightforward as letting go anyone with an unsatisfactory performance review, as Zuckerberg said that any employee not currently meeting expectations could be spared if Meta is “optimistic about their future performance,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Any employees affected will be notified by February 10 and receive “generous severance,” Zuckerberg’s memo promised.

This is the biggest round of cuts at Meta since 2023, when Meta laid off 10,000 employees during what Zuckerberg dubbed the “year of efficiency.” Those layoffs followed a prior round where 11,000 lost their jobs and Zuckerberg realized that “leaner is better.” He told employees in 2023 that a “surprising result” from reducing the workforce was “that many things have gone faster.”

«

I wonder if any of these “lower performers” are in the metaverse division, which it’s hard to believe is thriving. Is anyone doing a timeline of how long it is since Zuckerberg said “metaverse”?
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Americans are tipping less than they have in years • WSJ via MSN

Heather Haddon:

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Tipping at U.S. sit-down restaurants in the past six years peaked at 19.9% in early 2021, when Americans were likely to express gratitude as Covid-19 lockdowns eased.

People have become increasingly grumpy about dining out. Many have recoiled at menu prices that have risen sharply in recent years, and are going out less and ordering less when they do. Some restaurants have added mandatory gratuities and service fees to bills, driving up bills and resulting in some diners tipping less.

“Instead of that second or third drink, people will go home,” said Andrea Hill, director of operations for HMC Hospitality Group, a Chicago operator of Hooters restaurants. “Our servers are making less per table.” A Hooters location in downtown Chicago sells a BBQ Bacon Cheddar burger for $12.49.

John Reilly, a doctor in Washington, D.C., considers himself a generous tipper. But he’s hitting his limit as menu prices rise. “Restaurants have not been doing well here in D.C., and price definitely has much do with it,” Reilly said.

About 38% of consumers reported tipping restaurant servers 20% or more in 2024, according to a survey last fall of 1,000 consumers by restaurant technology company Popmenu. That’s down from 56% of consumers in 2021, according to the company, which said budgets are weighing more on diners’ minds.

Americans went to restaurants less in 2024 than they did in 2023. Restaurant chains and operators last year declared the most bankruptcies in decades, with the exception of 2020, when Covid-19 shutdowns decimated the industry, according to an analysis of BankruptcyData.com records. High-profile bankruptcies in 2024 included casual-dining chains Red Lobster and TGI Fridays.

Restaurant workers didn’t fare much better. Waiters, bartenders, cooks and other restaurant workers averaged less time working per week last year than 2023, according to federal data.

Restaurant servers know customers are annoyed about how often they’re now asked for tips. Payment systems on digital tablets prompt them to add gratuities, even at businesses like airport concessions and gas stations.

“I can see tipping culture in the U.S. cracking,” said Jenni Emmons, a server at an upscale Chicago restaurant. “People are being pressured to tip for things they didn’t used to, and I feel my income is under threat because of this.”

«

The American tipping culture is bonkers. Then again, this story seems to be perennial, and always in the same direction. Here’s a WSJ story saying much the same from November 2023, for example.
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Cost of Sizewell C nuclear project expected to reach close to £40bn • Financial Times

Jim Pickard, Rachel Millard and Gill Plimmer:

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The sum is double the £20bn estimate given by developer EDF and the UK government for the project in 2020, reflecting surging construction costs as well as the implications of delays and cost overruns at sister site Hinkley Point C. 

The higher estimate is likely to raise questions over the government’s strategy for a nuclear power revival, at a time of stretched government finances and cost of living concerns. 

EDF says that once up and running, Sizewell C should be able to supply low carbon electricity to the equivalent of about 6mn homes for 60 years.  

The Treasury is due to decide whether to go ahead with the project in this year’s multiyear spending review, according to officials. 

The UK government and French energy group EDF were the initial backers of Sizewell C but they are trying to raise billions of pounds from new investors, a process that is dragging on longer than planned.  

Earlier this month the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Desnz) said it could not reveal the current cost estimate for the project as it was “commercially sensitive”. 

But one senior government figure and two well-placed industry sources said that a reasonable assumption for the cost of building Sizewell C would be about £40bn in 2025 prices.

The government has already awarded £3.7bn of state funding to the project.

«

Nobody is quite able to explain why the cost is so gigantic and keeps going up. Allegedly, “lessons are being learnt” from the construction of Hinkley Point. Could we not look back at how the old nuclear stations were constructed and just, well, do that again? Or were they all wildly late and over budget?
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Free Our Feeds

»

Q: How is Free Our Feeds connected to the team at Bluesky?
Free Our Feeds is independent from Bluesky, but we have been in contact with the Bluesky team and they are supportive of the goals of the campaign. This is about developing a social media ecosystem on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, which is ultimately what Bluesky wants as well.

Free Our Feeds want to make sure that the open social media infrastructure that Bluesky has built remains operated in the public interest. As Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said “billionaire-proofing” relies on people outside of Bluesky adopting the protocol and making it their own. Bluesky’s great work to date and good intentions are clear, however social infrastructure run in the public interest cannot be governed by a private social media company in the long term.

Q: What will the money be used for?
It will take $30m over three years for us to realize our three step plan to free our feeds from billionaire control:

• Establish a public-interest foundation to support Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, to become independent and globally standardized.

• Build independent infrastructure, such as a second “relay,” guaranteeing Bluesky users and developers have uninterrupted access to data streams, regardless of corporate decisions.

• Fund developers to create a vibrant ecosystem of social applications built on open protocols, fostering healthier and more equitable online spaces.

«

Unless something remarkable happens, this will be a wonderful project that will achieve what it intends to do, and its uptake will be limited to nerds who have heard of it and are deeply in agreement with its aims, while normal people will never have heard of it and won’t use it, and even when they do hear of it won’t see the point.

If you think this is cynical, stop a random person in the street today and ask them if they’ve heard of the social media platform Mammoth. They won’t have (it doesn’t exist). Ask them if they’ve heard of Mastodon. Same answer.
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EU reassesses tech probes into Apple, Google and Meta • Financial Times

Javier Espinoza and Henry Foy:

»

Brussels is reassessing its investigations of tech groups including Apple, Meta and Google, just as the US companies urge president-elect Donald Trump to intervene against what they characterise as overzealous EU enforcement.

The review, which could lead to the European Commission scaling back or changing the remit of the probes, will cover all cases launched since March last year under the EU’s digital markets regulations, according to two officials briefed on the move.

It comes as the Brussels body begins a new five-year term amid mounting pressure over its handling of the landmark cases and as Trump prepares to return to the White House next week.

“It’s going to be a whole new ballgame with these tech oligarchs so close to Trump and using that to pressurise us,” said a senior EU diplomat briefed on the review. “So much is up in the air right now.”

All decisions and potential fines will be paused while the review is completed, but technical work on the cases will continue, the officials said.

While some of the investigations under review are at an early stage, others are more advanced. Charges in a probe into Google’s alleged favouring of its app store had been expected last year.

Two other EU officials said Brussels regulators were now waiting for political direction to take final decisions on the Google, Apple and Meta cases.

«

Oh, you thought these things were entirely driven by objective legal standards? Watch and learn.
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Scammer uses deepfakes to dupe woman into thinking she is dating Brad Pitt, gets divorced and sends £697,000 for ‘cancer treatment’ • Daily Mail

James Reynolds:

»

A scammer duped a French woman into paying out hundreds of thousands of pounds after convincing her they were Brad Pitt with reels of AI-generated images.

The 53-year-old victim shelled out 830,000 euros (£697,000) to help with what she believed was cancer treatment for the film star.

The interior designer told French channel TF1 that the ordeal started when she received a message on social media from someone claiming to be the actor’s mother after sharing photos of her lavish ski trip to Tignes on Instagram.

A day later, she received a second message from an account posing as Brad Pitt, saying his mother had spoken a lot about her already.

The victim, who said she was going through a difficult period with her millionaire husband, said she struck up an unlikely friendship with the account from February 2023, receiving poems and kind affirmations.

‘There are so few men who write you this kind of thing. I liked the man I was talking to. He knew how to talk to women, it was always very well done,’ she said, as reported by BFMTV.

She revealed she did have her suspicions and thought the account was fake at first, but after messaging every day and receiving AI generated photos and videos of the star, she became more at ease.

«

Good old internet, bringing people together. Unfortunately, it’s the most scheming and the most credulous. Now with the added ingredient of deepfakes.
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Stop trying to schedule a call with me • Mat Duggan

Mathew Duggan:

»

One of the biggest hurdles for me when trying out a new service or product is the inevitable harassment that follows. It always starts innocuously:

“Hey, I saw you were checking out our service. Let me know if you have any questions!”

Fine, whatever. You have documentation, so I’m not going to email you, but I understand that we’re all just doing our jobs.

Then, it escalates.

“Hi, I’m your customer success fun-gineer! Just checking in to make sure you’re having the best possible experience with your trial!”

Chances are, I signed up to see if your tool can do one specific thing. If it doesn’t, I’ve already mentally moved on and forgotten about it. So, when you email me, I’m either actively evaluating whether to buy your product, or I have no idea why you’re reaching out.

And now, I’m stuck on your mailing list forever. I get notifications about all your new releases and launches, which forces me to make a choice every time:

• “Obviously, I don’t care about this anymore.”
• “But what if they’ve finally added the feature I wanted?”

Since your mailing list is apparently the only place on Earth to find out if Platform A has added Feature X (because putting release notes somewhere accessible is apparently too hard), I have to weigh unsubscribing every time I see one of your marketing emails.

«

But it gets worse! As some people are familiar with, including Duggan.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

After a disastrous app relaunch, Sonos’s chief executive has resigned – but the dire app remains. Wrong way round, surely? CC-licensed photo by Patrick Quinn-Graham 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Unrelaunched. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after disastrous app launch • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is resigning from the job as of Monday, effective immediately, with board member Tom Conrad filling the role of interim CEO. It’s the most dramatic development yet in an eight-month saga that has proven to be the most challenging time in Sonos’ history.

The company’s decision to prematurely release a buggy, completely overhauled new app back in May — with crucial features missing at launch — outraged customers and kicked off a monthslong domino effect that included layoffs, a sharp decline in employee morale, and a public apology tour. The Sonos Ace headphones, rumoured to be the whole reason behind the hurried app, were immediately overshadowed by the controversy, and my sources tell me that sales numbers remain dismal. Sonos’ community forums and subreddit have been dominated by complaints and an overwhelmingly negative sentiment since the spring.

In October, Sonos tried to get a handle on the situation, which, by then, had spiraled into a full-on PR disaster, by outlining a turnaround plan. The company vowed to strengthen product development principles, increase transparency internally, and take other steps that it said would prevent any mistake of this magnitude from ever happening again. I can also report for the first time that Sonos hired a crisis management public relations firm to help navigate the ordeal.

…In case you were wondering, that [new] direction [outlined by a spokesperson] will not include a return to the old Sonos app; Pategas said the company remains fully committed to the new software, which has received a slew of bug fixes and gradually added back previous features over the last several months. It’s gotten better, but even this far along, complaints remain about speakers randomly vanishing from the app and other problems.

…Conrad’s career includes a 10-year tenure as chief technology officer at Pandora and two years as VP of product at Snapchat. He worked on Apple’s Finder software during the ’90s. Most recently, Conrad served as chief product officer for the ill-fated Quibi streaming service. Pategas believes he’s a great fit for the interim CEO position because he’s keenly aware of the company’s current predicament; Conrad and chief innovation officer Nick Millington have already been spearheading Sonos’ fix-the-app effort for months.

«

Spence gets $1.875m as severance pay, which must soften the blow a little. The fix-the-app effort has had next to no effect, in my experience: on opening the app, it takes about 10 seconds to update. By contrast, the third-party Sonophone app updates at once, and covers both old and new speaker sets.

Sonos is in deep trouble. Revenues are shrinking and losses are growing. Where is the growth going to come from? Where will the profits come from? Why don’t they just swallow their pride and buy Sonophone? Hard questions. Good products, good firmware, lousy user interface.

There’s a suspicion on Reddit that Sonos’s next move will be to introduce a subscription model. That sounds just like what a struggling – or even successful – company would do.
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Global fact-checkers were disappointed, not surprised, Meta ended its program • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

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While reports of U.S.-based fact-checkers being blindsided are doing the rounds, global fact-checking organizations have seen Facebook’s support for the program waning for some time now. 

“I don’t think this decision came out of nowhere,” Zainab Husain, managing editor of the Pakistan-based Soch Fact Check, told Rest of World. Soch Fact Check is made up of 10 journalists who put out editorials fact-checking misinformation. Husain said she’d heard rumors of the program shutting down for the past two years. 

Since 2016, Meta has attempted to combat misinformation by partnering with credible fact-checking organizations in 119 countries to label misinformation and link out to explanatory posts from its partners. All of Meta’s partners are certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which ensures standardization across the globe. The organizations flag and label content — decisions related to content and account removal are then made entirely by Meta, multiple fact-checking organizations and civil society groups told Rest of World. 

In response to questions, Meta directed Rest of World to its company blog post.

“Meta has been gradually lowering its investment in fact-checking for years,” Eliška Pírková, senior policy analyst and global freedom of expression lead at digital rights nonprofit Access Now, told Rest of World. Some fact-checking organizations that spoke to Rest of World said the fallout will likely be limited because Meta failed to make substantial fact-checking investments in their regions to begin with.

«

The web headline – what search engines see, as opposed to the headline shown to humans visiting the page – is “Meta drops fact-checking partnerships; global watchdogs scramble”. That’s not close to what the story says! If you think I’m harping on about this, it’s because news organisations are clearly telling search engines one thing, and readers another. Which one is meant to be correct, exactly? If you remembered “global fact-checkers disappointed” and tried a search on it, would this page be turned up? This needs fact-checking, really.

That said, the whole fact-checking business has hung so heavily on Facebook for ages that you’d be foolish not to have diversified much earlier.
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Ministers mull allowing private firms to make profit from NHS data in AI push • The Guardian

Kiran Stacey and Dan Milmo:

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Keir Starmer on Monday announced a push to open up the government to AI innovation, including allowing companies to use anonymised patient data to develop new treatments, drugs and diagnostic tools.

With the prime minister and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, under pressure over Britain’s economic outlook, Starmer said AI could bolster the country’s anaemic growth, as he put concerns over privacy, disinformation and discrimination to one side.

“We are in a unique position in this country, because we’ve got the National Health Service, and the use of that data has already driven forward advances in medicine, and will continue to do so,” he told an audience in east London.

“We have to see this as a huge opportunity that will impact on the lives of millions of people really profoundly.”

Starmer added: “It is important that we keep control of that data. I completely accept that challenge, and we will also do so, but I don’t think that we should have a defensive stance here that will inhibit the sort of breakthroughs that we need.”

…Starmer said on Monday that AI could help give the UK the economic boost it needed, adding that the technology had the potential “to increase productivity hugely, to do things differently, to provide a better economy that works in a different way in the future”.

Part of that, as detailed in a report by the technology investor Matt Clifford, will be to create new datasets for startups and researchers to train their AI models. Data from various sources will be included, such as content from the National Archives and the BBC, as well as anonymised NHS records.

Officials are working out the details on how those records will be shared, but said on Monday that they would take into account national security and ethical concerns.

…The Department for Work and Pensions was using an algorithm to flag up benefit fraud, which one MP believed had mistakenly led to dozens of people having their payments cancelled removed. A facial recognition tool used by the Metropolitan police was found to make more mistakes recognising Black and Asian faces than white ones under certain settings. And an algorithm used by the Home Office to flag up sham marriages had been disproportionately selecting people of certain nationalities.

«

But were the marriages sham, or not? Also, those are relatively primitive applications. There’s lots of potential for AI here; but nobody wants to imagine a better system. It really is a confederation of Eeyores.

(Starmer’s speech on AI is at the Financial Times.. inexplicably behind the paywall.)
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The cravenness of Mark Zuckerberg • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

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I should start by saying that I have some major issues with the whole concept of fact-checking in the context of social media, which I have expressed publicly a number of times. When a Bloomberg columnist asked for examples of fact-checkers showing political bias, Meta sent back three pieces, including a column I wrote in 2021, in which I argued that fact-checking is often used as censorship. I have also written positively about community notes, though that system has limitations as well.

And while the online spread of mis- and disinformation concerns me greatly, it is pretty much impossible for fact-checking to be done truly objectively given that all humans have biases. Choices have to be made about which claims to check and which to wave through. So the idea that you can thoroughly “fact-check” an entire social network has always been a fantasy. And there are few financial incentives for platforms to do so (unless they are worried about being fined by regulators).

The problem I have with all this is not so much the substance of what is going on at Meta. I even think that moving the content moderation teams from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas — a Democratic city in a largely very Republican state — so as to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content”, as Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, is a fairly sensible idea. But the very phrasing of that gives away his true motives: this is not about principles, but optics and pleasing the soon-to-be-resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

My issue with Zuckerberg is his spinelessness and opportunism. Ask yourself this: is there any chance that Zuckerberg would be making all these changes at Meta — he has also appointed Trump ally Dana White to the board, and replaced Nick Clegg with prominent Republican Joel Kaplan as president of global affairs — if Kamala Harris had won in November?

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Copyright (probably) won’t save anyone from AI • Techtris

James Ball on the perennial issue of “ah but we can sue the AI chatbot creators for copyright infringement”:

»

Sometimes, AIs output chunks of text that are just reproducing copyright material upon which they were trained. These are simple – everyone agrees these violate copyright, and if they’re too common, these will result in lost cases and payouts.

But neither the media nor big tech thinks these are what their argument centres upon – it will be relatively easy to minimise this kind of obvious copyright violation. The NYT included these in their lawsuit because they generate good headlines and are an obviously winnable part of the argument. They are not core to the case.

Instead, the media is trying to argue that AIs shouldn’t be able to ingest their copyrighted material even if what it outputs doesn’t violate copyright. That’s a more difficult case to make: it is essentially asking the courts to create a new threshold, allowing behaviour from humans but not if an automated system is doing it. That could be harder than it first looks.

Q: But when I research an article, I DON’T DOWNLOAD AND COPY MILLIONS OF DOCUMENTS AT ONCE

An AI ‘learning’ by ingesting copyrighted material feels like an injustice in a way that a human doing the same does not. Part of this is just normative: humans and AIs are different. Part of it is about the amount of money at stake, and the threat to the existing industries. But part of it is about scale: no human writer uses copyright materials in anything like the volumes of modern AI systems.

That might tempt people to think that this is why the copyright argument is winnable: if AI companies are making copies of all of this copyrighted work to power their models, surely that copy breaches copyright, even if it isn’t published to the public? This definitely feels like it’s an argument on surer footing.

However, it’s not without its problems. The first is that AI models don’t use their training data in the way many of us might imagine. If we’ve thought about how something like ChatGPT answers our questions, we might imagine that it takes our questions and looks it up against a database containing all of its training data – like we might look up a record in an archive, or a book in a library.

In reality, ChatGPT and its rivals don’t actually store their training data, let alone run queries against it. Instead, the data is used to create ‘weightings’ which influence how it responds to different prompts, and then it is discarded. There is no permanent copy of the training data packaged alongside commercial AI models – by the time the model is launched, the training data is surplus to requirements.

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James and I are on exactly the same page here. I don’t see the copyright lawsuits prevailing.
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How research credibility suffers in a quantified society • Social Science Space

Berend van der Kolk:

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Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions.

To gauge research quality, we count papers, citations, and calculate impact factors. The higher the scores, the better. Academic performance is often expressed in numbers. Why? Quantification reduces complexity, makes academia manageable, allows easy comparisons among scholars and institutions, and provides administrators with a feeling of grip on reality. Besides, numbers seem objective and fair, which is why we use them to allocate status, tenure, attention, and funding to those who score well on these indicators.

The result of this? Quantity is often valued over quality. In [the book] The Quantified Society I coin the term “indicatorism”: a blind focus on enhancing indicators in spreadsheets, while losing sight of what really matters. It seems we’re sometimes busier with “scoring” and “producing” than with “understanding”.

As a result, some started gaming the system. The rector of one of the world’s oldest universities, for one, set up citation cartels to boost his citation scores, while others reportedly buy(!) bogus citations. Even top-ranked institutions seem to play the indicator game by submitting false data to improve their position on university rankings!

While abandoning metrics and rankings in academia altogether is too drastic, we must critically rethink their current hegemony. As a researcher of metrics, I acknowledge metrics can be used for good, i.e., to facilitate accountability, motivate, or obtain feedback and improve. Yet, when metrics are not used to obtain feedback but instead become targets, they cease to be good measures of performance, as Goodhart’s law dictates. The costs of using the metrics this way probably outweigh the benefits.

«

There are so many interlocking perverse incentives in academia at the moment: “success” measured in papers published and impact, while for academic journal publishers, getting more subscribers by accepting more papers in more niche topics in more obscure journals maximises revenue and profit. Everything needs a reset.
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Tubi or not Tubi • The Washington Post

Travis Andrews:

»

King Arthur pursued the Holy Grail. Indiana Jones scoured for precious artifacts. Harold and Kumar sought White Castle burgers.

Adam Schmersal hunts for a different type of jewel: the most ridiculous movies on the most ridiculous streaming service. And he’s struck pay dirt again and again.

There’s “Dracula’s Angel,” a gothic horror romance that’s animated in the style of the Sims video game series. There’s the films of Dustin Ferguson, a director who puts out B-movies at an astonishing rate. Their titles speak for themselves: “Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told,” “Demonoids From Hell,” “Amityville in the Hood,” “Arachnado 2: Flaming Spiders.” And don’t forget “Big Bad CGI Monsters.”

“It’s unreal what he does,” says Schmersal, a 36-year-old service technician in Ohio. “It’s not good.”

Then there’s “Baby Cat,” about a woman who falls in love with a cat, which is played by a human wearing cat ears. Yes, romantically. “I couldn’t predict the next five seconds the entire time I was watching,” Schmersal says.

He dubs these flicks Tubi Treasures, and he has been posting his discoveries to Reddit for the past year.
These are the kind of movies you might have once found mindlessly flipping through the channels, back before streaming came along and algorithms began crafting our entertainment diets.

But Tubi is a streaming service that doesn’t feel like one. Owned by Fox, it’s free, so long as you can stomach a few ads (you know, like old TV). It’s a type of streaming service referred to in the industry as a FAST service — free, ad-supported TV.

You probably already have it installed somewhere — your phone, your smart TV, your gaming system, your Roku, who knows, maybe your microwave — without even knowing it.

«

At last a good headline. (Though the web headline is different, and boring.) I’m pretty sure I haven’t got Tubi installed anywhere. It claims to have the biggest streaming library of anyone. Then again, Sturgeon’s Law applies: 90% of anything is crap.
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Mirror journalists given individual online page-view targets • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

»

Mirror journalists have been given individual targets for online page views in a move that has raised concerns for some about the potential impact on editorial quality and future job security.

Some journalists whose roles are currently more focused on supporting the print edition are particularly concerned about hitting online page-view targets.

Page views is seen by some as a metric that encourages reporters to produce quickly-written stories with overly sensational headlines about a narrow range of topics (such as the weather and TV) .

In 2015 Wired reported: “The page view notoriously spawned that most reviled of internet aggravations: clickbait. Quality became less important than provocation; the curiosity gap supplanted craft.”

Some argue that returning visitors or dwell time are better metrics to focus on because they encourage a community of returning readers who may ultimately be persuaded to register with a publication or even subscribe. But chief executive Jim Mullen told staff last year: “I need to get the page views. That is the way we sell advertising blocks, and advertising blocks deliver revenue.”

…Monthly targets for Mirror reporters start at around 250,000 page views per month and vary from journalist to journalist depending on previous performance and the subject matter they are covering. Some are as high as one million page views per month.

Some individuals feel the new page-view targets are unfairly high. One insider said they did not know anyone who had come close to hitting their targets in previous months.

However another Reach source told Press Gazette many journalists have previously met and exceeded their new online targets.

«

For clarity: the Mirror (formerly Daily Mirror, formerly one of the biggest and only left-wing tabloid in Britain) is now owned by Reach plc, which also owns loads of local papers, where it has imposed similarly daft targets. This is surely going to lead to a death spiral: those targets aren’t feasible, and don’t make commercial sense either. Pageviews was bad a decade ago, and it’s bad now.
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Worldwide smartphone shipments grew 6.4% in 2024, despite macro challenges • IDC

»

According to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker , global smartphone shipments increased 2.4% year-over-year (YoY) to 331.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2024 (4Q24).

This marks the sixth consecutive quarter of shipment growth, closing the whole year with 6.4% growth and 1.24 billion shipments, marking a strong recovery after two challenging years of decline. We expect the market to continue growing in 2025, albeit at a slower pace, as refresh cycles continue growing and pent-up demand is fulfilled.

…While Apple and Samsung maintained the top two positions in Q4 and for the year, both companies witnessed YoY declines, and their shares shrunk thanks to the super aggressive growth of Chinese vendors this year—who drove the overall market by focusing on low-end devices, rapid expansion and development in China. Outside of Apple and Samsung, Xiaomi came in third for the quarter and the year, with the highest YoY growth rate among the Top 5 players.

«

Amazingly, Apple has outsold Samsung for two entire years straight – while three Chinese vendors (Xiaomi, Transsion and OPPO) sold nearly as many as the two giants combined.

Just to remind you that this is a huge, multi-billion dollar business which continues to tick over, and probably will do for decades to come.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sparks from power lines are suspected of causing many of the fires that have devastated Los Angeles. CC-licensed photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Welcome back! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The Anti-Social Century • The Atlantic

Derek Thompson:

»

The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years. “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,” the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis told me. “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are much more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29% in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

The evolution of restaurants is retracing the trajectory of another American industry: Hollywood. In the 1930s, video entertainment existed only in theaters, and the typical American went to the movies several times a month. Film was a necessarily collective experience, something enjoyed with friends and in the company of strangers. But technology has turned film into a home delivery system. Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.

The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. (He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.)

«

This is very reminiscent of “Bowling Alone”, which came out in 2000, and described how American communities (such as bowling leagues) had evaporated since 1950. This seems to find the same thread.
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Massive VW data leak exposed 800,000 EV owners’ movements, from homes to brothels • Carscoops

Thanos Pappas:

»

Many people worry about hackers stealing their personal data, but sometimes, the worst breaches come not from shadowy cybercriminals but straight from the companies we trust. According to a new report from Germany, the VW Group stored sensitive information for 800,000 electric vehicles from various brands on a poorly secured and misconfigured Amazon cloud storage system—essentially leaving the digital door wide open for anyone to waltz in. And not just briefly, but for months on end.

The breach impacts fully electric models across Audi, VW, Seat, and Skoda brands, affecting vehicles not just in Germany but throughout Europe and other parts of the world. Among the treasure trove of exposed data were GPS coordinates, battery charge levels, and other key details about vehicle status, like whether it was switched on or off. That’s right, someone with the right know-how could casually snoop on your car’s whereabouts and habits.

It gets worse. A more tech-savvy user could reportedly connect vehicles to their owners’ personal credentials, thanks to additional data accessible through VW Group’s online services

Crucially, in 466,000 of the 800,000 cases, the location data was so precise that anyone with access could create a detailed profile of each owner’s daily habits. As reported by Spiegel, the massive list of affected owners isn’t just a who’s-who of regular folks. It includes German politicians, entrepreneurs, Hamburg police officers (the entire EV fleet, no less), and even suspected intelligence service employees. Yes, even spies may have been caught up in this digital debacle.

«

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H5N1: much more than you wanted to know • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander with a long post about the origins of flu:

»

It’s not uncommon for humans to catch an animal disease. This doesn’t mean the disease has “crossed over” to humans. If the virus isn’t suited to human-to-human transmission, it simply dies off (either before or after killing its human host). Thus, chicken farmers have been reporting scattered H5N1 cases since 1997; now that the virus has spread to cattle, cow farmers have started reporting the same.

A Metaculus comment on this topic introduced me to the phrase “biocomputational surface”. Every viral replication that takes place in a human gives the virus one more chance to develop the set of mutations that makes it human-transmissible and start the next pandemic.

Or, more likely, every viral replication that takes place in a human who has both the H5N1 bird flu and a normal human flu – or in a pig which has both viruses – gives the virus one extra chance to reassort in a way that produces a bird-antigen-fortified human-adapted flu virus.

This doesn’t mean H5N1 will definitely become human-transmissible soon. Many viruses hang out on the borders of transmissibility for decades. Some, for unclear reasons, never cross over at all. But all of this is compatible with the virus becoming transmissible soon.

«

He then goes on to look at the likelihood of a pandemic – and whether the betting markets agree. Read this and be much wiser.
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Number of power grid faults in three areas spiked before fires began • Los Angeles Times

Noah Goldberg and Salvador Hernandez:

»

The number of faults on the power grid near three of the major Los Angeles County fires skyrocketed in the hours before the blazes began, according to a company that monitors electrical activity.

Bob Marshall, the chief executive of Whisker Labs, said in an interview with The Times that the areas near the Eaton, Palisades and Hurst fires all saw massive increases in faults in the hours leading up to the fires. Faults on the power grid are caused by tree limbs hitting electrical wires or wires hitting one another, among other causes. Each fault causes a spark.

The fires together have destroyed or damaged more than 9,000 structures. Power equipment has caused destructive wind-driven California wildfires in the past, but L.A. city and county fire officials say their investigators have not determined what sparked any of the fires.

“What I cannot say is one of these faults sparked the fire. I don’t know that,” Marshall said in an interview. “But it just takes one to start the fire.”

Data shared with The Times, but not yet released publicly, showed the increase in faults.

In the area of the Palisades fire, in the hour before the fire started, there were 25 faults on the grid. In the hour that the fire started, there were 18 faults, according to Whisker Labs’ data.

«

Inexplicably, the original headline on this article was “Southern California Edison preserving equipment near Eaton fire starting point”. Which doesn’t bear any relation to the top of the story in the above extract. It barely gets mentioned in the story total. When will American papers learn to write headlines, I wonder?
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Just how many ads are there on ad-supported streaming apps, really? • Sherwood News

Jon Keegan:

»

It’s getting harder to avoid ads on streaming video. For cord-cutters, after years of living in ad-free bliss, the trend is heading toward ads — a lot of ads.

The big streaming platforms are all boosting the price of their ad-free subscriptions, trying to get as many people over to an ad-supported tier, which has a greater potential revenue per user despite the lower monthly fees.

After suffering through what seemed to be an absurd number of ads recently while watching a show on my ad-supported Paramount+ plan, I decided to gather some data and see exactly how many ads are being crammed into the typical program, and how much time they’re taking up during the viewing session.

I signed up for new ad-supported accounts on Netflix, Peacock, Disney+, Max, Paramount+, and Hulu and watched all the ads on 12 popular shows — two on each platform — so you didn’t have to. You’re welcome.

The first thing I wanted to quantify was exactly how much of my viewing went to ads versus the program itself.

Let’s take a look at what we learned from each platform’s shows.

«

The ad load varies – on his perhaps limited investigation – from 3% (Netflix) to 16% (Disney+). Though they all have three or four ad breaks, which I think is the most frustrating thing about ads. It’s the interruption that’s annoying, and the uncertainty about how long the interruption will go on. Also, they didn’t look at Amazon, which has an ad-supported version of Prime.
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‘A time bomb’: fears for children being poisoned by lead paint in UK homes • Financial Times

Laura Hughes:

»

For six months this year, Xena Buckle quarantined her family into the one room in her council house in south London that she knew would not poison her six-year-old son.

Tests had just revealed that the toxic metal lead was present in Rhegon’s blood at almost twice the UK’s medical intervention level of 5 microgrammes per decilitre. Flaking lead paint in the property was to blame. 

The UK is home to some of the oldest housing in the world, and many homes still have lead paint, which as it flakes and rubs off walls, windows and door frames creates a poisonous dust that can be harmful to humans if ingested.

Before it was banned in 1992, lead paint in the UK may have contained up to 50% lead by weight, “which is potentially capable of causing lead poisoning in a small child if they eat just a single flake”, according to government guidance published in October.

The well-established health risks associated with exposure to the metal — which has a harmful impact on almost every organ in the human body — have led to a ban on its use in petrol, domestic paint and pipes in the UK.

But experts said a lack of routine testing meant hundreds of thousands of children would be silently suffering from the effects of lead poisoning.

“This is a time bomb and it’s not going to go away,” said Alan Emond, emeritus professor of child health at Bristol Medical School. “By not facing up to it now, we are going to expose another generation to lead.”

«

It took Hughes months to get the info together for this story. And here’s the other fun part: how do you get rid of the paint? If you chip or sand it off, you release it into the atmosphere.
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What happened to the live London Underground / bus maps? TfL happened • Traintimes

Matthew Somerville set up the live Tube trains map in June 2010, and it had been happily running since then using the official TfL API. But:

»

on 7th January 2025, I received two emails out of the blue; a vaguely personal one from someone at TfL telling me to remove the schematic Tube map, and my hosting provider received a very impersonal one from the “Trademark Enforcement team”. (That second one says “We informed the registrant of our complaint, but were unable to resolve this issue.” but presumably they can’t mean the first email sent about an hour earlier? This is the first I’ve ever heard from them.)

This is of course perfectly within their right so to do, though I would have hoped for a different approach. Sure, I could have made some changes and kept the maps up, although as above they have been fine with it for many years. But I believe it is possible to both “protect” your trademark (or whatever you think this is) and not treat people like this. And rewarding this heavy-handed approach (by continuing to provide a useful addition to their service with no contact bar this) to me feels wrong.

The internet isn’t what it was 15 years ago, and I can’t be bothered dealing with large organisations removing any semblance of joy from it. I’m sure they won’t care, but I am just too tired.

So sorry, the maps are all gone.

«

Utterly stupid on TfL’s part. Why have an API that’s not actually usable because you can’t put the trains on a map? Maybe this is the lesson of the internet: in time, all the good things die.
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Here are some of the weirdest gadgets we spotted at CES 2025 • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

As the gadget-filled spectacle that CES draws to a close, there’s much to anticipate and just as much that leaves us completely baffled.

We’ve already talked about the worst finds in the repairability and sustainability categories in our the worst of CES 2025. Now we turn an eye toward all the weird stuff that occupies the nooks and crannies of the Vegas show floor and has us wondering who decided to dedicate an engineering team’s time and salary toward such projects. 

There’s plenty of weirdness to pick through at CES every year, and we’ve whittled it down to these six items.

«

So glad not to be there. And to be honest, the “worst” list isn’t that much different from the weird ones. Read both and feel happy you didn’t go there too.

Anyway, that’s it done for another year, and dealt with in one link! Phew.
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One less thing to worry about in 2025: Yellowstone probably won’t go boom • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

It’s difficult to comprehend what 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock would look like. It’s even more difficult to imagine it being violently flung into the air. Yet the Yellowstone volcanic system blasted more than twice that amount of rock into the sky about 2 million years ago, and it has generated a number of massive (if somewhat smaller) eruptions since, and there have been even larger eruptions deeper in the past.

All of which might be enough to keep someone nervously watching the seismometers scattered throughout the area. But a new study suggests that there’s nothing to worry about in the near future: There’s not enough molten material pooled in one place to trigger the sort of violent eruptions that have caused massive disruptions in the past. The study also suggests that the primary focus of activity may be shifting outside of the caldera formed by past eruptions.

«

See? Good news does exist.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

At the end of September a crucial silicon mine in Spruce Pine was flooded by Hurricane Helene. Ever wonder what happened next? CC-licensed photo by State Archives of North Carolina Raleigh, NC on Flickr.

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This is the last Overspill of 2024 (220 editions, 44 weeks, not bad). We made it! See you again in 2025. (Not sure if it will be Monday 6th or 13th. Exciting!)

A selection of 10 links for you. Enjoy the break. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The ghosts in the machine • Harpers

Liz Pelly:

»

I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was new to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first report had just been published. Within a few days, the owner of an independent record label in New York dropped me a line to let me know about a mysterious phenomenon that was “in the air” and of growing concern to those in the indie music scene: Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.

At first, it sounded to me like a conspiracy theory. Surely, I thought, these artists were just DIY hustlers trying to game the system. But the tips kept coming. Over the next few months, I received more notes from readers, musicians, and label owners about the so-called fake-artist issue than about anything else. One digital strategist at an independent record label worried that the problem could soon grow more insidious. “So far it’s happening within a genre that mostly affects artists at labels like the one I work for, or Kranky, or Constellation,” the strategist said, referring to two long-running indie labels.

By July, the story had burst into public view, after a Vulture article resurfaced a year-old item from the trade press claiming that Spotify was filling some of its popular and relaxing mood playlists—such as those for “jazz,” “chill,” and “peaceful piano” music—with cheap fake-artist offerings created by the company. A Spotify spokesperson, in turn, told the music press that these reports were “categorically untrue, full stop”: the company was not creating its own fake-artist tracks. But while Spotify may not have created them, it stopped short of denying that it had added them to its playlists.

«

Deeply reported piece which does not make Spotify look good.
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America’s bird-flu luck has officially run out • The Atlantic

Yasmin Tayag:

»

The Louisiana patient was infected with a strain of the virus related to the one that sickened the Canadian teen but different from the one spreading among dairy herds, poultry, and farmworkers. The mutations in this strain “represent the ability of the virus to cause serious disease, but these instances should be isolated in humans for the time being,” Chin-Hong said.

But just because America is in the same place of steady precarity that it has been in for months doesn’t mean that’s a good place to be in. As I wrote in September, we are in an awkward state of in-between, in which experts are on high alert for concerning mutations but the public has no reason to worry—yet. “Right now, I agree that the risk to the general public is low, but we know avian influenza mutates quickly,” Anne Rimoin, an epidemiology professor at UCLA, told me.

The more transmissions among animals—in particular from birds to mammals—the more chances the virus has to mutate to become more threatening to the public. The longer the virus persists in the environment, “the greater potential to mutate, resort, and become more infectious and virulent to humans,” Maurice Pitesky, an animal-infectious-diseases expert at UC Davis, told me.

America is giving the virus a lot of chances to infect people. Although efforts to control the virus, such as regular testing of herds and bulk testing of raw milk, are under way, they have clearly not been enough. The spread of the virus geographically and across mammalian species is unprecedented, Pitesky said. He believes that more efforts should be directed toward shifting waterfowl—ducks, geese, and other wild birds responsible for spreading H5N1—away from commercial farms, where the virus is most likely to be transmitted to humans.

A shot for bird flu exists, and experts have urged the government to vaccinate farmworkers. “Farmers need help,” Pitesky said.

«

What will 2025 bring? Join us next year for Pandemic Watching Brief!
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IT expert convicted for repeatedly lying about inventing Bitcoin • BBC News

Joe Tidy:

»

A computer scientist has been found to have committed contempt of court for falsely and persistently claiming to be the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.

In March, the High Court ruled Craig Wright was not Satoshi, and ordered him to stop claiming he was.

However, he continued to launch legal cases asserting he had intellectual property rights to Bitcoin, including a claim he was owed $1.2 trillion ($911bn).

A judge said that amounted to a “flagrant breach” of the original court order and sentenced him to 12 months in prison, suspended for two years.

It means if Wright – who is from Australia but lives in the UK – continues to claim he invented the cryptocurrency he will face being jailed.

However, Wright, who appeared via videolink, refused to disclose where he was, saying only he was in Asia. It means an international arrest warrant would have to be issued if the UK authorities wanted to detain him.

Wright’s actions were described in court as “legal terrorism” that “put people through personal hell” in his campaign to be recognised as Bitcoin’s inventor.

The judge, Mr Justice Mellor, said Wright arguments were “legal nonsense” but acknowledged that he was not in the UK and “appears to be well aware of countries with which the UK does not have extradition arrangements”.

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And so we tie all that up. Can we hope we will hear no more from Craig Wright?
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Misleading Google search results on UK asylum seeker crime rate used 2017 data from Germany • Full Fact

»

Google’s search results and its AI overview have been giving misleading answers to questions about the number of crimes committed by asylum seekers in the UK—quoting figures that were actually from 2017 in Germany.

There’s no evidence these figures reflect the current crime rate among asylum seekers in the UK, though official data is limited and neither the Office for National Statistics (ONS) nor the Home Office publish equivalent UK figures.

But in recent months we’ve seen screenshots of some of these misleading Google search results circulated on social media.

After we contacted Google about this last week, the misleading results seem to be no longer appearing in searches on the topic.

A Google spokesperson told Full Fact: “We aim to surface relevant, high quality information in all our Search features and we continue to raise the bar for quality with ongoing updates and improvements. When issues arise—like if our features misinterpret web content or miss some context—we use those examples to improve and take appropriate action under our policies.”

«

Full Fact is a fact-checking organisation in the UK. Misleading results like this in its AI overview carry the imprimatur of Google, seen by many as “the source that’s correct”. Google’s response? “Oh”.
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October 2024: Quartz mine crucial for making chips reopens ten days after Hurricane Helene’s devastation • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

»

Sibelco, one of the two companies mining ultra-high-purity quartz at Spruce Pine, North Carolina, has restarted production a little over ten days after Hurricane Helene devastated the area. According to its press release, Sibelco only suffered minor damage, and all its employees are safe and accounted for. With the company restarting shipments to its customers and ramping production to full total capacity, the chipmaking industry is assured that it won’t have issues with the pure quartz supply needed to make the silicon base of semiconductors.

Hurricane Helene was a Category 4 hurricane that severely affected the Spruce Pine area, thus raising some fears that it would disrupt the accessible and affordable supply of quartz needed to create silicon ingots. These ingots are sliced into thin wafers and polished, then etched to form the chips we find on our computers. However, you can’t just melt ultra-pure silicon in any container to create the silicon ingots you need to make chips. Impurities in the container could react with the molten silicon, so you need an equally pure quartz crucible to hold it.

Most chip makers and their suppliers have enough silicon wafers or silicon ingots to weather a disruption in the supply chain, so many did not expect any significant industry repercussions from the tragedy. Besides, there are other quartz sources globally, although they’re likely not as readily available and affordable as what the North Carolina mines supply.

Nevertheless, Sibelco’s production restart is welcome news for the entire industry. After all, the supply chain horror stories that started during the 2020 COVID pandemic and extended until 2022 are fresh in our memories, and we don’t want a repeat of that.

«

Tying up loose ends: this was set up to be the Giant Drama at the end of September after Hurricane Helene: OMG semiconductor supply chain disruption?!?! Instead it turns out they got it all up and running again and everything’s hunky dory. Drink!
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US temporarily bans drones in parts of NJ, may use “deadly force” against aircraft – Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily banned drones over parts of New Jersey yesterday and said “the United States government may use deadly force against” airborne aircraft “if it is determined that the aircraft poses an imminent security threat.”

The FAA issued 22 orders imposing “temporary flight restrictions for special security reasons” until January 17, 2025. “At the request of federal security partners, the FAA published 22 Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) prohibiting drone flights over critical New Jersey infrastructure,” an FAA statement said.

…The latest notices follow numerous sightings of objects that appeared to be drones, which worried New Jersey residents and prompted state and federal officials to investigate and issue several public statements. The FAA last month imposed temporary flight restrictions at the Picatinny Arsenal, an Army research and manufacturing facility, and a Bedminster golf course owned by President-elect Donald Trump.

On December 16, a joint statement was issued by the US Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA, and Department of Defense. The “FBI has received tips of more than 5,000 reported drone sightings in the last few weeks with approximately 100 leads generated,” but evidence so far suggests “the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones,” the statement said. “We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast.” in the areas covered by this NOTAM” unless they have clearance for specific operations, the FAA said. Allowed operations include support for national defense, law enforcement, firefighting, and commercial operations “with a valid statement of work.”

“Pilots who do not adhere to the following proc[edure] may be intercepted, detained and interviewed by law enforcement/security personnel,” the FAA said. Violating the order could result in “civil penalties and the suspension or revocation of airmen certificates,” and criminal charges, the FAA said.

«

Americans have absolutely lost their minds over this. The UK had the same thing with drones allegedly being seen over Gatwick airport. No evidence was ever found.
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IMF reaches staff-level agreement with El Salvador on an Extended Fund Facility Arrangement • International Monetary Fund

»

IMF staff and the El Salvadoran authorities have reached a staff-level agreement on a new arrangement under the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility (EFF) for about US$1.4bn to support the government’s reform agenda. The agreement is subject to IMF Executive Board approval.

The program aims to strengthen fiscal and external sustainability, through implementation of an ambitious and growth-friendly fiscal consolidation plan, as well as actions to enhance reserve buffers.

Early efforts to improve governance, transparency, and resilience will be essential to boost confidence and the country’s growth potential, against the backdrop of strong security improvements.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin-related risks are being mitigated. Acceptance of Bitcoin by the private sector will be voluntary and public sector’s participation in Bitcoin-related activities will be confined.

«

Whoa whoa whoa. So Bukele’s experiment with El Salvador becoming the “bitcoin nation” is over. Taxes will be paid in US dollars, and the El Salvador government’s e-wallet Chivo will be “gradually unwound”.

I asked back in March 2022 how you’d evaluate the success of this experiment. The answer seems to be: could Bukele use it to get a good cash injection from the IMF?
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After 12 years of writing about bitcoin, here’s how my thinking has changed • Moneyness

JP Koning:

»

What I’ve learnt after many years of writing about bitcoin is that it’s a relatively innocuous phenomena, even pedestrian. When it does lead to bad outcomes, I’ve outlined how those can be handled with our existing tools. But here’s what does have me worried.

If you want to buy some bitcoins, go right ahead. We can even help by regulating the trading venues to make it safe. But don’t force others to play.

Alas, that seems to be where we are headed. There is a growing effort to arm-twist the rest of society into joining in by having governments acquire bitcoins, in the U.S.’s case a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The U.S. government has never entered the World Series of Poker. Nor has it gone to Vegas to bet billions to tax payer funds on roulette or built a strategic Powerball ticket reserve, but it appears to be genuinely entertaining the idea of rolling the dice on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is an incredibly infectious early-bird game, one that after sixteen years continues to find a constant stream of new recruits. How contagious? I originally estimated in a 2022 post, Three potential paths for the price of bitcoin, that adoption wouldn’t rise above 10%-15% of the global population, but I may have been underestimating its transmissibility. My worry is that calls for government support will only accelerate as more voters, government officials, and bureaucrats catch the orange coin mind virus and act on it. It begins with a small strategic reserve of a few billion dollars. It ends with the Department of Bitcoin Price Appreciation being allocated 50% of yearly tax revenues to make the number go up, to the detriment of infrastructure like roads, hospitals, and law enforcement. At that point we’ve entered a dystopia in which society rapidly deteriorates because we’ve all become obsessed on a bet.

Although I never wanted to ban Bitcoin, I can’t help but wonder whether a prohibition wouldn’t have been the better policy back in 2013 or 2014 given the new bitcoin-by-force path that advocates are pushing it towards. But it’s probably too late for that; the coin is already out of the bag. All I can hope is that my long history of writing on the topic might persuade a few readers that forcing others to play the game you love is not fair game.

«

I had no idea where this blogpost was going to start or end up. But also, you can’t prohibit bitcoin! Unless, perhaps, you figure out a way to ban bitcoin exchanges, which also isn’t really feasible.
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How to lose a fortune with just one bad click • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

Adam Griffin is still in disbelief over how quickly he was robbed of nearly $500,000 in cryptocurrencies. A scammer called using a real Google phone number to warn his Gmail account was being hacked, sent email security alerts directly from google.com, and ultimately seized control over the account by convincing him to click “yes” to a Google prompt on his mobile device.

Griffin is a battalion chief firefighter in the Seattle area, and on May 6 he received a call from someone claiming they were from Google support saying his account was being accessed from Germany. A Google search on the phone number calling him — (650) 203-0000 — revealed it was an official number for Google Assistant, an AI-based service that can engage in two-way conversations.

At the same time, he received an email that came from a google.com email address, warning his Google account was compromised. The message included a “Google Support Case ID number” and information about the Google representative supposedly talking to him on the phone, stating the rep’s name as “Ashton” — the same name given by the caller.

Griffin didn’t learn this until much later, but the email he received had a real google.com address because it was sent via Google Forms, a service available to all Google Docs users that makes it easy to send surveys, quizzes and other communications.

«

The answer to how to lose a fortune seems to be “keep it in crypto”. Ironically, the other week John Siracusa on the ATP podcast was explaining how his (tiny) investment in crypto had been stolen – by, he reckoned, the site which had issued his cryptojunk, where he had gone to check how much it was worth but which he figured now must have had some sort of password-stealing malware installed.
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Leak: this is Lenovo’s rollable display laptop • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Lenovo showed off a laptop concept with a rollable display last year, and in 2025, it might release one that you can actually buy. Leaker Evan Blass just shared images of what he says is a sixth-generation Lenovo ThinkBook Plus, and based on two of the images, it has a display that extends upward to reveal more display underneath.

It seems pretty similar to the concept from 2023, which also extended upward to show more screen. In these images from Blass, Lenovo is showing how the extended screen can be used for multitasking, such as by watching a YouTube video in the lower half of the screen or having a document on hand under a PowerPoint presentation.

Blass’ leak doesn’t include any specs, so we don’t yet know many important details about this rumored laptop.

«

Lenovo is very keen on trying wild laptop ideas which then get absolutely no traction anywhere in the market and are abandoned within a year.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, legalised sports betting is linked to an increase in domestic violence incidents when home gridiron teams lose. CC-licensed photo by Maryland GovPics 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Unwagered. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple collaborates with NVIDIA to research faster LLM performance • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

In a blog post on Wednesday, Apple engineers shared new details on a collaboration with NVIDIA to implement faster text generation performance with large language models.

Apple published and open sourced its Recurrent Drafter (ReDrafter) technique earlier this year. It represents a new method for generating text with LLMs that is significantly faster and “achieves state of the art performance.” It combines two techniques: beam search (to explore multiple possibilities) and dynamic tree attention (to efficiently handle choices).

While its research demonstrated strong results, Apple collaborated with NVIDIA to apply ReDrafter in production. As part of this collaboration, ReDrafter was integrated into NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, a tool that helps run LLMs faster on NVIDIA GPUs.

…“LLMs are increasingly being used to power production applications, and improving inference efficiency can both impact computational costs and reduce latency for users,” Apple’s machine learning researchers conclude.

«

What’s most remarkable about this is that it’s Apple working with NVidia – the company that most resembles it in internal culture, and which Apple therefore has the most trouble working with, because (as discussed on the recent “Apple and Nvidia” episode of the Dithering podcast) they both want to control everything about the process – what is shared, who provides what, who goes to whose office to do coding.

The question posed by Ben Thompson on that episode has stuck with me: if there was a duplicate of yourself – like you in every way, including personality – do you think you would get on with them? Or might some things they did annoy you, even though they’d be the things you would do? It’s worth reflecting on. Would you be aloof? Charming? Welcoming? Impatient?
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Newsom declares bird flu emergency in California as US confirms first severe case • KQED

Lesley McClurg:

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Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on Wednesday in response to the bird flu outbreak, an action meant to allow the state and local agencies additional resources to increase virus surveillance and slow the spread.

The declaration comes as new dairy cows in Southern California test positive. The state’s Department of Food and Agriculture has detected the virus at 645 dairies, about half of them in the last month. To date, the virus has not spread from person-to-person in California, and nearly all infected individuals were exposed to infected cattle.

Newsom’s announcement coincides with concerning news from Louisiana, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the nation’s first severe human case of bird flu. The patient, who was exposed to sick and dead birds in their backyard flock, is currently hospitalised.

The US Department of Agriculture started testing the nation’s milk supply for bird flu earlier this month, and the agency alerted dairy processors that they may have to provide samples of raw milk on request.

«

The Louisiana patient isn’t just hospitalised; they’re critical with severe respiratory symptoms. We seem to have moved rapidly from “watching brief” to “bird flu state of emergency”.
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1999: the year that signalled end times for newspapers • Los Angeles Times

Shelby Grad is the deputy managing editor of the LA Times:

»

“I see nothing in the new technology — nothing coming out of Silicon Valley — that eliminates the need for newspapers and certainly for trained, responsible, ethical and aggressive journalists,” the chairman of the National Assn. of Newspapers told an audience in Washington a month earlier. “We believe that of all the traditional media, newspapers are in the best possible position to use the Internet.”

But behind the rosy corporate spin, there were some red flags. Many newspapers posted advertising gains, but the percentage of ads going to print versus other media was declining. Classified ads were shifting from print to the web. The Times was still regrouping after a round of 500 job cuts. A few years earlier the paper had hired a CEO from breakfast food giant General Mills to bring its finances into line. The newsroom derisively referred to him as the “cereal killer.” Growing revenue was the name of the game, and it took The Times down some strange roads, including a quixotic quest to make the paper smell better.

And it was this search for cash that led to one of the darkest chapters in L.A. Times history.

When Staples Center opened that October [1999], the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a lavish special issue. It was a celebration not just of the Lakers’ and Kings’ new home but of the revival of downtown Los Angeles it promised to unleash. It was the largest magazine the paper ever published and generated $2m in revenue.

But it was later revealed by competitors that the paper had secretly entered into a profit-sharing agreement with Staples Center for the magazine, a conflict of interest that sparked protests by Times journalists who’d written for the magazine without knowing about the deal as well as head-shaking from many readers.

On Dec. 20, The Times published a massive self-examination that broke down what went wrong. It ran 14 pages as a special section without a single ad. The episode left the newsroom shaken and the newspaper’s credibility damaged, and it sparked a more frank discussion inside The Times about financial pressures. “Money is always the first thing we talk about,” one senior editor said in the piece. “The readers are always the last thing we talk about.”

In L.A. Times scholarship, the Staples scandal is seen as the first sign of the epic decline to come.

«

Classic self-flagellating American journalism: the mistake wasn’t failing to adapt to the internet quickly enough, it was producing a supplement that pulled in huge amounts of money!
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What happens when the internet disappears? • The Verge

s. e. smith:

»

The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia. 

This is a particularly complex problem for digital storage. For every painstakingly archived digital item, there are also hard drives corrupted, content wiped, media formats that are effectively unreadable and unusable, as I discovered recently when I went on a hunt for a reel-to-reel machine to recover some audio from the 1960s. Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with even the Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives.  

Historical content can be an incredibly informative resource, telling us how people lived and thought. But we must remember that it’s a small fraction of contemporaneous material that survives, even as we hope, of course, that it’s our own existence that is ultimately memorialized. Sometimes it is through the gaps that we read history or are forced to consider why some things are more likely to persist than others, are more remembered than others, why other histories are subject to active suppression, as we’re seeing across the United States with legislation targeting the accurate teaching of history.

«

Solutions to this? None really apart from the Internet Archive. Smith is not very encouraged by the arrival of AI, which he thinks will make things worse.
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TikTok’s ban-or-sale law challenge to be heard in Supreme Court • The Washington Post

Ann Marimow and Eva Dou:

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The Supreme Court said Wednesday that it will quickly take up TikTok’s challenge to a federal law that would shutter the popular platform next month unless the company divests from Chinese ownership.

The justices said they would consider whether the law, passed with bipartisan support to address national security concerns, violates the First Amendment rights of millions of TikTok users and the owners of the video-sharing platform.

In a sign of the significance of the issue, the court added a special hearing to its calendar, scheduling two hours for oral argument on Jan. 10. A ruling could come any time after that.

TikTok had asked the high court to intervene before Jan. 19, the deadline Congress set for TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform or be barred in the United States. The company wants the justices to put on hold a lower-court ruling that clears the way for the law, which was signed by President Joe Biden.

President-elect Donald Trump, who will take office Jan. 20, has suggested he could try to retain access to the app, adding to the uncertainty surrounding the ban-or-sale law.

Lawmakers passed the measure in response to concerns from U.S. officials that TikTok could be pressured by the Chinese government to covertly manipulate public opinion in the United States or to provide access to Americans’ data.

TikTok has said in court filings that the law is a “massive and unprecedented speech restriction” that will “silence the speech of applicants and the many Americans who use the platform to communicate about politics, commerce, arts and other matters of public concern.”

«

Logically, the ruling needs to come before January 19 if it throws out the government’s law. The obvious challenge is the First Amendment; the government’s rebuttal is national security. But it will have to demonstrate that, which might be very tricky in open court.
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Japan sees nuclear as cheapest baseload power source in 2040 • Bloomberg via Financial Post

Shoko Oda:

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Nuclear power is forecast to be the cheapest baseload electricity source in Japan in 2040, highlighting the government’s desire to restart the nation’s idled reactors.

The cost of constructing and operating a new nuclear power plant for 2040 is estimated at 12.5 yen ($0.08) per kilowatt-hour, according to documents released from a trade ministry panel meeting on Monday. This cost assumes reactors will be used for 40 years at a 70% operational rate. The meeting was held to discuss the so-called levelized cost of electricity for each power asset, the document said. 

A previous study published in 2021 saw LNG-fired power plants as the cheapest power source in 2030. However, the latest analysis includes a cost to reduce emissions, while fuel prices are also higher.

Intermittent renewable sources, like large-scale and residential solar, were priced lower than nuclear for 2040, the most recent report showed. However, when including the total system cost, including deployment of batteries, nuclear is cheaper than solar in some scenarios.

Japan is currently in the process of revising its national energy strategy, which will dictate its power mix targets beyond 2030. The government has doubled down on nuclear as a way to curb dependence on pricey fossil fuels.

«

Japan, don’t forget, has essentially zero indigenous energy sources, so has to rely on imports for all its fossil fuels – which is a lot.
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Brazil’s illegal vape market thrives as Meta’s rules clash with local laws • Rest of World

Pedro Nakamura:

»

On August 3, Love Disk, a tobacco and liquor shop, posted an ad of a saleswoman holding three vapes up to the camera on Instagram. “The little beloved ones have arrived home,” the caption read.

There was a serious problem with the ad: Love Disk is located in Brazil, where the sale, import, and advertising of e-cigarettes has been illegal since 2009.

But such endorsements have gone unchecked in Brazil as Meta’s content policies allow attempts to buy, sell, trade, gift, and ask for nicotine products by profiles run by “legitimate” brick-and-mortar stores. The use of e-cigarettes has risen sharply in the country in recent years, with sales partly driven by social media platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp, according to a government report. Meanwhile, the Big Tobacco lobby in Brazil is pushing for their legalization, threatening to roll back decades of declining tobacco use.

“Today, we don’t have a legal framework to hold platforms accountable,” Stefania Schimaneski, who manages the registration and inspection of smoking products at Anvisa, Brazil’s health regulatory agency, told Rest of World.

The Brazilian government banned the sale, import, and advertising of e-cigarettes in 2009. For a while, it appeared that the ban was successful at keeping vaping rates down. According to Covitel, a nationwide survey to monitor risk factors for chronic illness in Brazil, 0.6% of people between 18 and 24 years were daily e-cigarette users in 2022.

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Meta ignoring local laws? Perish the thought.
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Apple stock up despite lacklustre iPhone 16 sales • Investor’s Business Daily

Patrick Seitz:

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Despite hopes that artificial intelligence features would drive iPhone 16 sales, Apple’s latest smartphones continue to underperform compared with last year’s models, a Wall Street analyst says. Still, Apple stock is near record high territory. [They came off it, along with the rest of the US stock market, on Wednesday afternoon.]

In a client note Wednesday, JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee said US sales of the iPhone 16 are tracking below the iPhone 15 so far. He cited a survey from Wave7 Research about handset sales across US carriers in October and November.

“The survey highlights that the lower momentum, reflected in the lower market share year over year, is likely led by the (still) lower consumer awareness for Apple Intelligence,” Chatterjee said.

Apple Intelligence is Apple’s branding of AI features.

On the plus side, Apple is seeing a mix shift toward its higher-end models, especially the iPhone 16 Pro Max, he said. Chatterjee rates Apple stock as overweight with a price target of 265.

On the stock market today, Apple stock fell 2.1% to close at 248.05. Earlier in the session, it notched a record high of 254.28.

“Awareness about Apple Intelligence remains low,” Chatterjee said. “Based on a survey of carrier store representatives, 67% believe that iPhone users have low awareness of Apple Intelligence. Meanwhile, 24% indicated a ‘medium’ level of awareness, and only 10% reported a ‘high’ level of awareness among iPhone users.”

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Lower sales and low awareness of Apple Intelligence is honestly not surprising. Phones last longer, and it’s really impossible to cite a must-have element among the new features. The adverts aren’t doing the job either. (Unlike the one for AirPods Pro, which is one of the best I have ever seen anywhere.)
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Sports betting legalization amplifies emotional cues and intimate partner violence • SSRN

Kyutaro Matsuzawa and Emily Arnesen (both University of Oregon, dept of economics):

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This study explores the relationship between legalized sports gambling, unexpected emotional cues, and reported intimate partner violence (IPV). Using crime data from the 2011 to 2022 National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and extending Card & Dahl (2011)’s model, we find that when sports gambling is legalized, the effect of NFL home team upset losses on IPV increases by around 10 percentage points.

Heterogeneity analyses reveal that these effects are larger: (i) in states where mobile betting is legalized, (ii) in locations where higher bets were placed, (iii) around paydays, and (iv) for teams who were on a winning streak. Together, these findings support that financial losses from participation in sports gambling can amplify the emotional cues from a favorite team’s unexpected loss.

«

Police forces know this anecdotally, but now we have a more statistical confirmation. In the UK there trope has been for years that domestic violence cases spike in an area when the home (soccer) team loses.
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Energy firms to spend £77bn to rewire Great Britain’s electricity grid • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

»

Energy companies have promised to spend up to £77bn over five years to help rewire to Great Britain’s electricity infrastructure in the global race to shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity.

The companies that own the high-voltage power system – National Grid, SSE and ScottishPower – have submitted the spending plans to the regulator Ofgem for the period from 2026 to 2031, which could support about 100,000 jobs.

National Grid set out plans to spend up to £35bn over the five years to March 2031, SSE is budgeting up to £31bn and ScottishPower aims to invest £10.5bn.

John Pettigrew, the chief executive of National Grid, said its programme represents “the most significant step forward in the electricity network that we’ve seen in a generation”.

He added: “Through it we will nearly double the amount of energy that can be transported around the country, support the electrification of the industries of today and tomorrow; create new jobs; and support inward investment for the UK.”

The proposals must still be approved by the watchdog, which is expected to balance the need for costly investments in upgrading the power infrastructure to meet climate targets, which is paid for through energy bills, against the need to protect customers from rising costs.

National Grid, which owns the transmission network in England and Wales, plans to spend more than £11bn to maintain and upgrade its existing networks, alongside building three major grid projects that have already been approved by the regulator through its fast-track process.

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This is serious money. And a lot of jobs.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Thanks to the many people who sent or offered to send the Neuron paper about our slow brains. I will slowly read it over the Christmas break.

A large amount of podcasting is recorded on Apple computers – so why does the company make it so hard to capture audio? CC-licensed photo by Jakob Härter 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Inaudible. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Casual Viewing • n+1 Magazine

Will Tavlin:

»

In 2021 Netflix announced that it would start releasing a new original movie every week. A certain style soon began to take shape, a mind-numbing anticinema that anyone who has subscribed to Netflix in recent years knows by sight. I’ll call it the Typical Netflix Movie (TNM). From the outside, the TNM looks algorithmically constructed, as if designed to cater to each of Netflix’s two thousand “taste clusters,” the genre-like groupings Netflix uses to segment its audience, green-light programs, and recommend films and shows to subscribers.

The TNM covers every niche interest and identity category in existence, such as a movie about a tall girl, Tall Girl, but also Horse Girl, Skater Girl, Sweet Girl, Lost Girls, and Nice Girls. Seemingly optimized for search engines, the title of a TNM announces exactly what it is — hence a romantic comedy about a wine executive called A Perfect Pairing, or a murder mystery called Murder Mystery. The opening credit sequence looks thrown together, as if its designer were playing roulette with Adobe templates in After Effects.

A typical shot frames two characters, waist up, in profile as the camera slowly dollies across them, a slow and constant whir meant to inject motion into an otherwise inert frame. There is a preponderance of drone shots. The characters’ dialogue is stilted, filled with overexplanation, clichés, and lingo no human would ever use, like two bots stuck in a loop.

…Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” [Lindsay] Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)

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Not a short essay, but with plenty of insights, especially towards the end.
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Mark Zuckerberg says Threads has more than 100 million daily active users • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Threads now has more than 100 million daily active users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday. It’s a notable milestone not just because it’s a big number; it’s also the first time Meta has a daily active user figure publicly.

In recent weeks, Meta has been very vocal about Threads’ growth after a lot of people flocked to Bluesky. While Bluesky tracker says that that platform currently has a little over 25 million total users, Zuckerberg shared Monday that Threads has more than 300 million monthly active users. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s clear that Threads is still much larger than Bluesky.

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One suspects there’s a lot of growth hacking going on here: if you browse Instagram, little prompts of things from Threads pop up, which surely enourages plenty of its billion-strong user base to go over and see what’s happening. Also, Threads isn’t full of mad people. Just annoyed ones.
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Germany looks into alleged market manipulation during Dunkelflaute power price spike • Clean Energy Wire

Benjamin Wehrmann:

»

Following an extreme spike in electricity prices on 12 December, Germany’s Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) has said it will investigate possible market manipulation that could have contributed to the situation. BNetzA head Klaus Müller in a social media post said the grid regulator took the price spike “very seriously” and that it “assesses alleged market manipulation.” Investing in steerable capacity and flexibility would be crucial for Germany, Müller said.

Market manipulation could, for example, occur when companies withhold technically available backup plant capacity to push up power prices. During a so-called Dunkelflaute (dark doldrums) event last week, when both wind and solar power output were very low, intraday power prices shortly shot above 900 euros per megawatt hour (MWh). The unavailability of fossil fuel plants was a contributing factor during the price spike in Germany and in other European countries.

“Power supply security has not been at risk at any point in time,” the BNetzA said in an analysis. However, it added that operators had not dispatched any backup power plants even when the short-term wholesale price level exceeded 300 euros per MWh. While price peaks during a Dunkelflaute event are generally to be expected, the regulator and power exchange operators will investigate whether collusion had played a role in the mid-December price hike.

«

Utility companies taking advantage to make money? Perish the thought!
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What if tech execs don’t really need all these data centres? • The New Republic

Kate Aronoff:

»

Data center growth is already helping to extend the life of coal-fired power plants and fueling a boomlet for the gas power providers furnishing Silicon Valley titans with new turbines. There is nothing inevitable, though, about the tremendous energy demand that AI boosters say they’ll need.

“Nobody has any idea what AI electricity usage in data centers is going to be in three to four years,” says Jonathan Koomey, a researcher and consultant who studies the energy impact of internet and information technology. Electricity demand is indeed growing for the first time in over a decade, he says. Not all of that is from data centers, and larger spikes in demand are generally concentrated in places with new factories and data centers, like Virginia and Georgia. The modest overall load growth happening now, moreover, doesn’t indicate that there’s some looming crisis in which the US will run out of electricity as data centers proliferate.

The bigger risk may well be that these fantastical demand projections are used to bring new fossil fueled power plants online and keep existing ones running—regardless of whether they’re actually needed. Once built, new coal or gas plants are likely to operate for decades. “When people think it’s a crisis they make big mistakes,” Koomey says. “It’s absolutely not a crisis.”

There are economic reasons to push for such a massive infrastructure binge. In many states, building new infrastructure is one of the few ways that electric utility companies can raise rates, decisions that require approval from the public service commissions that regulate what they charge and the profits they make. Big new sources of electricity demand—met with new infrastructure—can mean higher profits.

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Well that’s a convenient intersection of interests between the utilities and the tech companies.
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The unbearable slowness of being: why do we live at 10 bits/s? • Neuron

Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister:

»

This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ∼1 0^9 (1 billion) bits/s. The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects of brain function: what neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of our existence?

Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time? The brain seems to operate in two distinct modes: the “outer” brain handles fast high-dimensional sensory and motor signals, whereas the “inner” brain processes the reduced few bits needed to control behavior. Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbers in the outer brain, but not for the inner brain, and we propose new research directions to remedy this.

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I can’t access the full article – it requires an academic institution login – but I’d hope it answers some of its own questions: not all of the brain’s processing is “throughput”. There’s a lot going on just to keep the lights on, so to speak: the duck’s slow progress belies the paddling beneath the water.
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As a doctor, here’s what I have learned from my Alzheimer’s disease • The Washington Post

Daniel Gibbs:

»

I have a special interest in Alzheimer’s disease. For nearly 25 years, I practiced general neurology in Portland, Oregon, and some of my patients had dementia. In 2012, while doing a genealogical DNA search, I inadvertently discovered that I have two copies of the APOE-4 allele, meaning I had a very good chance of getting Alzheimer’s-caused dementia by age 80.

I felt gobsmacked. I remember walking down the stairs in a daze after reading the report from the genetic testing service and telling my wife, Lois, “I think I am screwed.”

A year later, I retired at age 62 even though I had no symptoms of cognitive impairment. If I had almost any other job, I could have continued working for a few more years, but in medicine, forgetfulness could have fatal consequences. I suddenly wore two hats — that of a retired physician who had cared for a lot of people with Alzheimer’s disease and now a person living with the same disorder.

I had been taught, in medical school in the 1970s and even during my neurology residency in the 1980s, that Alzheimer’s disease progresses from onset to death in about three to five years, and nothing can be done about it. Neither statement is true.

In hindsight, my first symptom of Alzheimer’s disease was a gradual loss of smell that I first noticed in 2006. This was accompanied by odd olfactory hallucinations that smelled like baking bread mixed with perfume. I didn’t have any measurable cognitive impairment until 2015, when I had significant trouble remembering words, including the names of friends and colleagues.

I had a PET scan as part of a research study, which showed my brain had the beginning of abnormal tau protein, a key part of diagnosing Alzheimer’s. When the scans were repeated in 2018 and 2022, the tau protein can be seen spreading through my brain.

…I am now 73, and I have had mild cognitive impairment for roughly five years, followed by mild dementia for about four years. We don’t yet have a way to stop this progression, but what have I been doing to slow it?

«

Turns out that aerobic exercise is a good way to stave it off. Allied to the study last week that showed that simply keeping moving is a great way to lengthen your life, it seems like we all just need to keep jogging on.
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Klarna’s CEO says it stopped hiring thanks to AI – yet still advertises many open positions • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

»

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Bloomberg TV that his company essentially stopped hiring a year ago and credited generative AI for enabling this massive workforce reduction.

However, despite Siemiatkowski’s bullishness on AI, the company is not relying entirely on AI to replace human workers who leave, as open job listings — for more humans — and the company’s own statements confirm.

“We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were 4,500, now we’re 3,500,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV. “We have a natural attrition, as [does] every tech company. People stay about five years — so 20% leave every year — and by not hiring, we’re simply shrinking.”

The company’s CEO also said he believes AI can effectively replace workers. “I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do,” said Siemiatkowski. “We’re gonna give some of the improvements [from] the efficiency that AI provides by increasing the pace at which the salaries of our employees increases.”

…in practice, while Klarna has significantly reduced its workforce in the last year, the buy now, pay later company has not completely stopped hiring.

Klarna is currently hiring for more than 50 roles around the globe, according to the job postings page on its website. Furthermore, Klarna’s managers have said they are actively hiring or growing their teams at least half a dozen times throughout 2024, according to posts on LinkedIn viewed by TechCrunch.

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Oh, telling the truth about how AI is affecting your company is so last year.
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Australia plans to tax digital platforms that don’t pay for news • AP News

Rod McGuirk:

»

The Australian government said Thursday it will tax large digital platforms and search engines unless they agree to share revenue with Australian news media organizations.

The tax would apply from Jan. 1 to tech companies that earn more than A$250m ($160m) a year in revenue from Australia, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones and Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said.

They include Meta, Google-owner Alphabet and ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok.

The tax would be offset through money paid to Australian media organizations. The size of the tax is not clear. But the government aims to make sharing revenue with media organizations the cheaper option.

“The real objective … is not to raise revenue — we hope not to raise any revenue. The real objective is to incentivize agreement-making between platforms and news media businesses in Australia,” Jones told reporters.

The move comes after Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced that it would not renew three-year deals to pay Australian news publishers for their content.

«

“Pay our voluntary tax, or else pay our compulsory tax”, in short.

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The developers who came in from the cold • Rogue Amoeba

Paul Kafasis is CEO of Rogue Amoeba, which makes excellent Mac software for capturing incoming or outgoing audio – which means it’s enormously popular with podcasters, among others:

»

Even as our products steadily grew in popularity, our relationship with Apple was almost non-existent. Plenty of individuals inside the company were fans, but we received very little attention from Apple as a corporate entity. We didn’t much mind being outsiders, but it meant that we often had zero notice of breaking changes introduced by Apple.

During this time, Apple placed an emphasis on improving the security of MacOS, continually locking the operating system down further and further. Though their changes weren’t aimed at the legitimate audio capture we provided our users, they nonetheless made that capture increasingly difficult. We laboured to keep our tools functioning with each new version of MacOS. Through it all, we lived with a constant fear that Apple would irreparably break our apps.

In 2020, the disaster foreshadowed literally one sentence ago struck. Beta versions of MacOS 11 broke ACE, our then-current audio capture technology, and the damage looked permanent. When we spoke briefly to Apple during WWDC 2020, our appeals for assistance were flatly rejected. (WWDC was virtual for the first time that year, which meant this took the form of a very disheartening WebEx call.) We spent weeks attempting to get ACE working again, but eventually we had to admit defeat. ACE as we knew it was dead in the water, and all options for replacing it involved substantial reductions in functionality. Though we did not discuss it publicly at the time, things looked grim for the future of our products.

Thankfully, we had three things going for us.

«

It’s astonishing that Apple is so hostile to Rogue Amoeba, given that its technology effectively keeps scores of podcast producers in business, on the Mac platform. If it’s so worried about the security aspect (reasonable: what if someone dropped a script or other malware to capture audio from the mic?) then just buy Rogue Amoeba and build the functionality in with a private, undisclosed API.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Close-up imagery of failed microchips reveals a world of strange shapes and details. CC-licensed photo by ZEISS Microscopy 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Fractal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Social media given ‘last chance’ to tackle illegal posts • BBC News

Liv McMahon:

»

Online platforms must begin assessing whether their services expose users to illegal material by 16 March 2025 or face financial punishments as the Online Safety Act (OSA) begins taking effect.

Ofcom, the regulator enforcing the UK’s internet safety law, published its final codes of practice for how firms should deal with illegal online content on Monday.

Platforms have three months to carry out risk assessments identifying potential harms on their services or they could be fined up to 10% of their global turnover.

Ofcom head Dame Melanie Dawes told BBC News this was the “last chance” for industry to make changes.

“If they don’t start to seriously change the way they operate their services, then I think those demands for things like bans for children on social media are going to get more and more vigorous,” she said. “I’m asking the industry now to get moving, and if they don’t they will be hearing from us with enforcement action from March.”

Under Ofcom’s codes, platforms will need to identify if, where and how illegal content might appear on their services and ways they will stop it reaching users

According to the OSA, this includes content relating to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), controlling or coercive behaviour, extreme sexual violence, promoting or facilitating suicide and self-harm.

But critics say the Act fails to tackle a wide range of harms for children. The Molly Rose Foundation – set up in memory of teenager Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after being exposed to self-harm images on social media – said the OSA has “deep structural issues”.

Andy Burrows, its chief executive, said the organisation was “astonished and disappointed” by a lack of specific, targeted measures for platforms on dealing with suicide and self-harm material in Ofcom’s guidance.

“Robust regulation remains the best way to tackle illegal content, but it simply isn’t acceptable for the regulator to take a gradualist approach to immediate threats to life,” he said.

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LFGSS and Microcosm shutting down 16th March 2025 (the day before the Online Safety Act is enforced) • LFGSS

“Velocio” runs LFGSS: “London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK”:

»

Reading the new Ofcom safety regulations and we’re done… we fall firmly into scope, and I have no way to dodge it. The act is too broad, and it doesn’t matter that there’s never been an instance of any of the proclaimed things that this act protects adults, children and vulnerable people from… the very broad language and the fact that I’m based in the UK means we’re covered.

The act simply does not care that this site and platform is run by an individual, and that I do so philanthropically without any profit motive (typically losing money), nor that the site exists to reduce social loneliness, reduce suicide rates, help build meaningful communities that enrich life.

The act only cares that is it “linked to the UK” (by me being involved as a UK native and resident, by you being a UK based user), and that users can talk to other users… that’s it, that’s the scope.

I can’t afford what is likely tens of thousands [of pounds] to go through all the legal hoops here over a prolonged period of time, the site itself barely gets a few hundred in donations each month and costs a little more to run… this is not a venture that can afford compliance costs… and if we did, what remains is a disproportionately high personal liability for me, and one that could easily be weaponised by disgruntled people who are banned for their egregious behaviour (in the years running fora I’ve been signed up to porn sites, stalked IRL and online, subject to death threats, had fake copyright takedown notices, an attempt to delete the domain name with ICANN… all from those whom I’ve moderated to protect community members)… I do not see an alternative to shuttering it.

«

Seems odd that a standard forum site should think itself at risk from the new rules. It’s a question of moderation, for the most part. If there aren’t enough volunteers, there could be a problem, but it seems odd in a site like this.
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Amazon facing strike threats as Senate report details hidden widespread injuries • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Just as Amazon warehouse workers are threatening to launch the “first large-scale” unfair labor practices strike at Amazon in US history, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) released a report accusing Amazon of operating “uniquely dangerous warehouses” that allegedly put profits over worker safety.

As chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Sanders started investigating Amazon in June 2023. His goal was “to uncover why Amazon’s injury rates far exceed those of its competitors and to understand what happens to Amazon workers when they are injured on the job.”

According to Sanders, Amazon “sometimes ignored” the committee’s requests and ultimately only supplied 285 documents requested. The e-commerce giant was mostly only willing to hand over “training materials given to on-site first aid staff,” Sanders noted, rather than “information on how it tracks workers, the quotas it imposes on workers, and the disciplinary actions it takes when workers cannot meet those quotas, internal studies on the connection between speed and injury rates, and the company’s treatment of injured workers.”

To fill in the gaps, Sanders’ team “conducted an exhaustive inquiry,” interviewing nearly 500 workers who provided “more than 1,400 documents, photographs, and videos to support their stories.” And while Amazon’s responses were “extremely limited,” Sanders said that the Committee was also able to uncover internal studies that repeatedly show that “Amazon chose not to act” to address safety risks, allegedly “accepting injuries to its workers as the cost of doing business.”

«

The report is worth browsing – even if just the executive summary – for its list of legislation that Sanders says needs to be passed, including the “No Robot Bosses Act” and the “Stop Spying Bosses Act”.
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Sorry human, you’re wrong • Engineering Prompts

Marcel Salathé paid for access to GPT-4o:

»

Yesterday, I decided to try a quick experiment for fun. As an amateur piano player and a big Chopin fan, I took a picture of a page from the score open on my piano – Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 27 No. 2 – and asked GPT-4o to identify it. To my surprise, it couldn’t. Intrigued, I tested other models. While none of them succeeded, most at least recognized it as Chopin.

Here’s where it gets interesting: the larger models (GPT-4o, GPT o1, GPT o1 Pro, Claude Opus, and Gemini 1.5 Pro) were all quite confident in their wrong answers. Only Mistral and Claude Sonnet admitted their uncertainty. They suggested it might be Chopin but acknowledged they weren’t sure without more information. Kudos to them.

I was especially disappointed with GPT o1 Pro. After “thinking” for 2 minutes and 40 seconds (so much for being faster), it didn’t just fail – it was the only advanced model to misidentify the composer entirely. It confidently claimed the piece was Liszt’s “Un Sospiro” and gave elaborate reasons to back up its claim. Normally, I abandon experiments like this and move on, but in this case, I had a strange urge to tell o1 Pro it was wrong.

(By the way, I wish I could share the conversation directly. Unfortunately, sharing conversations involving images isn’t possible – an strange limitation given the price.)

I told it flat out that it was wrong and provided the correct answer. What happened next left me stunned. Normally, when you correct a model, it apologizes and acknowledges the mistake – unless your claim is completely outlandish. Even then, most models only push back in the gentlest way. But this time, after another minute and 18 seconds of “thinking”, o1 Pro doubled down: “I’m fairly certain that this page is not from Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat major, Op. 27 No. 2.” (emphasis added).

It provided an elaborate explanation of why I was wrong and insisted that the piece was, in fact, Liszt’s “Un Sospiro”. The message was clear: sorry human, but you’re wrong.

«

It gets weirder, trust me.
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Chinese hacker singlehandedly responsible for exploiting 81,000 Sophos firewalls, DOJ says • Cybernews

Stefanie Schappert:

»

A Chinese hacker indicted on Tuesday and the PRC-based cybersecurity company he worked for are both sanctioned by the US government for compromising “tens of thousands of firewalls” – some protecting US critical infrastructure, putting human lives at risk.

In a series of coordinated actions, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Department of Justice (DoJ), and the FBI said the massive cyber espionage campaign, which compromised at least 36 firewalls protecting US critical infrastructure, posed significant risks to national security.

A federal court in Indiana on Tuesday unsealed an indictment charging 30-year-old Guan Tianfeng (Guan) with conspiracy to commit computer and wire fraud by hacking into firewall devices worldwide, including one “used by an agency of the United States.”

Guan, employed by the Chinese cybersecurity firm Sichuan Silence – a known contractor for Beijing intelligence – was alleged to have discovered a zero-day vulnerability in firewall products manufactured by UK cybersecurity firm Sophos.

DoJ officials said between April 22nd and April 25th, 2020, Guan and his co-conspirators infected approximately 81,000 vulnerable devices, including 36 firewalls protecting US critical infrastructure.
The malware deployed by the attackers was designed to steal sensitive user information, but once compromised, Guan escalated the attacks.

Using the Ragnarok ransomware variant, the hackers would further disable their victims’ anti-virus software, encrypt their systems, and demand payment if victims attempted to remediate the breach.

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Sneaky. And determined.
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Yearlong supply-chain attack targeting security pros steals 390,000 credentials • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

A sophisticated and ongoing supply-chain attack operating for the past year has been stealing sensitive login credentials from both malicious and benevolent security personnel by infecting them with Trojanized versions of open source software from GitHub and NPM, researchers said.

The campaign, first reported three weeks ago by security firm Checkmarx and again on Friday by Datadog Security Labs, uses multiple avenues to infect the devices of researchers in security and other technical fields. One is through packages that have been available on open source repositories for over a year. They install a professionally developed backdoor that takes pains to conceal its presence. The unknown threat actors behind the campaign have also employed spear phishing that targets thousands of researchers who publish papers on the arXiv platform.

The objectives of the threat actors are also multifaceted. One is the collection of SSH private keys, Amazon Web Services access keys, command histories, and other sensitive information from infected devices every 12 hours. When this post went live, dozens of machines remained infected, and an online account on Dropbox contained some 390,000 credentials for WordPress websites taken by the attackers, most likely by stealing them from fellow malicious threat actors. The malware used in the campaign also installs cryptomining software that was present on at least 68 machines as of last month.

It’s unclear who the threat actors are or what their motives may be. Datadog researchers have designated the group MUT-1244, with MUT short for “mysterious unattributed threat.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess at China? There have been some very determined long-term attacks, such as (I think) the one on PyPI discovered earlier this year.
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AI thriller spec script snapped up in $3.25m sale to Fifth Season, Makeready • Hollywood Reporter

Borys Kit:

»

An unknown writer, a fast-rising feeding frenzy, and a true multimillion-dollar deal. It’s enough to make executives or aspiring screenplay authors dream of the heady spec script deals of the 1990s.

In a deal that shakes up a sleepy Hollywood before the holidays, Fifth Season and Brad Weston’s Makeready banner have preemptively picked up Alignment, a spec script by Natan Dotan, a man who until a week ago had no representation.

The deal could become one of biggest spec deals of the year — Nyad writer Julia Cox sold spec Love of Your Life, with Ryan Gosling producing, to Amazon in October for low seven figures — but this one involves the breaking of a writer with few Hollywood connections. It also involves a topic that is generating intense interest — and hand-wringing — in Hollywood, namely artificial intelligence.

…Alignment is described as having the urgency of thrillers such as Margin Call and Contagion and takes place in a 36-hour period. It tells of a board member at a booming AI company who wrestles with corporate politics and warped incentives as he tries to prevent his colleagues’ willful ignorance from causing a global catastrophe.

«

It’s the OpenAI board row from November 2023, but with “global catastrophe” as the ticking clock, rather than just the passage of the weekend and emails from tech publications. Looking forward to the CEO consulting a (consults script notes from executives) wall of blinking lights and an LED display that blinks red and green.
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What does a human life cost – and is it ethical to price it? Jenny Kleeman asked a hitman, philanthropists and a life insurer • The Conversation

Hugh Breakey:

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What is your life worth, in dollar terms? The answers may surprise you. The asking price for murder, for example, is disconcertingly low. The average price of hiring a hitman is A$30,000 [UK £15,000], estimates British journalist Jenny Kleeman in her intriguing and thought-provoking book, The Price of Life. But the cost to the public purse is very high.

Here are some more striking figures (all converted into Australian dollars). The average price of a ransom: $560,000. The payout to families if one of their loved ones dies in an act of terrorism (in Australia) $75,000. The average price of saving a life through strategic philanthropy: $6,000. And the price of buying a cadaver: $7,600.

Kleeman’s book investigates the many ways decision-makers find themselves putting a price on the priceless.

In her quest to discover how our modern world fixes a price to human life in a wide variety of contexts, she also investigates the costs and consequences of life insurance, the sale of body parts, and the inside details of government policy-making, compensation for murder and more.

…Kleeman’s book is not just concerned with how and why a human life is priced, but on who decides that price. Kleeman’s question encourages her to look in strange places and talk to interesting people, opening the readers’ eyes to decisions and calculations often hidden – sometimes deliberately so – from public view.

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The NHS has a measure called QALYs, or quality-adjusted life years, in determining whether to go ahead with treatments for disease or disability. It’s very technical, but another form of the measure discussed here.
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Google goes solar as grid can’t power its future datacenters • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

Google believes the US electricity grid can’t deliver the energy needed to power datacenters that deliver AI services, so has formed an alliance to build industrial parks powered by clean energy, at which it will build “gigawatts of datacenter capacity” across the nation.

The search megalith announced its plan last Wednesday. Google president Ruth Porat wrote that the US is poised to enjoy strong economic growth thanks to AI, increased manufacturing activity, and the electrification of transport and other industries. But Porat thinks those opportunities could be missed due to the wonky electricity grid, which she wrote has “not kept pace with the country’s economic growth opportunity” and is sometimes “unable to accommodate load increases.”

Google’s response is a deal with solar energy firm Intersect Power, and financier TPG Rise Climate, to build industrial parks next to renewable energy generation facilities that Porat wrote will be “purpose-built and right-sized for the datacenter.” Google will build datacenters at those parks – meaning they have a long-term customer from day one – and believes it can build bit barns faster under this arrangement.

Intersect Power agrees with that analysis, describing the deal as a “‘power-first’ approach to datacenter development.”

The generation plants Intersect Energy builds will also be connected to the grid, and provide power to other tenants of the industrial parks.

Intersect Power’s portfolio consists of 2.2GW of operating solar PV and accompanying battery storage in operation or construction.

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Nuclear, solar, just throwing energy at the problem. But what exactly is the problem?
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The art of failure analysis 2024 • IEEE Spectrum

Kohava Mendelsohn:

»

When your car breaks down, you take it to the mechanic. When a computer chip fails, engineers go to the failure-analysis team. It’s their job to diagnose what went wrong and work to make sure it doesn’t in the future.

The International Symposium on the Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits (IPFA) is a yearly conference in Asia attended by failure-analysis engineers. The gathering is mostly technical, but there’s also a fun part: The Art of Failure Analysis contest.

“It’s all about creativity and strong imagination,” says Willie Yeoh, chair of the Art of Failure Analysis contest this year. Anyone in the failure-analysis community can submit an image taken during their everyday work that includes something surprising or unexpected, like a melted bit of silicon that looks like a dinosaur. Ten photos are chosen by the conference committee as the most interesting, and then conference attendees vote on their favorite among those.

We’ve gathered a collection of photos from the 2022 and 2024 Art of Failure Analysis contests (it did not run in 2023). Which one would you vote for?

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These photos are very striking – though it would be nice too to know the scale.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Why did the Ingenuity helicopter crash on Mars? An investigation blames bland terrain. CC-licensed photo by Kevin Gill 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. Grounded. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI could be making scientists less creative • Gizmodo

Todd Feathers:

»

Researchers at the University of Chicago and Tsinghua University, in China, analyzed nearly 68 million research papers across six scientific disciplines (not including computer science) and found that papers incorporating AI techniques were cited more often but also focused on a narrower set of topics and were more repetitive. In essence, the more scientists use AI, the more they focus on the same set of problems that can be answered with large, existing datasets and the less they explore foundational questions that can lead to entirely new fields of study.

“I was surprised at the dramatic scale of the finding, [AI] dramatically increases people’s capacity to stay and advance within the system,” said James Evans, a co-author of the pre-print paper and director of the Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago. “This suggests there’s a massive incentive for individuals to uptake these kinds of systems within their work … it’s between thriving and not surviving in a competitive research field.”

As that incentive leads to a growing dependence on machine learning, neural networks, and transformer models, “the whole system of science that’s done by AI is shrinking,” he said.

The study examined papers published from 1980 to 2024 in the fields of biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, materials science, and geology. It found that scientists who used AI tools to conduct their research published 67% more papers annually, on average, and their papers were cited more than three times as often as those who didn’t use AI.

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Bird flu jumps from birds to human in Louisiana; patient hospitalized • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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A person in Louisiana is hospitalized with H5N1 bird flu after having contact with sick and dying birds suspected of carrying the virus, state health officials announced Friday.

It is the first human H5N1 case detected in Louisiana. For now, the case is considered a “presumptive” positive until testing is confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials say that the risk to the public is low but caution people to stay away from any sick or dead birds. A spokesperson for Louisiana’s health department told Ars that the hospitalized patient had contact with both backyard and wild birds.

Although the person has been hospitalized, their condition was not reported.  The spokesperson said the department would not comment on the patient’s condition due to patient confidentiality and an ongoing public health investigation.

The case is just the latest amid H5N1’s global and domestic rampage. The virus has been ravaging wild, backyard, and commercial birds in the US since early 2022 and spilling over to a surprisingly wide range of mammals. In March this year, officials detected an unprecedented leap to dairy cows, which has since caused a nationwide outbreak. The virus is currently sweeping through California, the country’s largest dairy producer.

To date, at least 845 herds across 16 states have contracted the virus since March, including 630 in California, which detected its first dairy infections in late August.

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Um, just a watching brief.
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Google’s lost moonshots • Jerry Liu

The aforesaid Liu has just spent six years in consulting and startups, having previously worked at Facebook/Meta:

»

1. Misaligned Incentives
Google’s innovation machine is driven by PM careers, and PM careers are driven by metrics. If you’re a product manager at Google, what’s your incentive? Ship something small that looks good on your performance review, or spend years on a project that might fail spectacularly? It’s like trying to work on decade-spanning climate change projects with politicians who need to win the next election and have term limits of 4 years. You take your wins, and you get out before the bridge collapses. Which inevitably it will, because can you expect any human project to only ever be winning, quarter after quarter?

2. Moonshot-scale Budget
This is crucial: moonshot-scale problems need moonshot-scale resources. Think about how VCs fund startups. When something shows promise, not only do they need more funding, the fundraising often jumps by orders of magnitude. What Google calls moonshots often feel more like well-funded experiments. Meanwhile, Meta commits resources at a scale that matches their ambitions. Look at Reality Labs – they’ve burned more money than most companies will ever see, but they keep going.

3. Institutional Learning
And maybe the hardest problem: institutional learning. Both companies fail, but they fail differently. When Google Glass flopped, what happened to all that knowledge? Sure, some of it probably lives in internal docs, but the teams scattered, the context was lost, and the deep learning – the kind that only comes from failure – largely evaporated. I also heard that Google Plus’s assets were also cannibalized internally; Please let me know if you’ve interacted with any part of Google Plus’s remains recently.

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This is very true: whatever happened to Loon, the balloon thing, and all the other moonshots? Quietly fallen to earth, it seems.
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Ingenuity Mars helicopter January grounding: what happened? • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

It appears the bland Martian surface triggered a chain of events that left NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter permanently grounded on the red planet.

The helicopter’s flying career came to an abrupt end earlier this year when Flight 72 was cut short, and communications were briefly lost. After re-establishing contact, it soon became clear Ingenuity would not be flying again – the rotor blades were damaged, and one was entirely detached.

At the time, the prevailing theory was that the flight ended when Ingenuity’s downward-facing camera could not pick out features on the surface. According to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), this is still the most likely scenario for what started a chain of events that left the helicopter crippled.

Performing an air crash investigation from hundreds of millions of kilometers away is tricky. It’s impossible to get hands on the wreckage, there are unlikely to be any witnesses, and there aren’t brightly colored black boxes to give clues about what happened in the final minutes of the flight.

What there is, however, is telemetry. Data sent during the final flight indicates that around 20 seconds after take-off, Ingenuity’s navigation system couldn’t find enough surface features to track. It was designed to operate over textured, flat terrain, not the steep, featureless sand ripples where it ultimately met its demise.

“Photographs taken after the flight indicate the navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown,” according to JPL. Engineers reckon the most likely scenario is that Ingenuity made a hard landing on the slope of a sand ripple. The sudden pitch and roll exerted stress on the rotor blades past their design limits, and all four snapped at their weakest point.

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Making “social” social again: announcing Mozi • Medium

Ev Williams did Twitter, did Medium, and now he’s doing a sort of.. travel-contact app:

»

Mozi is a social app — not in the sense of “social media.” But in the sense of interacting with other people and building relationships.

In fact, it’s not a media app at all. There is no posting photos or videos or liking or following. There are no influencers — except your friend who may influence you to meet up for a coffee when you’re in town.

The primary value proposition of Mozi (today) is simple: It lets you know when you’re going to be in the same place (city or event) as someone you know. And the goal is straightforward: to connect more often—and in person—with the people you care about.

For example, I just got back from Miami. Before going, I put my plan (just the city and what days) into Mozi. This information was shared just with my contacts (minus any I wouldn’t want it to be). So, even before going, I was able to see both the people I know who live there and other friends who were visiting at the same time, so we could meet up and make plans.

Mozi also helps you decide where to go. “Events” on Mozi (currently a beta feature) lets you see who you know may be going—or considering going—to a conference or event before you go. (If you happen to be going to SXSW, join the Mozi event. I’ll be there too.)

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Not in a burning hurry to try this, to be honest. It’s reminiscent of Foursquare, but without the gamification; it’s a sort of private shared-only-with-contacts-you-want-to meetup app. I wonder about the mental load of having to choose which contacts to share with; what you really want is to see who’s in the city you’re going to and include or exclude on that basis. You can get it now for iOS. (Android is of course on a wait list.)(Thanks Q for the link.)
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The ‘Ghost Gun’ linked to Luigi Mangione shows just how far 3D-printed weapons have come • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»

More than a decade after the advent of the 3D-printed gun as an icon of libertarianism and a gun control nightmare, police say one of those homemade plastic weapons has now been found in the hands of perhaps the world’s most high-profile alleged killer. For the community of DIY gunsmiths who have spent years honing those printable firearm models, in fact, the handgun police claim was used to fatally shoot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is as recognisable as the now-famous alleged shooter himself—and shows just how practical and lethal those weapons have become.

In the 24 hours since police released a photo of what they say is Luigi Mangione’s gun following the 26-year-old’s arrest Monday, the online community devoted to 3D-printed firearms has been quick to identify the suspected murder weapon as a particular model of printable “ghost gun”—a homemade weapon with no serial number, created by assembling a mix of commercial and DIY parts. The gun appears to be a Chairmanwon V1, a tweak of a popular partially 3D-printed Glock-style design known as the FMDA 19.2—an acronym that stands for the libertarian slogan “Free Men Don’t Ask.”

The FMDA 19.2, released in 2021, is a relatively old model by 3D-printed-gun standards, says one gunsmith who goes by the first name John and the online handle Mr. Snow Makes. But it’s one of the most well-known and well-tested printable ghost gun designs, he says.

…The fact that even a relatively old model of 3D-printed firearm allegedly allowed the killer to shoot Thompson repeatedly on a Manhattan street—certainly the most high-profile shooting ever committed with a ghost gun or a 3D-printed weapon—shows how far DIY weapons tech has come, says Cody Wilson, the founder of the gun rights group Defense Distributed. Unlike the earliest 3D-printed gun models, the FDMA 19.2 can be fired hundreds or even thousands of times without its plastic components breaking.

«

Originally the makers of these guns weren’t sure if they would explode when fired. Now, they’re more confident. (I’ve slightly tweaked the original text to avoid any assumptions about the identity of the killer and ownership of the gun: both are crucial to the case.)
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Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore • The Guardian

Siân Boyle:

»

Brain rot was portended almost 20 years ago when scientists studied the effects of a new invention called “email”, specifically the impact a relentless barrage of information would have on participants’ brains. The results? Constant cognitive overload had a more negative effect than taking cannabis, with IQs of participants dropping an average of 10 points.

And this was prior to smartphones bringing the internet to our fingertips, which has resulted in the average UK adult now spending at least four hours a day online (with gen Z men spending five and a half hours a day online, and gen Z women six and a half).

In recent years, an abundance of academic research from institutions including Harvard medical school, the University of Oxford and King’s College London found evidence that the internet is shrinking our grey matter, shortening attention spans, weakening memory and distorting our cognitive processes. The areas of the brain found to be affected included “attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources”, “memory processes” and “social cognition”.

Paper after paper spells out how vulnerable we are to internet-induced brain rot. “High levels of internet usage and heavy media multitasking are associated with decreased grey matter in prefrontal regions,” finds one. People with internet addiction exhibit “structural brain changes” and “reduced grey matter”. Too much technology during brain developmental years has even been referred to by some academics as risking “digital dementia”.

In 2018, a decade of data analysed by leading memory psychologists at Stanford University found that people who frequently engaged with multiple online platforms have reduced memory and attention spans.

And yet we seem to be doing very little to stem the tide.

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BBC complains to Apple over misleading shooting headline • BBC News

Graham Fraser:

»

The BBC has complained to Apple after the tech giant’s new iPhone feature generated a false headline about a high-profile murder in the United States.

Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier [last] week, external, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications.

This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

A spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”. Apple declined to comment.

“BBC News is the most trusted news media in the world,” the BBC spokesperson added. “It is essential to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name and that includes notifications.”

The notification which made a false claim about Mangione was otherwise accurate in its summaries about the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and an update on South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

But the BBC does not appear to be the only news publisher which has had headlines misrepresented by Apple’s new AI tech. On 21 November, three articles on different topics from the New York Times were grouped together in one notification – with one part reading “Netanyahu arrested”, referring to the Israeli prime minister.

It was inaccurately summarising a newspaper report about the International Criminal Court issuing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, rather than any reporting about him being arrested.

«

Apple would have expected that there would be screwups with Apple Intelligence, but it’s hard to see how it prevents this sort of mangling from happening.
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iOS 18.2’s new Mail app is nice, but I disabled one of its main features • 9to5Mac

Michael Burkhardt:

»

With iOS 18.2, Apple introduced an all new Mail app. It introduced mail categorization, a fresh coat of paint, contact photos/business logos for conversations, a new system for grouping emails, and more. All of that sounded nice when it was unveiled back at WWDC, but now that I’ve actually spent some time using it, I’m having some doubts.

One of the biggest features in the new Mail app is categorization, breaking down your emails into varying categories of Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions.

This all sounds nice in concept, since it’d declutter your inbox, and the Primary tab would contain everything that’s important. In practice though, a lot of things were incorrectly categorized, and I found myself swiping over to the “All Mail” tab most of the time, that way I could see everything without having to deal with inaccurate sorting.

And yes, you can choose to recategorize senders if you don’t like how Apple chose to sort it. However, I find that a bit tedious compared to simply turning categorization off entirely.

Apple thought about the fact that everyone might not necessarily like categorization, and provided a simple way to disable it.

«

I think “features” like this would get in the way of using the machine. Google does this with Gmail, and I truly don’t like that either. So far, nothing in 18.2 (which I haven’t installed) looks utterly compelling.
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Apple plans thinner, foldable iphones to revive growth • WSJ

Aaron Tilley and Yang Jie:

»

Starting next year, Apple plans to introduce an iPhone that will be thinner than the approximately 8-millimeter profile of current models, said people familiar with the company’s plans. The model is intended to be cheaper than Pro models, with a simplified camera system to reduce costs.

The company is also planning two foldable devices, the people said. A larger device, intended to serve as a laptop, would have a screen that unfolds to be nearly as large as some desktop monitors, at about 19 inches. A smaller model would unfold to a display size that would be larger than an iPhone 16 Pro Max, intended to serve as a foldable iPhone, the people said.

Both foldable designs have been in development for years, but some key parts weren’t ready. Major challenges included improving the hinge, a mechanism that allows the device to fold and unfold, and the display cover, a flexible material protecting the foldable screen.

Current foldable phones on the market aren’t thin, light or energy-efficient enough to meet Apple’s standards, which is why Apple has been slower to enter this segment, said Jeff Pu, an analyst with Hong Kong-based brokerage Haitong International Securities.

Apple experimented with other different designs, such as having a display on the outside of the device when it is folded, but it now favors an inward-folding design, people familiar with the devices said.

Although Apple initially aimed to introduce the larger device first to gauge market response, it now appears that the foldable iPhone will likely be ready ahead of it. Apple executives are pushing for a 2026 release, but the company may need another year to address technical challenges, the people said.

«

So a foldable iPad and an inwardly-folding phone. But far enough away that they might have been “held up” by “technical challenges”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Genetic studies seem to have pinned down when homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, and what we got from it. CC-licensed photo by Clemens Vasters 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about tribalism.

A selection of 10 links for you. Thoughtful. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sora’s AI video revolution is still a ways off • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

The first version of OpenAI’s Sora can generate video of just about anything you throw at it — superheroes, cityscapes, animated puppies. It’s an impressive first step for the AI video generator. But the actual results are far from satisfactory, with many videos so heavily plagued with oddities and inconsistencies that it’s hard to imagine anyone finding much use for them.

Sora was released on Monday after almost a year of teasers heralding its capabilities. There are a few hurdles before you get to the video generation features, though. For one, account creation was closed within hours of launching due to the overwhelming demand. Those who did manage to sign up will find that its features also require a subscription to unlock: a $20 monthly “Plus” membership will let you generate videos at 480p or 720p, capped at either five or 10 seconds in length depending on the resolution. To unlock everything, including 1080p quality and 20-second-long videos, you need to cough up $200 a month for the “Pro” Sora subscription.

My results from testing the Plus tier have been underwhelming. Simple prompts with limited descriptions seem to work best — “a cat playing with a ball of yarn,” for example, generates a very realistic-looking cat bouncing excitedly around the floor. But Sora gave the cat a second tail for a few moments, and the yarn itself was jittery and looked like badly inserted CGI.

These visual issues were more frequent and glaring for complex prompts that provided detailed scene descriptions. It’s difficult to get human motion to be remotely natural: hands flailed everywhere when I asked it to show me someone applying makeup, and videos of people eating salad and sausage rolls were nightmarishly reminiscent of the viral AI clips of Will Smith inhaling spaghetti.

«

Again, though: this is the worst that Sora is going to be. Every version after this will be better. And the next version is the worst. And the next. Until the “worst” is absolutely good enough.
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The Turing Test — Can you tell a human from an AI?

Cameron Jones:

»

The Interrogator (you) asks the Witnesses (a human and an AI chatbot) questions to determine which one is human and which one is AI.

The true identity of the Witnesses are revealed at the end of each round.

«

Something to do over the Christmas break, perhaps? (Don’t worry, there’s another week of this stuff to come.) (Thanks Steve for the link.)
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‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

»

World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth.

The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.

Although a viable mirror microbe would probably take at least a decade to build, a new risk assessment raised such serious concerns about the organisms that the 38-strong group urged scientists to stop work towards the goal and asked funders to make clear they will no longer support the research.

“The threat we’re talking about is unprecedented,” said Prof Vaughn Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh. “Mirror bacteria would likely evade many human, animal and plant immune system responses and in each case would cause lethal infections that would spread without check.”

The expert group includes Dr Craig Venter, the US scientist who led the private effort to sequence the human genome in the 1990s, and the Nobel laureates Prof Greg Winter at the University of Cambridge and Prof Jack Szostak at the University of Chicago.

Many molecules for life can exist in two distinct forms, each the mirror image of the other. The DNA of all living organisms is made from “right-handed” nucleotides, while proteins, the building blocks of cells, are made from “left-handed” amino acids. Why nature works this way is unclear: life could have chosen left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins instead.

…The fresh concerns over the technology are revealed in a 299-page report and a commentary in the journal Science. While enthusiastic about research on mirror molecules, the report sees substantial risks in mirror microbes and calls for a global debate on the work.

«

For Venter to be against this is quite something: he has usually been the one barnstorming along, ignoring the consensus.
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Pew: half of American teens are online ‘constantly’ • AP News

Barbara Ortutay:

»

Nearly half of American teenagers say they are online “constantly” despite concerns about the effects of social media and smartphones on their mental health, according to a new report published Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

As in past years, YouTube was the single most popular platform teenagers used — 90% said they watched videos on the site, down slightly from 95% in 2022. Nearly three-quarters said they visit YouTube every day.

There was a slight downward trend in several popular apps teens used. For instance, 63% of teens said they used TikTok, down from 67% and Snapchat slipped to 55% from 59%. This small decline could be due to pandemic-era restrictions easing up and kids having more time to see friends in person, but it’s not enough to be truly meaningful.

X saw the biggest decline among teenage users. Only 17% of teenagers said they use X, down from 23% in 2022, the year Elon Musk bought the platform. Reddit held steady at 14%. About 6% of teenagers said they use Threads, Meta’s answer to X that launched in 2023.

The report comes as countries around the world are grappling with how to handle the effects of social media on young people’s well-being. Australia recently passed a law banning kids under 16 from social networks, though it’s unclear how it will be able to enforce the age limit — and whether it will come with unintended consequences such as isolating vulnerable kids from their peers.

Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp was a rare exception in that it saw the number of teenage users increase, to 23% from 17% in 2022.

…As in previous surveys, girls were more likely to use TikTok almost constantly while boys gravitated to YouTube. There was no meaningful gender difference in the use of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.

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Finite attention world: Meta seems to be the winner based on time spent using WhatsApp and Threads.
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Google unveils mixed-reality headset with Samsung, taking on Apple and Meta • Bloomberg via MSN

Mark Gurman:

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Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Samsung Electronics Co. unveiled a joint push into the mixed-reality market, introducing a new operating system and headset in a bid to challenge devices from Apple and Meta.

In what they called a collaboration as “one team,” the two companies announced a version of Google’s Android software for XR — shorthand for extended reality, which refers to a range of virtual- and augmented-reality technologies. They also showed off a Samsung-built headset code-named Project Moohan, taken from the Korean word for “infinite.”

The two tech giants look to jump-start a market that’s been slow to take off. Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro headset, released this year, remains a niche product — held back by its burdensome weight and hefty price tag. And Meta has had more success with smart glasses and cheaper VR headsets than higher-end mixed-reality devices.

The new Android will allow a range of companies to design their own XR devices — both headsets and lighter-weight glasses — while also taking advantage of the latest artificial intelligence advances. The hope is to replicate the success Google had with the original version of Android, which is used by most major smartphones. Companies like Sony Group Corp., Xreal Inc. and Lynx Mixed Reality have committed to build devices running the new operating system, Google said.

“The time for XR is now,” Sameer Samat, a Google executive who oversees the Android ecosystem, said in an interview. “We’re not strangers to this space,” he said, referring to Google Glass, a precursor to today’s devices that flopped a decade ago. “The technology wasn’t quite ready at the time, but we never stopped believing in the vision of what XR could be.”

«

Still a technology in search of a use. Ben Thompson made the good point on the Dithering podcast this week that what really works is a use case existing and pulling a technology out of the swamp: internet on a phone? Needs a big screen, so a touchscreen, so the iPhone was right for it. And so on. What’s pulling XR out of the technology swamp to be chosen?
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Studies pin down exactly when humans and Neanderthals swapped DNA • Ars Technica

Kiona Smith:

»

The Ranis [in Germany] population, based on how their genomes compare to other ancient and modern people, seem to have been part of one of the first groups to split off from the wave of humans who migrated out of Africa, through the Levant, and into Eurasia sometime around 50,000 years ago. They carried with them traces of what their ancestors had gotten up to during that journey: about 2.9% of their genomes were made up of segments of Neanderthal ancestry.

Based on how long the Ranis people’s segments of Neanderthal DNA were (longer chunks of Neanderthal ancestry tend to point to more recent mixing), the interspecies mingling happened about 80 generations, or about 2,300 years, before the Ranis people lived and died. That’s about 49,000 to 45,000 years ago. The dates from both studies line up well with each other and with archaeological evidence that points to when Neanderthal and Homo sapiens cultures overlapped in parts of Europe and Asia.

What’s still not clear is whether that period of contact lasted the full 5,000 to 7,000 years, or if, as Johannes Krause (also of the Max Planck Institute) suggests, it was only a few centuries—1,500 years at the most—that fell somewhere within that range of dates.

Once those first Homo sapiens in Eurasia had acquired their souvenir Neanderthal genes (forget stealing a partner’s hoodie; just take some useful segments of their genome), natural selection got to work on them very quickly, discarding some and passing along others, so that by about 100 generations after the “event,” the pattern of Neanderthal DNA segments in people’s genomes looked a lot like it does today.

Iasi and his colleagues looked through their catalog of genomes for sections that contained more (or less) Neanderthal ancestry than you’d expect to find by random chance—a pattern that suggests that natural selection has been at work on those segments. Some of the segments that tended to include more Neanderthal gene variants included areas related to skin pigmentation, the immune response, and metabolism. And that makes perfect sense, according to Iasi.

“Neanderthals had lived in Europe, or outside of Africa, for thousands of years already, so they were probably adapted to their environment, climate, and pathogens,” said Iasi during the press conference. Homo sapiens were facing selective pressure to adapt to the same challenges, so genes that gave them an advantage would have been more likely to get passed along, while unhelpful ones would have been quick to get weeded out.

«

We haven’t quite grasped the extent to which homo sapiens probably wiped out a rival hominid species. Then again, seeing what homo sapiens will do to itself, perhaps not surprising.
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Malaysia’s internet crackdown forces creators to self-censor • Rest of World

Tashny Sukumaran:

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Malaysian officials have blocked dozens of sites this year, and ordered social media sites to tighten their moderation policies. They have introduced a new regulatory framework and a new code of conduct for online platforms, made licensing mandatory, and passed the Cyber Security Act, which allows the seizure of any information without a warrant. A new Online Safety Bill will give authorities even more power to access information, and use a “kill switch” to shut down sites deemed harmful. Proposed changes to a 25-year-old communication law would compel service providers to disclose user data, and empower authorities to order surveillance measures.

These actions have tightened the government’s grip on online content, raising concerns about greater censorship and surveillance in Malaysia, digital rights groups say. Content creation in the Muslim-majority nation was already “tricky” before the raft of recent measures, entertainer Blake Yap, known as Chinepaiyen, told Rest of World.

Creators “have to be really smart, especially when it comes to bringing up issues that minorities face,” said Yap, who occasionally posts commentary on racial discrimination faced by religious and ethnic minorities in Malaysia to his half a million followers on Instagram and YouTube and two million on TikTok.

The new regulations “serve as a strict reminder of how people should produce their content, which, in a way, is definitely censoring us,” said Yap. “I am extra careful now.”

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YouTube TV is hiking prices again after denying “erroneous” report days ago • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

YouTube TV, now one of the country’s leading cable (or cable-ish) television providers, is starting to act like it. The service told customers in an email this morning that prices are going up in the new year, from $73 per month for the Base Plan to $83 on January 13, 2025—just days after suggesting that wasn’t happening.

“We don’t make these decisions lightly, and we realize this has an impact on our members,” Google’s email to subscribers read. “We are committed to bringing you features that are changing the way we watch live TV, like unlimited DVR storage and multiview, and supporting YouTube TV’s breadth of content and vast on-demand library of movies and shows.”

Google cited “the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service” in announcing the price increase. It noted that customers can pause or cancel their subscription in their Settings and that current trials and promotions will be honored and unchanged.

The move comes just days after a Verizon promotion on Facebook suggested that customers could save $10 per month on YouTube TV, in which the “Current subscription price of $82.99/mo applies.” As seen on 9to5Google, the verified TeamYouTube account responded on X (formerly Twitter) that it was aware Verizon promoted “the incorrect price for the YouTubeTV Base Plan.” It’s true that the price was incorrect—for three days, or about five weeks, depending on how you count.

Ars has contacted Google for comment on this post and will update it if we receive a response.

It’s getting tougher for YouTube TV to push itself as a more cost-effective version of traditional cable TV.

«

It’s getting a bit Animal Farm-ish: the consumer looked from the cable company to YouTube TV and back again and could not tell the difference. According to a Community Note on X, YouTube TV’s price has doubled in the past five years, with the last increase in April 2023.
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52 things I learned in 2024 • Medium

Tom Whitwell:

»

1: To highlight tax evasion, South Korea introduced ugly neon green number plates for company cars worth more than $58,000. Luxury car sales fell 27%. [Song Jung-a]

2: If you run one specific, but illegal, database query on a set of widely used health data, you can access Tony Blair’s entire personal medical history. [Ben Goldacre]

3: There are just 16 trademarked scents in the US, including Crayola crayons, Playdoh, an ocean-scented soft play in Indiana and a type of gun cleaner that smells of ammonium and kerosene. [Via Gabrielle E. Brill]

4: Film studios now add CGI effects to behind the scenes footage to hide how much CGI has been used to make the film. [Jonas Ussing]

5: Casio sells a premium desk calculator called the S100X-BK. It has exactly the same functions as a normal calculator but is handmade in Japan from milled aluminium. It costs £359.99. [darkhorse_log]

6: The London Underground has a distinct form of mosquito, Culex pipiens f. Molestus, genetically different from above-ground mosquitos, and present since at least the 1940s. [Katharine Byrne & Richard A Nichols]

«

Whitwell’s 52 things are always wonderful. This year is no exception.
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‘There will be nothing left’: researchers fear collapse of science in Argentina • Nature

Martín De Ambrosio & Fermín Koop:

»

It has been one year since libertarian President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, and the nation’s science is facing collapse, researchers say. Milei’s agenda to reduce the country’s deficit and lower inflation — which had topped 211% last year — has meant that, as his administration’s slogan says, “there is no money” for science or anything else.

“We are in a very, very critical situation,” says Jorge Geffner, director of the Institute for Biomedical Research in Retroviruses and AIDS (INBIRS) in Buenos Aires. He adds that the Innovation, Science and Technology Secretariat, once the country’s main science ministry but downgraded by Milei to a secretariat with less power, is working with a budget that is one-third lower than last year.

Argentinian scientists who are paid by the government have lost up to 30% of their income, Geffner says. (As of 2022, the government funded about 60% of research and development in Argentina, and the rest came from the private sector and international contributions.) As a result, the country is facing massive brain drain. At INBIRS, about half of its staff members are either considering finding jobs in other countries or already doing the paperwork, Geffner adds.

“With six more months like this, there will be nothing left” of the scientific community, says Mariano Cantero, director of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina, which trains physicists and engineers.

Milei promised to take a “chainsaw” to the Argentine government’s spending when he campaigned for president, to bring the economic crisis under control. Although the monthly inflation rate has dropped from 25.5% last December, when Milei took office, to 2.7% as of this October, poverty in the country has increased by 11 percentage points. Argentina’s gross domestic product is expected to shrink by 3.5% by the end of 2024, but recover by 5% in 2025.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

South Korea’s LG is ceasing production of Blu-ray players, marking the end of another hardware era. CC-licensed photo by Detlef Kroeze 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Still in production. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Bankruptcy judge rejects The Onion’s bid to buy Alex Jones’ Infowars • NBC News

David Ingram:

»

A bankruptcy judge on Tuesday rejected a bid by The Onion’s parent company to buy Alex Jones’ far-right media empire, including the website Infowars, ruling that the auction process was unfair. 

Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee. 

“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”

It was not immediately clear whether there would be a new auction in which The Onion could bid again for Jones’ assets. Lopez said he would leave the decision about what to do next in the hands of the trustee, Christopher Murray, who had overseen the auction.

The judge said Murray had acted in good faith in running the auction in which The Onion’s parent company initially appeared to prevail, but he said the trustee did not run a transparent process and should have given a rival bidder associated with Jones another chance to improve its bid.

“I think you’ve got to go out and try to get every dollar,” Lopez said. “I think that the process fell down.” 

The ruling dashed, at least for now, Global Tetrahedron’s plans to take over Infowars and radically shift its content from anti-government conspiracy theories to satirical humor. Instead, Jones can continue operating his far-right media business as he has for decades.

…A rival bidder associated with Jones, First United American Cos., offered $3.5m in cash, or twice as much cash as The Onion’s parent company. First United American is a limited liability company affiliated with Jones’ dietary supplements business, and its bid had Jones’ blessing.

«

One wonders about the shenanigans that have been going on here. Rather like Rudy Guiliani hanging on by his fingernails to stuff a court order has confiscated, Jones won’t give up.
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LG discontinues all UHD Blu-ray and Blu-ray players • FlatpanelsHD

Rasmus Larsen:

»

LG has discontinued all Blu-ray players, including the UBK80 and UBK90 UHD Blu-ray players, with remaining units only available while stocks last.

The announcement echoes similar moves from Oppo in 2018 and Samsung in 2019, when both companies exited the optical disc player market.

LG has now officially discontinued its Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray players, as reflected on LG’s online portals and confirmed by multiple sources to FlatpanelsHD.

However, in a statement to FlatpanelsHD, LG Korea stopped short of confirming a definitive global exit from the optical disc player market, leaving the door open for a return if demand picks up. For now, a few old models remain available in regions such as America and Europe, but only until inventory runs out.

LG has not launched any new optical disc players since 2018, when it introduced the UBK80 and UBK90 UHD Blu-ray players. This same is true for other major brands such as Panasonic and Sony.

«

Sales peaked in 2017. Now things are pretty much cooked for these devices into which colossal amounts of money – and amazing technological breakthroughs – were poured.
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Staff at Britain’s AI institute in open revolt • POLITICO

Laurie Clarke:

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Staff at the UK’s prestigious artificial intelligence institute are up in arms about the way it is being run — and have urged its board to step in and save it from itself.

A letter signed by 93 employees of the Alan Turing Institute — which is largely funded by the UK government and serves as Britain’s national institute for AI and data science — expresses no confidence in the body’s executive leadership team (ELT) and calls on the institute’s board to “urgently intervene.”

The missive, sent in early December, warns that employee concerns on a host of issues — including the institute’s sense of direction, progress on gender diversity, and a major redundancy round — have been “ignored, minimized or misdirected.” Immediate action is needed, it continues, to avoid “jeopardizing our funding base and long term financial health.”

The research institute — set up in 2015 with cash from central government — is supposed to lead the country’s research ecosystem on AI and data science.

But it has attracted strong criticism from other organisations in the space, including the influential Tony Blair Institute think tank, over a perceived failure to keep the UK abreast of the seismic developments in generative AI that have taken place in recent years.

The letter — seen by POLITICO — meanwhile argues that there has been “catastrophic decline in trust in leadership, particularly at senior levels. Staff morale and wellbeing has also become a critical concern, with rising levels of stress and burnout across teams.” 

…A review of the Turing Institute conducted by Britain’s science research funding agency last year highlighted governance issues at the organization. An open letter signed by more than 180 staff members denounced the lack of gender diversity across leadership roles following the appointment of four new research directors in February, all of whom were men.

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First, that’s a lot of people. Who knew the AI institute needed that many to keep abreast of things? Second, I’ve never heard of any of its governance team. Not sure if this reflects on me or them.
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Gemini Advanced rolling out first agentic feature: Deep Research • 9to5 Google

Abner Li:

»

Gemini Advanced subscribers are getting access to a new “Deep Research” capability. It is the “first feature in Gemini” to bring Google’s vision of agents that can perform complex actions on your behalf.

First previewed at the end of Made by Google 2024 in August, you ask Gemini a research question and it will create a multi-step plan. You will be able to revise that plan, like adding more aspects to look into.

Once approved and “Start research” is clicked, Gemini will be “searching [the web], finding interesting pieces of information and then starting a new search based on what it’s learned. It repeats this process multiple times.” Throughout the process, Gemini “continuously refines its analysis.”

The end result is a “comprehensive report of the key findings” that’s organized into sections/headings. Gemini will note “Sources and related content,” as well as link to “Researched websites.” You’ll find “helpful, easy-to-read insights” and a conclusion, with the ability to export to Google Docs.

Framed as a “personal research assistant,” Google says Gemini Deep Research takes a “few minutes” instead of several hours. 

Deep Research is rolling out today to Gemini Advanced in English on desktop and mobile web. In the top-left model picker, select “Use 1.5 Pro with Deep Research.” This is coming to the mobile in early 2025. 

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This might sound trivial, but has the potential to be absolutely enormous, and underpin all sorts of work. The most important part is that you can review the proposed steps. Give it a few years and this will be available everywhere for nothing.
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The department of flags: Syrian rebels lay bare Assad’s corrupt state • Financial Times

Raya Jalabi and Sarah Dadouch:

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“It’s all going to become one. All the government bodies will be dissolved: no Salvation Government, no factions, nothing,” said Mohammad Yasser Ghazal, a 36-year-old technocrat in the rebel government seconded from his job to help reconfigure the Damascus governorate. “It will all soon be dissolved into one Syrian republic.”

Ghazal and his colleagues displayed a strong command of the state apparatus they inherited just hours earlier, and hinted that HTS’ plans to overhaul it had long been in the works. But the task they face is formidable. Syria’s dysfunctional state institutions became engorged by corruption, cronyism and centralised power over five decades of rule by the Assad dynasty.

In his lilting Aleppan accent, Ghazal asked the department chiefs to list their remits and explain their departments’ functions. The two-hour meeting showcased how Assad’s government was “stopped in time”, he later told the FT in an interview.

Employees quoted government handbooks from the 1930s and 1960s, and were unable to answer direct questions about their duties, nor explain why decisions had been made. “The problems piled up, and they let them be,” he said. “They do not see themselves as responsible.”

One man introduced himself as the head of the public relations department, which he said included “international co-operation” as well as a division for “festival and events management”. Asked what this division did exactly, the civil servant answered, “flags”.

“There’s a department for flags?” Ghazal asked incredulously. 

“Yes, when foreign dignitaries come, we put up a lot of flags,” he said. “We hang them from the poles. It’s a big job.”

The same department head also had a translation division, staffed by two employees who spoke English. Ghazal asked if there were Russian or Iranian translators — states that propped up the Assad regime and frequently sent envoys — and was told there were none because representatives of these countries brought their own.

“But you didn’t have English-speaking dignitaries visit?”

“No,” the department head said.

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The end of Cruise is the beginning of a risky new phase for autonomous vehicles – The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

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The robotaxi subsidiary lost a staggering $3.48bn in 2023. Kyle Vogt, Cruise cofounder and [Dan] Amman’s successor as CEO, was under mounting pressure to expand the service and bring in more money to help cover the losses. Plus, he was directly competing with Alphabet’s Waymo, which had more vehicles and seemingly better technology. And Google’s parent company was more willing to spend billions of dollars, without any near-term profits, to win the robotaxi race. With the screws tightening, Vogt publicly drew a line in the sand: Cruise would bring in over $1bn in revenue by 2025.

Instead, Cruise never made it to the end of 2024.

It all culminated in an incident on October 7th, 2023, when a Cruise vehicle in San Francisco struck and dragged a pedestrian over 20 feet, seriously injuring her. The victim was initially struck by a hit-and-run driver, which launched her into the path of the Cruise car.

…the incident damaged Cruise’s effort to win the public’s trust.

…GM may have scrapped its “Ultra Cruise” branding to develop a partially autonomous system that covers “95 percent” of driving scenarios, but it still thinks that people want a fully autonomous car of their own — on their own terms.

“I think the application of what the customer wants in a privately owned vehicle is very different,” Barra said on Tuesday. “But I also think… there’s a lot of commonality [with Cruise’s technology]. How it seamlessly moves back and forth, I think is something different in a personal autonomous vehicle.”

“I think the application of what the customer wants in a privately owned vehicle is very different”
Driver-assistance technologies, especially so-called Level 3 systems, carry their own risks. There have been studies that show that the handoff between a partially automated system and a human driver can be especially fraught.

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It feels like GM is making lots of bad decisions, serially.
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What we really mean by “the massive scale” required for carbon dioxide removal in climate goals • Rocky Mountain Institute

Ryan Mills:

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Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) experts have explained the need for carbon dioxide removal (CDR), alongside aggressive and urgent decarbonization efforts, to meet climate goals. Recent estimates based on IPCC projections of emissions reductions indicate that the world may need to remove up to 10 gigatons of CO2 each year by 2050 to stay below 1.5°C of warming. Those working in the CDR field often describe this scale as “massive” or “enormous” and the necessary speed of growth as “unprecedented” or “ambitious.” But these terms alone do not allow people to truly envision the magnitude of a gigaton.

The prefix “giga-” translates to billion; each gigaton of CDR deployment means removing 1,000,000,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. In the same way that it is difficult to conceptualize the vastness of the solar system, the microscopic size of a cell, or the age of the Earth, it is hard to grasp what “gigatons of CDR” means without helpful comparisons and visuals. This article will break down the massive scale of CDR needed by 2050, using five key graphics.

…Interviews with CDR companies across approaches suggest that removing 1 gigaton of CO2 per year may require between 400,000 and 1,800,000 workers in areas including construction, operations, and ancillary corporate positions such as finance and legal support. Reaching 10 gigatons of removals per year could therefore require a total workforce of ~10 million workers. To put this in perspective, the global renewable energy industry employed 13.7 million people in 2022.

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The numbers in this are truly scary. As in, unattainable by anything except an international effort. And the COP meetings suggest that isn’t happening in a hurry.
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Bird flu in California child linked to virus in dairy cows, CDC says • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

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Federal disease trackers reported Tuesday that the first child diagnosed with bird flu in an ongoing US outbreak was infected with a virus strain closely related to one moving rapidly through dairy cattle, even though there is no evidence the youngster was exposed to livestock or any infected animals.

The finding by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the child, who lives in California, deepened the mystery about the spread of H5N1 bird flu, a viral ailment that epidemiologists have watched warily for more than two decades, fearing it could spark a pandemic.

The ongoing bird flu outbreak emerged this spring in US dairy herds. Almost 60 people, mostly farmworkers, have been sickened. All experienced mild illness, mostly pink eye. In all but two cases, including the California child, officials determined that patients had direct contact with infected animals. The only other human bird flu case in which the source of exposure is not known involved an adult in Missouri.

State health officials in California and in Alameda County, where the child lives, do not know how the youngster became infected. [Not via raw milk products, the CDC says.]

…For months, experts have warned that the longer the virus spreads among humans and animals, the greater the chance for mutations that make it more virulent and transmissible person to person. A teen in Canada was hospitalized with an H5N1 infection, and, like the child in California, had no known contact with infected animals.

…In a separate development Tuesday, state and local public health officials in California said they have received reports of illnesses afflicting 10 people who drank raw milk even though the state had recalled such products after bird flu virus was detected in raw milk sold in stores.

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It’s just one marvellous thing after another. (I still wonder if one of the child’s parents works on a farm.) (Thanks Joe S for the link. Only a watching brief!)
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Crypto’s legacy is finally clear • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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I’ve spent time reporting on NFTs and crypto-token-based decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs (like the one that tried to buy an original printing of the Constitution in 2021). I’ve read opaque white papers for Web3 start-ups and decentralized finance protocols that use smart contracts to enable financial-service transactions without major banks, but I’ve never found a killer app.

The aftermath of the presidential election, however, has left me thinking about crypto’s influence differently.

Crypto is a technology whose transformative product is not a particular service but a culture—one that is, by nature, distrustful of institutions and sympathetic to people who want to dismantle or troll them. The election results were at least in part a repudiation of institutional authorities (the federal government, our public-health apparatus, the media), and crypto helped deliver them: the industry formed a super PAC that raised more than $200m to support crypto-friendly politicians. This group, Fairshake, was nonpartisan and supported both Democrats and Republicans.

But it was Donald Trump who went all in on the technology: During his campaign, he promoted World Liberty Financial, a new crypto start-up platform for decentralized finance, and offered assurances that he would fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who was known for cracking down on the crypto industry. (Gensler will resign in January, as is typical when new administrations take over.)

Trump also pledged deregulation to help “ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” During his campaign, he said, “If you’re in favor of crypto, you’d better vote for Trump.”

At least in the short term, crypto’s legacy seems to be that it has built a durable culture of true believers, techno-utopians, grifters, criminals, dupes, investors, and pandering politicians. Investments in this technology have enriched many of these people, who have then used that money to try to create a world in their image.

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Definitely: the establishment for the anti-establishment, the culture for the anti-culture.
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Booking.com says typos giving strangers access to private trip info is not a bug • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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You may want to be extra careful if you’re booking holiday travel for family and friends this year through Booking.com. A stunned user recently discovered that a typo in an email address could inadvertently share private trip info with strangers, who can then access sensitive information and potentially even take over bookings that Booking.com automatically adds to their accounts.

This issue came to light after a Booking.com user, Alfie, got an email confirming that he had booked a trip he did not.

At first, Alfie assumed it was a phishing attempt, so he avoided clicking any links in the email to prevent any malicious activity and instead went directly to his Booking.com account to verify that the trip info wasn’t there. But rather than feeling the sweet relief that his account had not been compromised, he was shocked to find the trip had somehow been booked through his account.

Alfie told Ars he was “quite sure” he had not been hacked but could not explain how the booking got there. He contacted a Booking.com support team member, who he said also seemed surprised, putting him on hold for 10 minutes and telling him that “they had not seen anything like it in the many years they had worked there.” By the end of the call, Alfie was told that the issue was escalated to security teams who would follow up within 48 hours.

…Booking.com’s spokesperson told Ars. “Following our investigation, we found that the issue occurred due to a customer input error during the reservation process, where he inadvertently entered an incorrect email address. That email address, however, belonged to another Booking.com customer”—Alfie—”which caused the reservation to be linked to their account.”

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It gets worse: people can attach their trips to other emails. Booking.com doesn’t think it’s a security breach. Users might not concur.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified