The price of Apple products seems likely to shoot up if Trump’s tariffs come into effect. CC-licensed photo by Brian Snelson 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.

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

Trump’s 60% tariffs could push China to hobble tech industry growth • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Now that the US presidential election has been called for Donald Trump, the sweeping tariffs regime that Trump promised on the campaign trail seems imminent. For the tech industry, already burdened by the impact of tariffs on their supply chains, it has likely become a matter of “when” not “if” companies will start spiking prices on popular tech.

During Trump’s last administration, he sparked a trade war with China by imposing a wide range of tariffs on China imports, and President Joe Biden has upheld and expanded them during his term. These tariffs are taxes that Americans pay on restricted Chinese goods, imposed by both presidents as a tactic to punish China for unfair trade practices, including technology theft, by hobbling US business with China.

As the tariffs expanded, China has often retaliated, imposing tariffs on US goods and increasingly limiting US access to rare earth materials critical to manufacturing a wide range of popular products. And any such retaliation from China only seems to spark threats of more tariffs in the US—setting off a cycle that seems unlikely to end with Trump imposing a proposed 60% tax on all China imports. Experts told Ars that the tech industry expects to be stuck in the middle of the blow-by-blow trade war, taking punches left and right.

Currently, there are more than $300bn in tariffs on Chinese imports, but notably, there are none yet on popular tech like smartphones, laptops, tablets, and game consoles. Back when Trump last held office, the tech industry successfully lobbied to get those exemptions, warning that the US economy would hugely suffer if tariffs were imposed on consumer tech. Prices on game consoles alone could spike by as much as 25% as tech companies coped with increasing costs from tariffs, the industry warned, since fully decoupling from China was then, and is still now, considered impossible.

Trump’s proposed 60% tariff would cost tech companies four times more than that previous round of tariffs that the industry dodged when Trump last held office. A recent Consumer Technology Association (CTA) study found that prices could jump even higher than previously feared if consumer tech is as heavily taxed as Trump intends. Laptop prices could nearly double, game console prices could rise by 40%, and smartphone prices by 26%.

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Bet Apple is absolutely delighted at this prospect.
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Tracking Harris and Trump’s ad spending on Facebook and Instagram • Bellingcat

Pooja Chaudhuri and Melissa Zhu:

»

By summing up the average spending for all ads by each presidential candidate’s campaigns, we found that Harris’ campaign has spent about US$113m  – more than a small country’s GDP – advertising on Facebook and Instagram between July 21 and Oct. 30, while Trump’s campaign spent about US$17m in total.

Both figures likely represent just the tip of the iceberg for the candidates’ total ad spending across television and digital advertising including on other online platforms such as Google. 

Almost all (99.8%) of the ads sponsored by Harris’ campaign ran on both Facebook and Instagram, whereas almost 26% of those supporting Trump were only shown on Facebook, and 7.5% targeted only Instagram. 

This is only a fraction of both campaigns’ and their supporters’ spending on ads. An NPR analysis published on November 1, found that over $10bn has been spent in the 2024 election cycle, beginning January 2023, on races from president, senate to county commissioner. This includes ads on TV, radio, satellite, cable and other digital ads.

To estimate how much each campaign spent advertising on Meta’s platforms, we multiplied the average spending for each ad with the the percentage of ad delivery for each region (the data previously extracted from the “delivery_by_region” column), assuming that the amount spent in each region was proportional to where audiences eventually saw the ad.

Based on our calculations, the Harris campaign directed more advertising dollars in swing states with the highest spending in Pennsylvania – reported as the toughest swing state by election strategists – than any other state.

Pennsylvania played a crucial role in the 2020 election with Biden winning by a narrow margin. The state backed Trump in the 2016 election. 

The seven swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – are regarded as holding the key to the White House in the 2024 election. The Trump campaign has also focused on the swing states, but Democrats have outspent Republicans in each of those states.

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My conclusion, based on that: 2016 is long gone. This was not the social media election.
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Foundation’s edge • Unbalancing Mechanism

Adam Bell:

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[In the 1980s and 1990s] New nuclear power stations were considerably more expensive than building a new fleet of combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power stations. These were able to achieve thermal efficiencies of 55-60% and make best use of cheap North Sea gas. We stopped building nuclear power stations because we had a cheaper alternative.

And this was not simply a matter of Government making the wrong investment decisions. At privatisation the new generation companies refused to take on the UK’s existing nuclear fleet, judging both its running costs and potential liabilities as being not worth the candle. The Government kept them in public hands and forced utilities to buy power from them through the Non-Fossil Fuels Obligation. If we had maintained the nuclear build-out under public control, we would have had higher electricity costs throughout the 90s and 00s. And, consequently, lower growth.

The second explanation the authors [of the essay Foundations] put forward is that the increased use of wind and solar in our power system is driving costs up. This is not because of how much it costs to build out these technologies, but rather the costs of integrating them into our electricity system – more transmission lines to where the wind actually is, increased costs of balancing to accommodate intermittency, and the need to pay for backup for periods of low wind and low sun.

The reason why we cancelled our nuclear build-out and the reason why industrial power prices are now high is the same: the price of gas. The CCGT fleet we built in the 90s is now driving prices higher. The bounty of the North Sea ran out in the 2000s and we now import the majority of our needs. As a result, our marginal gas supply is liquified natural gas traded on global markets over which we have little control. Even the minor expansion of North Sea extraction that new exploration would unlock would do very little to move the dial here.

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And there are tons of pricing contracts for renewables which pay at least as much as the price of gas on the network. It’s strange how we get locked into our past actions; for all that we tell ourselves we can forecast the future, we get stuck with one foot in the solid concrete of what we did.
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Secrets of a ransomware negotiator • The Economist

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Last autumn, somewhere in Europe, a security operations centre noticed something. This is the primary job of a security operations centre – to notice things. Its role is simple, protecting organisations by tracking the people using their computer networks. Its name is often abbreviated to a simple acronym, SOC (pronounced “sock”.) The people who work at a SOC are the cyber-security equivalent of night guards at the mall, sitting at a bank of television screens: watching, waiting, trying not to doze off.

In this case, what they noticed was someone trying to log in to a staff member’s account at one of the companies the SOC monitors, using a series of incorrect passwords. About a thousand times in one day. This seemed suspicious. Someone at the SOC sent someone at the company an email, letting them know about the failed logins.

The cyber-security industry exists to keep information secret and reputations intact. I am able to tell you this story only if I keep the company in question anonymous, though you might have heard of it. Picture a company that provides boring administrative services to thousands of organisations across the planet. The kind of company that your own employer subcontracts. A company everyone relies on but no one really bothers to think about.

Both the SOC and the company were certified as meeting “the world’s best-known standard for information security”. But when the SOC alerted the company’s staff to the failed logins, they did nothing. The SOC didn’t press the issue. No one noticed that the user was eventually able to log in. Or that the account belonged to an employee who no longer worked there. No one noticed that it was an administrator-level account, which provided access to the company’s entire network. No one noticed anything amiss – for about a month.

Then, one day, the company’s servers began malfunctioning. A series of alarming emails arrived. “We managed to obtain a lot of secret documents, internal documents classified as strictly confidential, personal data of current employees!” read one. There was a link to a private chat room, and a deadline for using it. The hackers wanted to talk.

Some hours later, a phone rang on the other side of the world. Nick Shah was asleep at his beach house on the tropical island of Mauritius, which is in the middle of the Indian Ocean. When he picked up, it was a colleague with bad news.

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Shah is the ransomware negotiator (it’s a fast-growing trade) and this is an entertaining story.
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India’s lithium mining plans in Kashmir have stalled • Rest of World

Yashraj Sharma:

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Sunil Thakur, a 24-year-old engineering graduate, once planned to build a career as a civil engineer. But jobs were scarce, and so Thakur spent his days frying samosas for his family’s snack shop in Salal — a picturesque mountain village of about 10,000 people in India’s northern state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Then, in February 2023, Thakur’s dreams of prosperity were suddenly revived.

India’s mining ministry informed the villagers that they were sitting on a fortune: 5.9 million metric tons of lithium, a silver-white metal that is a core component of the batteries necessary for India’s transition to clean energy.

The discovery — a first in India — would make the country the holder of the fifth-largest lithium reserve in the world, mining officials announced. Indian media outlets jubilantly reported that companies including Mitsubishi, Tesla, and Ola Electric were eyeing the reserve.

Thakur and his family started daydreaming about selling their land in exchange for “a duplex home in a big Indian city, and loads of cash,” he said. He imagined investing in the family business, first established by his grandfather nearly four decades ago.

Two years later, nothing has happened. The government tried to auction the lithium block twice in March, and failed both times, due to a lack of bidders. The extraction plans have been halted indefinitely.

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“Did we say 5.9 million? We meant 0.02 million, and in clay deposits that make it hard to extract. Anyone?”
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Botched little animals • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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In the course of writing Superbloom over the last few years, I found myself losing patience with the prevailing critique of social media and the internet, the one that portrays the technology as something imposed on us by an imperious external force (progress or capitalism or Big Tech or what-have-you) and that in turn depicts us as the hapless, helpless victims of that force’s exploitative and manipulative powers. The problem with this line of inquiry is not that it’s invalid — it’s valid, and it’s necessary — but that it’s incomplete. It skirts around our own complicity. It too easily separates our botched little animals from our botched little selves.

One of the central arguments of the book is that the commercial internet, and social media in particular, is a machine fine-tuned to sense our desires and fulfill them. If “the algorithm” manipulates us, it does so by giving us what we want. The machine’s manipulative power is secondary to, and dependent on, the pleasure it provides.

The moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre stressed the importance of distinguishing “between what we desire and the choiceworthy” and “between what pleases those others whom we desire to please and the choiceworthy.” Making such distinctions has always been difficult. Digital media, with its hyperactive solicitude and its automation of the act of choosing, makes them more difficult than ever — and more important than ever. Because technology is a repository of human desire, a full critique of any machine needs also to be a critique of human desire. We’re the machine’s makers before we’re its victims.

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Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents • Financial Times

John Burn-Murdoch:

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the economic and geopolitical conditions of the past year or two have created arguably the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties and politicians across the developed world.

From America’s Democrats to Britain’s Tories, Emmanuel’s Macron’s Ensemble coalition to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi’s erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year.

The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.

Ultimately voters don’t distinguish between unpleasant things that their leaders and governments have direct control over, and those that are international phenomena resulting from supply-side disruptions caused by a global pandemic or the warmongering of an ageing autocrat halfway across the world.

Voters don’t like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit. The cost of living was also the top issue in Britain’s July general election and has been front of mind in dozens of other countries for most of the last two years.

That different politicians, different parties, different policies and different rhetoric deployed in different countries have all met similar fortunes suggests that a large part of Tuesday’s American result was locked in regardless of the messenger or the message. The wide variety of places and people who swung towards Trump also suggests an outcome that was more inevitable than contingent.

But it’s not just about inflation. An update of economist Arthur Okun’s “misery index” — the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates — for this era might swap out joblessness and replace it with immigration. On this basis, the past couple of years in the US, UK and dozens of other countries have been characterised by more economic and societal upheaval than they have seen in generations.

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Police freak out at iPhones mysteriously rebooting themselves, locking cops out • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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Law enforcement officers are warning other officials and forensic experts that iPhones which have been stored securely for forensic examination are somehow rebooting themselves, returning the devices to a state that makes them much harder to unlock, according to a law enforcement document obtained by 404 Media.

The exact reason for the reboots is unclear, but the document authors, who appear to be law enforcement officials in Detroit, Michigan, hypothesize that Apple may have introduced a new security feature in iOS 18 that tells nearby iPhones to reboot if they have been disconnected from a cellular network for some time. After being rebooted, iPhones are generally more secure against tools that aim to crack the password of and take data from the phone.

“The purpose of this notice is to spread awareness of a situation involving iPhones, which is causing iPhone devices to reboot in a short amount of time (observations are possibly within 24 hours) when removed from a cellular network,” the document reads. 

Apple did not provide a response on whether it introduced such an update in time for publication. Regardless, the reported iPhone reboots highlight the constant cat and mouse game between law enforcement officers and forensic experts on one side, and phone manufacturers Apple and Google on the other.

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It would make sense as a safety feature for “Find my iPhone”, for example: the phone will turn on and let the world know where it is.
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Man spent $2m to find new largest prime number • Popular Science

Andrew Paul:

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Formed in 1999, GIMPS [Greater Internet Mersenne Prime Search] relies on an international network of volunteers who download specialized software that harnesses their computers’ unused programming capabilities to search for exceptionally large Mersenne prime numbers. Named after Marin Mersenne, the 17th-century French friar who first studied them, Mersenne primes are defined as 2n-1, where “n” is any integer. While these begin relatively simply with the number 3 (22-1), they quickly climb to giant numbers that surpass any single human mind’s mathematical skills. They become so difficult to calculate, in fact, that the newest example, officially designated M136279841, is just the 52nd known Mersenne prime number.

Announced on Tuesday, GIMPS explained that M136279841 was first suspected on October 11 by a 36-year-old former NVIDIA employee named Luke Durant using what’s known as Fermat probable prime test. After Durant notified GIMPS of his possible breakthrough, several other computers around the world conducted multiple Lucas-Lehmer primality tests to ensure M136279841’s prime-ness, leading to its official confirmation 10 days later.

Durant’s achievement also marks a major moment in the hunt for Mersenne prime numbers—it’s the first of its kind to be found through the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) instead of traditional central processing units (CPUs). GPUs have come to prominence in recent years in conjunction with the rise of machine learning, large language models, and artificial intelligence, all of which often rely on massive GPU networks to function. For 28 years, GIMPS volunteers relied on CPU power to use the organization’s original software. In 2017, however, a developer named Mihai Preda designed an open-source program called GpuOwl to continue the Mersenne prime research through these muc-improved machines.

A single GPU isn’t likely to net a 41,024,320-digit number, however. Durant, for example, found M136279841 through a supercomputer cloud network he built using server GPUs throughout 24 datacenter regions in 17 countries. Such a large system isn’t cheap, either—The Washington Post reports the project cost Durant around $2m since he started looking for the 52nd Mersenne number in October 2023.

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The discoverers of the Mersenne primes are a varied bunch. Previously, in 2018: Fedex employee discovers largest prime number.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The fastest mobile speeds you can get in London tend to be down in the Underground. CC-licensed photo by Mike Knell 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. Jammed? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Trump’s win is neither an oil gusher nor a green crusher • Bloomberg

Liam Denning:

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as much as Trump calls the energy transition a scam, he entered office in 2017 amid sustained declines in the price of clean technologies. Developers’ decisions are certainly influenced by policy but few can resist the siren call of lower costs. For example: More US wind-power capacity was installed under the former president who speculates that the sound of spinning turbines can cause cancer than under Biden (Biden still wins big on solar and batteries).

Similarly, anyone expecting another round of energy dominance to spark a big jump in US oil and gas output should remember that the industry has in recent years grown rather fond of profitability. The same day Americans went to the polls, shale darling Diamondback Energy Inc. hosted an earnings call luxuriating in the company’s efficiency gains but warning against using that extra firepower to boost production: “I think that spreadsheet math is what’s gotten this industry in trouble in the past” — see: the Obama oil boom — as Chief Financial Officer Matthew Kaes Van’t Hof put it.

Trump will certainly reduce hurdles for producers; expect lower royalties and easier environmental rules on federal lands as well as more lease auctions. But federal lands account for a minority of oil and gas production and there are far bigger forces shaping the outlook for prices — and, therefore, the path of domestic production.

Chinese oil imports have slowed, exacerbating an excess of supply that has forced OPEC+ to delay bringing back production. If the group decides to pull the trigger in the first quarter — seasonally weak for oil demand — Trump’s inauguration could coincide with a slump in prices. That’s before we get to the negative impacts on oil and gas prices from a potential easing of sanctions on Russia or the chilling effect on global trade, and the opposite effect on US inflation, of his promised sweeping tariffs.

Similarly, Biden’s signature green policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, isn’t necessarily dead come January. The vast majority of announced cleantech manufacturing investment and associated jobs, underpinned by IRA subsidies, are in red [Republican] House districts.

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This is an important point: Trump can’t buck the market, and the price of renewables is cratering. In 2016 he was full of talk about coal: its use plummeted. The fact that the Inflation Reduction Act is making so much impact in Republican areas makes it much, much harder to kill.
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How the Trump whale correctly called the election • WSJ

Alexander Osipovich:

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The mystery trader known as the “Trump whale” is set to reap almost $50 million in profit after running the table on a series of bold bets tied to the presidential election.

Not only did he see Donald Trump winning the presidency, he wagered that Trump would win the popular vote—an outcome that many political observers saw as unlikely. “Théo,” as the trader called himself, also bet that Trump would win the “blue wall” swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Now, Théo is set for a huge payday. He made his wagers on Polymarket, a crypto-based betting platform, using four anonymous accounts. Although he has declined to share his identity, he has been communicating with a Wall Street Journal reporter since an article on Oct. 18 drew attention to his bets.

In dozens of emails, Théo said his wager was essentially a bet against the accuracy of polling data. Describing himself as a wealthy Frenchman who had previously worked as a trader for several banks, he told the Journal that he began applying his mathematical know-how to analyze US polls over the summer.

…Polls failed to account for the “shy Trump voter effect,” Théo said. Either Trump backers were reluctant to tell pollsters that they supported the former president, or they didn’t want to participate in polls, Théo wrote.

To solve this problem, Théo argued that pollsters should use what are known as “neighbour polls” that ask respondents which candidates they expect their neighbours to support. The idea is that people might not want to reveal their own preferences, but will indirectly reveal them when asked to guess who their neighbours plan to vote for.

Théo cited a handful of publicly released polls conducted in September using the neighbour method alongside the traditional method. These polls showed Harris’s support was several percentage points lower when respondents were asked who their neighbours would vote for, compared with the result that came from directly asking which candidate they supported.

To Théo, this was evidence that pollsters were—once again—underestimating Trump’s support. The data helped convince him to put on his long-shot bet that Trump would win the popular vote. At the time that Théo made those wagers, bettors on Polymarket were assessing the chances of a Trump popular-vote victory at less than 40%.

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People who saw the size of the bets thought the “Whale” must be some sort of foreign influence operation. Half-right, at least. (How did they think a big bet would influence millions of voters?) I hadn’t heard of neighbour polls, but it seems like a clever method to discover revealed preference.
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Walking Phoenix • Chris Arnade Walks the World

Chris Arnade has been walking around all sorts of countries, seeing them from the ground, for years. In March this year he was in Phoenix, Arizona, seeing the American dream at ground zero:

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The second morning began at the same McDonald’s, with the now familiar woman yelling at Susan — my own little Groundhog Day-like riff (“Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties”) which I chuckled at.

By noon I wasn’t chuckling anymore. The walk, although in a different direction, was just as depressing. Long empty stretches on mile-long blocks, with just me and the distraught. It became another day-long lesson in the zoology of American dysfunction — the homeless addict, the mentally-ill homeless addict, the bored and aimless teens, the elderly with no family, the physically handicapped, the obese, the obese physically handicapped, the perc 30 addict, the angry mentally ill, and so on and so on.

After a lunch my body had no interest in, I realized I was in over my head, and needed to get out of the sun, needed water, so I called it quits, and found a bus route to get the six miles back to my motel. The first bus was running forty-five minutes late, and the stop had no shade, so instead of waiting, I walked to the second, which was an hour and fifteen late. I also walked that last bit.

When I finally got to my room, I realized I’d made a massive mistake2. I had zero appetite, despite having eaten little all day, and I badly needed hydration, so I went to the corner 24 7 Convenience Store to stock up on Gatorade, where all my cards were declined, then locked. I’ve used these cards in Senegal, Mongolia, and Ecuador without triggering so much as a security text, but the corner of 27th and Indian School Rd was too much for the algorithm. Given who was around me and the amount of plexiglass between me and the clerk, it was probably justified.

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Do you want the remain candidate? Or the change candidate?
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The old man lost his horse • Flavia Ouyang

Flavia Ouyang:

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There is a well-known parable in the book Master of Huainan that encapsulates Daoist’s idea of the relativity of luck in life. It’s known as “The old man lost his horse, how could he know if this is not fortuitous” (Original: 塞翁失馬，焉知非福).

Here’s the story:

Once Upon a time, a skilled equestrian lived near the border. For no reason, his horse ran off into the barbarian kingdoms. Everyone felt bad for him. But his father said, “Don’t be glum. Who’s to say this won’t take a turn for the better?”

Months passed. His horse came back with a herd of well-bred barbarian horses. People congratulated him. His father said, “Don’t be overjoyed. Who’s to say this won’t take a turn for the worse?”

Now with an abundance of horses, the son indulged in riding. One day, he fell and broke his leg. Again, people sympathized with him. Yet his father said, “My son, who’s to say this won’t take a turn for the better?”

A year later, the barbarian breached through the border. All able-bodied men were conscripted to fight. Nine out of ten were killed. Due to his injury, the father and son were spared.

Thus, misfortune can bring fortune, and fortune can lead to misfortune. This happens time and time again. The evolution of fortune is endless and unfathomable.

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Ouyang’s comment: “Here’s to the horse we [in the US] lost last night.”
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Sweden scraps plans for 13 offshore windfarms over Russia security fears • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

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Sweden has vetoed plans for 13 offshore windfarms in the Baltic Sea, citing unacceptable security risks.

The country’s defence minister, Pål Jonson, said on Monday that the government had rejected plans for all but one of 14 windfarms planned along the east coast.

The decision comes after the Swedish armed forces concluded last week that the projects would make it more difficult to defend Nato’s newest member.

“The government believes that it would lead to unacceptable consequences for Sweden’s defence to build the current projects in the Baltic Sea area,” Jonson said at a press conference.

The proposed windfarms would have been located between Åland, the autonomous Finnish region between Sweden and Finland, and the Sound, the strait between southern Sweden and Denmark. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only about 310 miles (500km) from Stockholm.

Wind power could affect Sweden’s defence capabilities across sensors and radars and make it harder to detect submarines and possible attacks from the air if war broke out, Jonson said.

The only project to receive the green light to was Poseidon, which will include as many as 81 wind turbines to produce 5.5 terawatt hours a year off Stenungsund on Sweden’s west coast.

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Quite a thing when you have to bear in mind that your renewable energy strategy might interfere with your defence strategy.
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Why is London’s phone signal so bad? • London Centric

Jim Waterson:

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Astonishingly, tests carried out by London Centric found that in several high-profile areas of the capital the best place to find a fast 5G mobile data connection is now hundreds of feet under the capital in deep tube tunnels. This is thanks to new equipment – known as “leaky feeders” – installed in recent years under a contract with Transport for London.

In a damning indictment of the capital’s outdoor mobile infrastructure, if you want to tether your laptop to your phone and work remotely you might be better off tapping into the tube network and doing your work while riding around at 40km/hr underneath London. (Much of this article was written on the tube in this manner.)

On a packed rush hour Jubilee line train to Canary Wharf on Thursday morning it was possible to download data over EE’s network at 217mbps (megabits per second), as fast as many home broadband connections. But the moment you go above ground and are surrounded by the financial district’s skyscrapers the data download speed falls by more than three quarters to 49mbps.

Get back on the Jubilee line heading east from Canary Wharf and, thanks to the train emptying out, it was possible to hit a super-fast 371mbps on 5G in a tunnel deep under the Thames, enough to download an entire film in little over a minute. But on arrival at Stratford station there was no data connection on many platforms.

Jump on the Elizabeth Line to central London and the in-tunnel data speed returns to 203mbps – but outside Tottenham Court Road station, where you might be trying to meet a friend, it immediately falls to a barely-usable 2mbps. Even wandering around the corner to the middle of an empty Soho Square, free from obstructions, did little to improve download speeds.

The solution to all of this is to install more masts with greater capacity. Gareth Elliott works for lobby group Mobile UK, which represents the interests of mobile phone network providers. He said the biggest issue the operators face in London is the planning system, with local councillors across the capital politically incentivised to object to new masts at all costs – either on aesthetic grounds, or over dubiously-sourced fears about the supposed health impacts.

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Planning regulations really are a blight.
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Just have AI build an app for that • David Gomes

David Gomes:

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I sometimes need to search for a website that will “convert a PNG to SVG”, or “remove page from PDF” or “resize svg”. And these apps are… okay. I don’t really trust most of them with my data, and also a lot of times they just don’t work or have too many ads.
So, I’ve been noticing a trend of people just using AI agents to create full blown apps for these simple use cases.

I decided to try it myself for a “resize SVG” app since I recently had to go through a bunch of websites to do this. So, I pulled up Replit Agent and even though I’ve used it before, it doesn’t cease to amaze me just how insanely good it is. The level of polish on this product is unlike any other AI agent out there right now.

It starts off by drawing up a plan and asking you for feedback on that plan. Then, it’ll just go to town and try to build the app. But what’s super clever about it is that the agent asks you for feedback along the way. Effectively, the Replit Agent guides you, not the other way around (as one might have expected).

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This is going to be the next generation of apps. Total junk, but single-use.
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Fate of Google’s search empire could rest in Trump’s hands • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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A few weeks before the US presidential election, Donald Trump suggested that a breakup of Google’s search business may not be an appropriate remedy to destroy the tech giant’s search monopoly.

“Right now, China is afraid of Google,” Trump said at a Chicago event. If that threat were dismantled, Trump suggested, China could become a greater threat to the US, because the US needs to have “great companies” to compete.

Trump’s comments came about a week after the US Department of Justice proposed remedies in the Google monopoly trial, including mulling a breakup.

“I’m not a fan of Google,” Trump insisted. “They treat me badly. But are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that, are you going to destroy the company? What you can do, without breaking it up, is make sure it’s more fair.”

Now that Trump is presumed to soon be taking office before the remedies phase of the DOJ’s litigation ends next year, it seems possible that Trump may sway the DOJ away from breaking up Google.

Experts told Reuters that a final ruling isn’t expected until August, giving Trump plenty of time to possibly influence the DOJ’s case. But Trump’s stance on Google has seemed to shift throughout his campaign, so there’s no predicting his position once he takes power.

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Creates the perfect conditions to force Sundar Pichai to come and pay fealty in the hope of getting amelioration.
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Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”

When reached by TechCrunch, Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief Brandon Borrman confirmed the layoffs in an email.

“The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward,” read the statement shared with TechCrunch.

According to its annual tax filings, the Mozilla Foundation reported having 60 employees during the 2022 tax year. The number of employees at the time of the layoffs was closer to 120 people, according to a person with knowledge. When asked by TechCrunch, Mozilla’s spokesperson did not dispute the figure.

This is the second layoff at Mozilla this year, the first affecting dozens of employees who work on the side of the organization that builds the popular Firefox browser.

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I think the “onslaught of change” is actually an absence of money. Mozilla is getting walloped by the drying up of Google’s funding.
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What are you Haydn? The hoaxers who fooled the classical music world • The Guardian

Phil Hebblethwaite:

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In 1993, completely out of the blue, the Austrian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda was sent a photocopy of a manuscript purporting to be six lost Haydn keyboard sonatas. It came with a letter from a little-known flautist from Münster, Germany called Winfried Michel, who told Badura-Skoda that he’d been given it by an elderly lady whose identity he could not reveal.

Badura-Skoda was suspicious, but once he played the music, he became sure that the works were real. He asked his wife Eva, a musicologist, to examine the manuscript. Although the music wasn’t in Haydn’s hand, she believed it to be an authentic copyist’s score dating from around 1805 and originating in Italy. They checked with the Haydn scholar, HC Robbins Landon, and he too was convinced. He penned an article for BBC Music Magazine, headlined Haydn Scoop of the Century, tipped off the Times, and called a press conference for 14 December 1993.

Within hours, the Joseph Haydn Institute in Cologne declared the manuscript to be a fake. An expert from Sotheby’s in London agreed. The Badura-Skodas had been hoaxed, or so it seemed. The following February, Eva gave a talk in California titled: The Haydn Sonatas: A Clever Forgery. Paul played a selection of the works – in a confused state of mind. Eva told the music scholar Michael Beckerman, reporting for the New York Times, “My husband still thinks they’re genuine,” raising difficult questions about truth and art. What did Paul believe he was playing? What was the audience hearing? And did it matter?

In his article, Beckerman wrote: “Knowing that a work is by Haydn or Mozart allows us to see ‘inevitable’ connections. Take away the certainty of authorship, and it’s devilishly difficult to read the musical images within.” He noted, too, that it was the inauthenticity of the manuscript that had exposed Michel and not the fidelity of the music. And so, Beckerman dared to ask: “If someone can write pieces that can be mistaken for Haydn, what is so special about Haydn?”

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That is the question, isn’t it? I’m surprised, in passing, that AI music generators haven’t yet given us Beethoven’s Tenth, or Schubert’s Finished Symphony.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Bicycle theft is all too prevalent in London, but even when tracking devices show where they are, police won’t intervene. CC-licensed photo by Lisa Risager 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. Locked up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Coinbase’s big election bet is about to be tested • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

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In the first few years after founding Coinbase, CEO Brian Armstrong shied away from Washington, DC. But as his ambitions for his crypto exchange scaled, so too did his need to curry favour on Capitol Hill.

“About five or six years ago, we realized that crypto was getting big enough that we needed to go really engage actively in a policy effort, so I started coming out to D.C.,” Armstrong, who started Coinbase in 2012, told CNBC in September, following a day of meetings with political leaders.

Now, it’s practically Armstrong’s full-time job, and Coinbase’s money is all over the nation’s capital. The company was one of the top corporate donors this election cycle, giving more than $75m to a group called Fairshake and its affiliate PACs, including a fresh pledge of $25m to support the pro-crypto super PAC in the 2026 midterms. Armstrong personally contributed more than $1.3m to a mix of candidates up and down the ballot.

The tech industry’s biggest names have dotted Washington for years to try and push their agendas as their market caps have expanded, but for Coinbase, the matter is potentially existential.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler sued the firm last year over claims that it sells unregistered securities. A judge has since ruled that the case should be heard by a jury. Coinbase has fought back vociferously, and has also said that it wants to work with regulators to come up with a proper set of laws governing the nascent industry.

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Coinbase, you might recall, is the company where Armstrong himself declared in October 2020 that politics was definitely, absolutely, not going to be a thing any more for the workplace: the new corporate policy was “political neutrality”. O tempora, o mores, and if you don’t like these mores we have plenty more out the back.

Secretly, one has to hope that all that money turns out to be wasted and that none of the candidates they’ve backed succeed. Though of course there’s probably been plenty of each-way funding going on.
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China hack enabled vast spying on US officials, likely ensnaring thousands of contacts • WSJ

Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha, Drew FitzGerald and Sarah Krouse:

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as U.S. officials and security experts piece together what the hackers—part of a group nicknamed Salt Typhoon by investigators—were able to achieve, they have assembled clues that fuel concerns that China’s mastery of cyber-espionage is dangerously advanced.

The hackers appeared to have had the ability to access the phone data of virtually any American who is a customer of a compromised carrier—a group that includes AT&T and Verizon—but limited their targets to several dozen select, high-value political and national-security figures, some of the people familiar with the investigation said. 

The hackers also appear to have infiltrated communications providers outside the U.S., including at least one country that closely shares intelligence with the U.S., though it isn’t yet clear where or how extensively. Investigators expect more victims to be identified as the probe continues.

Investigators don’t yet know how China planned to use the information it allegedly stole. U.S. intelligence officials have warned for over a decade that Beijing has amassed an enormous trove of information on Americans in order to identify undercover spies, understand and anticipate decisions by political leaders, and potentially build dossiers on ordinary citizens for future use. 

Though political figures are among those spied upon, officials don’t suspect the Chinese are seeking to use the access to disrupt or otherwise interfere in the presidential election.

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The US begins to look like a huge Swiss cheese at this point.
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EU plans to fine Apple for anticompetitive App Store practices • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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The European Commission plans to fine Apple for not adequately complying with Digital Markets Act (DMA) requirements for the App Store, reports Bloomberg. Regulators apparently believe that Apple did not implement changes that allowed developers to steer users to cheaper prices outside of the App Store .

Back in June, the EU said that Apple was in breach of the DMA due to its anti-steering rules. The European Commission said that developers should be able to inform their customers of alternative purchasing options, steer them to offers, and allow them to make purchases outside of the App Store .

In August, Apple again changed its App Store rules in Europe to satisfy regulators. Apple began allowing EU developers to communicate and promote offers that would direct customers outside of the App Store , and it marked a significant loosening of Apple’s prior rules. Developers are able to communicate discounts and deals without opting into Apple’s new developer terms or paying the Core Technology Fee, but Apple is requiring developers to report external purchase transactions and pay an initial acquisition fee and a store services fee.

It is not clear when the European Commission will announce the fine, but it could happen before current competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager leaves the position later this month. It could also be pushed back to later in the year, though.

Exactly how much Apple will have to pay is unknown at this time, but earlier this year, the EU fined Apple $2bn for anticompetitive behavior against third-party music services.

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It has taken a very, very long time for Apple to reap what it has been sowing for all these years, but it looks like it’s finally going to happen.
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Why we should start worrying about bird flu • The Washington Post

Leanna Wen:

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Forty-one people in the United States have been infected by the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu since April, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed last week. These include 17 cases from California and nine from Washington, both states that had no known human infections until last month.

The CDC reiterated that the risk to the public is low, citing that there has been no documented human-to-human transmission and that all cases thus far have been mild. But many public health experts are increasingly worried. Here are four reasons why:

The epidemiology of the virus has changed a lot in a short time. Caitlin M. Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and author of the book “Crisis Averted,” told me that it’s significant for a virus to evolve from circulating mostly among wild birds to causing outbreaks in mammals. In March, H5N1 began spreading among dairy cows.

“This was a new development that had not been seen before for avian influenza,” Rivers said, “And now we are finding more and more spillovers from those farm settings to humans.”

Other mammals have since been contracting bird flu. First, it was farm cats in Texas, then indoor cats in Colorado. Last week, it was found in a pig at a backyard farm in Oregon. The virus has even been detected in mice. Should spread in pest mice become prevalent, “that would be very troubling in terms of containment and the ease by which the virus could find other hosts,” Rivers said.

Many cases are probably undetected. An investigative reporter from KFF Health News obtained emails from state and local health departments and found that, despite their best efforts, surveillance was “marred by delays, inconsistencies, and blind spots.” Many farm owners did not want their employees tested and refused visits by health officials. Considering that avian flu outbreaks have been documented in 387 dairy herds in 14 states and 1,195 poultry operations in 48 states, infections among workers have almost certainly been missed.

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And the other joyful news is “the virus might spread more easily that we’d thought.” Something to take your minds off the US election, eh? (Only a watching brief. Nothing more.)
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Is your air fryer spying on you? Concerns over ‘excessive’ surveillance in smart devices • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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Air fryers that gather your personal data and audio speakers “stuffed with trackers” are among examples of smart devices engaged in “excessive” surveillance, according to the consumer group Which?

The organisation tested three air fryers, increasingly a staple of British kitchens, each of which requested permission to record audio on the user’s phone through a connected app.

Smart air fryers allow cooks to schedule their meal to start cooking before they get home. Not all air fryers have such functionality but those that do often use an app installed on a smartphone.

Which? found the app provided by the company Xiaomi connected to trackers for Facebook and a TikTok ad network. The Xiaomi fryer and another by Aigostar sent people’s personal data to servers in China, although this was flagged in the privacy notice, the consumer testing body found.

Its tests also examined smartwatches that it said required “risky” phone permissions – in other words giving invasive access to the consumer’s phone through location tracking, audio recording and accessing stored files.

Which? found digital speakers that were preloaded with trackers for Facebook, Google and a digital marketing company called Urbanairship.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the latest consumer tests “show that many products not only fail to meet our expectations for data protection but also consumer expectations”.

The ICO, the UK’s independent regulator for data protection and information rights law, is drawing up new guidance for manufacturers of smart products to be published in spring 2025. It is due to outline clear expectations for what they need to do to comply with data protection laws and protect people using smart products.

Harry Rose, the editor of Which? magazine, said smart tech manufacturers were collecting data with little or no transparency and called for the ICO’s code to “be backed by effective enforcement, including against companies that operate abroad”.

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Overspecified smart devices are the worst. I rejected some scales because they required an app.
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Is your smartphone being tracked? Here’s how to tell • The Guardian

Ariel Bogle:

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We’re looking for apps I don’t remember downloading, and which platforms can access my smartphone’s camera or microphone; who else can see my calendar, my notes, my emails.

We also check the basics: whether my device is actually registered to my name and email address, and whether I have two-factor authentication turned on.

Rose MacDonald, cofounder of Nansen Digital Forensic Services, is walking me through the digital safety audit she provides to victim-survivors of family violence. I’m talking to the former police detective and digital forensics specialist so that I can better understand the experience of people who are subject to this kind of abuse – and how they can minimise the risks.

We examine who might be able to access my Google or iCloud accounts. What third-party platforms are connected to the account, and whether my emails are being forwarded to another address.

Sometimes when MacDonald does these audits she finds hi-tech surveillance tools – spyware, for example, which buries itself deep in your phone’s software. But this kind of technology costs money and much more often, she says, perpetrators take advantage of the opportunities for surveillance offered by everyday features: the shared accounts or location sharing tools that reveal more than we realise.

“What we find more typically is misconfiguration of normal settings … and breaches of the cloud environment. If they’ve got a username and password to something, you don’t really need a lot of technical knowledge,” she says.

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Notable that this is filed under “domestic violence”.
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How to catch a London bike thief • London Centric

Jim Waterson:

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James Dunn, the founder of bicycle recovery service BackPedal, wasn’t expecting a call from me on a Friday evening. We’d spent weeks discussing how best to investigate the plague of bike theft in the capital for a London Centric article. I’d tried knocking on the doors of convicted bike thieves after they got out of prison but, strangely, the criminals didn’t want to share all their tactics with a journalist. I’d asked to accompany Dunn’s recovery agents as they track down and retrieve client’s bikes, using GPS trackers they hide on the frame, but we hadn’t yet scheduled in a date.

In desperation, I’d bought a cheap bicycle with the intention of using it as “bait bike”, a tactic used occasionally by the police to smash organised gangs. Dunn’s company was going to fit my new purchase with a specialist tracker, wait for it to get stolen, then we’d see where it ended up.

Instead, I’d accidentally jumped the gun.

Earlier that day I’d left my family’s electric cargo bike outside my home while dashing in for a Teams meeting with a group of London council communications directors. The battery-powered bike can carry two children across London faster than public transport and is far cheaper than owning a car. Every story in London Centric is reported from its saddle, as I cover hundreds of miles across the capital every week in search of news. It has transformed my life. But, as the thieves who must have been watching my house knew, it is not a cheap bit of a kit. And by the time I went back outside, it was gone.

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Absorbing story. Waterson is, bit by bit, making London Centric a must-read for Londoners. This one – given that he found the bike, but the police wouldn’t act – is going to run and run.
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Oil giant BP is killing 18 hydrogen projects, chilling the nascent industry • TechCrunch

Tim De Chant:

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Tucked inside a 32-page earnings report, oil and gas giant BP revealed it was killing 18 early-stage hydrogen projects, a move that could have a chilling effect on the nascent hydrogen industry.

The decision, along with the sale of the company’s US onshore wind-power operations, will save BP $200m annually and help boost its bottom line. The hydrogen industry, which has relied on oil and gas companies both financially and through lobbying efforts, is preparing for a grimmer outcome.

BP has been a supporter of hydrogen. The company’s venture capital arm has invested in several green hydrogen startups, including Electric Hydrogen and Advanced Ionics. Earlier this year, BP said it would develop “more than 10” hydrogen projects in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. 

Now BP is scaling back those plans, saying it’ll develop between five and ten projects. The company is keeping quiet about which ones will receive the green light.

Hydrogen has the potential to reduce carbon pollution significantly in a range of industries, including petrochemical refining, steelmaking, and long-haul shipping. But infrastructure for hydrogen, especially green hydrogen, which is produced using renewable electricity, remains underbuilt. That’s in part because green hydrogen is the most expensive form of the gas to produce, and because transporting hydrogen is costly relative to fossil fuels.

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Good old BP – why bother getting into renewables when you can just dump wind projects. Hydrogen projects have never seemed convincing: they get trialled and dumped, because it’s just too difficult in a world where microgeneration is booming and small nuclear seems like a plausible future.
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The law must respond when science changes • Scientific American

David Faigman and Jeff Kukucka:

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Whereas the law seeks to provide fair process in a timely fashion, science seeks to discover truth over time. This means that what was once fair may become unfair; the justice of yesteryear may be unjust today. [Robert] Roberson [sentenced to for death for the murder of his two-year-old daughter in 2002] and the Menendez brothers [life without parole for killing their parents] are the victims of that very divide.

In both cases, scientific understanding changed years ago. Shaken baby syndrome was called into question in the early 2010s, and, years before that, psychologists identified the relationship between the trauma of childhood abuse and violence. Yet all three men have struggled to reopen their cases. An essential principle of science is that it might change as research accumulates. That is a principle that the law has largely failed to come to grips with. This failure threatens the constitutional guarantee of due process.

The Roberson and Menendez cases are not abnormal. The annals of the law are replete with examples of what we once thought was scientific truth, upon which judges and juries decided both civil and criminal cases, where we later understood the science to be wrong. In 2004 the state of Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham for the 1992 arson murders of his family. At the time of his execution, the forensic science that linked him to the fire had been categorically invalidated.

In a 2015 press release, the FBI reported that in their ongoing review of non-DNA-based microscopic hair identification, 90% of cases had errors. Similarly, prosecutors’ use of a questionable theory known as comparative bullet-lead analysis was eventually abandoned after scientific reports debunked its statistical bases. Even today, courts continue to allow bite mark identification testimony, even though people who say they are bite mark experts can’t even agree on whether a bite mark is from a person—or a dog. And what we know about firearms identification and fingerprints are changing— there could be scores of convictions based on what is no longer true.

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The death penalty goes wrong? Who would have guessed? (Faigman is a professor of law, and Kukucka a professor of psychology.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Turns out there was a Wordle on Tuesday morning, so perhaps the NYTimes has laid in a store against the possibility of its tech workers striking. Brief Drama Given Spare Space.

A strike at the New York Times means there won’t be a Wordle today, November 5. Drama! CC-licensed photo by Ken Mayer 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. Freed! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Generative AI has a massive e-waste problem • IEEE Spectrum

Katherine Bourzac:

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Private investment in generative AI has grown from about US $3bn in 2022 to $25bn in 2023, and about 80% of private companies expect AI to drive their business in the next three years, according to Deloitte. Keeping up with the latest advancements means upgrading GPUs, CPUs, and other electronic equipment in data centers as newer, more advanced chips become available. And that, researchers project, will lead to an explosion in the production of electronic waste.

A study published last week in the journal Nature Computational Science estimates that aggressive adoption of large language models (LLMs) alone will generate 2.5m tonnes of e-waste per year by 2030.

“AI doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it relies on substantial hardware resources that have tangible environmental footprints,” says study coauthor Asaf Tzachor, a sustainability and climate researcher at Reichman University, in Israel. “Awareness of the e-waste issue is crucial for developing strategies that mitigate negative environmental impacts while allowing us to reap the benefits of AI advancements,” he says.

Most research on AI sustainability has focused on these models’ energy and water use and their concomitant carbon emissions. Tzachor worked with Peng Wang and Wei-Qiang Chen, both professors at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to calculate the potential increase in e-waste associated with generative AI. The study is intended to provide an estimate of the potential scale of the problem, and the researchers hope it will spur companies to adopt more sustainable practices.

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In its way, classic human behaviour: do it now, worry about the effect later.
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Scientists may have solved the mystery of sky-high methane emissions • The Washington Post

Shannon Osaka:

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Almost two decades ago, the atmosphere’s levels of methane — a dangerous greenhouse gas that is over 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide in the short term — started to climb. And climb.

Methane concentrations, which had been stable for years, soared by 5 or 6 parts per billion every year from 2007 onward. Then, in 2020, the growth rate nearly doubled.

Scientists were baffled — and concerned. Methane is the big question mark hanging over the world’s climate estimates; although it breaks down in the atmosphere much faster than carbon dioxide, it is so powerful that higher-than-expected methane levels could shift the world toward much higher temperatures.

But now, a study sheds light on what’s driving record methane emissions. The culprits, scientists believe, are microbes — the tiny organisms that live in cows’ stomachs, agricultural fields and wetlands. And that could mean a dangerous feedback loop — in which these emissions cause warming that releases even more greenhouse gases — is already underway.

“The changes that we saw in the last couple of years — and even since 2007 — are microbial,” said Sylvia Michel, lead author of the paper published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Wetlands, if they are getting warmer and wetter, maybe they’re producing more methane than they used to.”

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Figured out by isotopic examination of the methane’s carbon atoms. If it’s microbes, this is bad.
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Why did so many die in Spain? Because Europe still hasn’t accepted the realities of extreme weather • The Guardian

Friederike Otto:

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I founded World Weather Attribution in 2014 to shift the conversation. Our attribution studies are carried out quickly, over days or weeks, in the immediate aftermath of weather disasters to inform people in real time about the role of the climate crisis.

A quick analysis following the floods in Spain found that the climate emergency made the extreme rainfall about 12% more intense and twice as likely. Despite this, in Paiporta, where at least 62 people have died, the mayor said floods were not common and “people are not afraid”. But the changing climate is making once-rare events more common.

Record-breaking events such as these complicate preparedness – how do you communicate the extreme danger of something someone has never experienced before?

We saw this play out recently after Hurricane Helene made landfall. More than 200 people died in floods in the inland southern Appalachians region of the US. Despite warnings of “catastrophic and life-threatening” flooding ahead of the disaster, people were still caught out when disaster struck, and many could not appreciate how extreme the downpours were going to be.

However, in Spain, people were only warned as it was happening. Warnings were not sent until many people were already trapped in flooded houses or in underground car parks, trying to move their cars to higher ground.

The same happened – or rather didn’t happen – in Germany in 2021. No information was given on how to act and, crucially, no support was given to those who could not help themselves: in the German town of Sinzig, 12 residents of a home for disabled people drowned. Back in Spain, the deaths of the inhabitants of one care home have already been reported and I fear more disturbing stories such as this will emerge in the weeks to come.

World Weather Attribution has studied 30 devastating floods, and in almost all cases, including in developing countries, we’ve found that the rainfall was well forecast. But as we’ve seen in Spain, forecasting is not enough. The warnings, when they finally came, did not include vital information on where to evacuate to and how.

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404 Media is partnering with Wired • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, Jason Koebler and Joseph Coxk:

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Today we are happy to announce WIRED is going to co-publish two of our articles a month on its website. We are really excited to get our stories in front of a wider audience and grow 404 Media. We also hope to occasionally collaborate with our friends and colleagues at WIRED on stories we can do better together. 

To be absolutely clear, 404 Media remains a 100% independent, journalist-owned company managed by the four of us. Our collaboration with WIRED is similar to our collaboration with Court Watch and Capitol Forum, and involves us co-publishing stories on like-minded publications that we think their audience will like and widening our reach beyond what we’re able to do by ourselves. If you’re a paying subscriber reading this, there’s not really anything for you to do or to know—you’ll continue to get ad-free access to all of our articles, including those we co-publish with WIRED. And if you’re reading any of those co-published articles on our site, you will need to be a paying 404 Media subscriber.

Like most people who follow technology, we’ve been fans of WIRED since before we became journalists ourselves, and we’re especially happy to partner with the legendary title now that it is home to many of our talented former co-workers at VICE.

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Hopeful that this means 404 Media is getting money for this.
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Gender is a big factor in what a TikTok user sees about politics and the election • The Washington Post

Jeremy B. Merrill, Cristiano Lima-Strong and Caitlin Gilbert:

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A significant gender gap has emerged in this year’s presidential campaign, with women voters breaking for Vice President Kamala Harris and men for former president Donald Trump. For participants in a unique Washington Post experiment, that gap has also shown up in their TikTok feeds.

This fall, more than 800 American adults shared their TikTok viewing histories with The Post, opening a rare window on how the increasingly popular app presents political news. The Post found that female users received roughly 11% more content about Harris than men did, while men — even liberal ones — were more likely to be shown videos about Trump than women were.

The 800 users who responded to The Post overwhelmingly identified as liberal. But the gender gap also showed up in a Post analysis of 300 TikTok users whose histories were collected in a parallel effort by researchers at Cybersecurity for Democracy, a nonpartisan multi-university project that studies algorithms. In that dataset — where liberals, conservatives and moderates were evenly divided — men were 12.5% more likely than women to see videos about Trump.

The Post found a similar gender imbalance for videos posted directly by the campaigns. In the Cybersecurity for Democracy sample, women of all political persuasions saw Harris campaign videos 40% more often than men did. And men saw Trump campaign videos more than twice as often as women did.

The findings shed light on how TikTok is shaping the way American adults, especially younger ones, get their news — and what they see about politics. The app claims 170 million U.S. users, and 4 in 10 US adults under 30 say they regularly turn to TikTok for news. Both campaigns have said they see the app as a key messaging tool to reach Gen Z and millennial voters.

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Doesn’t this rather give the lie to the suggestion that TikTok is an Evil Chinese App Trying To Control America’s Politics? Never mind – the forced sale is still scheduled for (Sunday) January 19 next year, the day before the presidential inauguration.
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Meta’s Threads has 275 million users. It sure doesn’t feel that way • Business Insider

Peter Kafka:

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Meta says Threads is growing very, very fast and has been adding a million sign-ups a day. Back in April, Meta said Threads had 150 million monthly users. Which means it has grown 83% in half a year.

But all of that is hard to square with my experience on Threads. I’m there quite a bit, posting and reading for fun and for work. And it doesn’t seem like the place has nearly doubled recently.

This isn’t a metrics-based argument — I’m not tracking the engagement for my posts in any serious way. Just a vibes thing. When Threads launched in July 2023, it definitely felt empty, especially compared to what was then still called Twitter. It’s picked up since then.

But it certainly doesn’t seem anything close to what Twitter was like back in 2019, back when lots of people were calling it a hellsite and also checking it every day.

For giggles, I did the classic lazy reporter gambit and asked people on Threads if it felt like the place has gotten a lot more full recently. The results seem split. Special shout out to sami3456567, whose bio says he’s no fan of “incels, present & future cat ladies, anything remotely French.” You’ll always have a place in social media, sami.

One reason I may not be noticing that Threads seems more crowded is that some of that growth is coming from people who are unlikely to be posting in English: Meta says a bunch of its recent users have been coming from Japan and Taiwan.

But the most obvious reason Threads can grow so fast is that Meta surfaces Threads posts in Instagram, which does have gazillions of users. Some of them click on Threads posts they see there, and become Threads users that way.

And you can definitely see, or at least feel, the presence of Instagram users who are logging into Threads. They’re the people who seem to have wandered into the bar not completely knowing why they’re there or what they’re supposed to do, and they are prime targets for my colleague Katie Notopoulos.

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Notopoulos is notoriously good at the empty ragebait posts which Threads amplifies. But it’s not a news network, and for that reason journalists just don’t like it. (I find it too random.)
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The end of independent publishing and Giant Freakin Robot • GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT

Joshua Tyler:

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After relaunching GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT in 2019, the site grew to a readership of more than 20 million a month, through 2021 and 2022. Then Google decided they didn’t want independent publishers around anymore. Most entertainment keywords have now been given to one big company, whose numerous sites own the top slots for nearly every entertainment-related query of any substance.

No one can find our site to read it so that 20 million unique visitors is now a few thousand a month. Nearly every independently owned entertainment news publisher is in the same situation, in one way or another.

Last week I was one of 20 independent publishers invited to an event at Google in Mountain View, California. I didn’t know why I was going, I didn’t know what would happen, and Google didn’t cover all my expenses. But I went, I went because it was the only chance I had to save the jobs of the few employees GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT has left.

Unfortunately, if you’ve read my account of that catastrophe, you know that instead of finding solutions I received a clear signal from Google that they have no intention of allowing anyone to see GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT’s work. 

Google’s engineers were adamant that there is no problem with our website or our content. In fact, some of the geeky Googlers there regularly read our articles and seem to genuinely like us. However, my take away was that we don’t fit in with the search monopoly’s new business model, and so we won’t be shown to anyone.

That business model seems to largely revolve around pleasing big brands. During the course of our conversation with Google, an Independent site owner asked why a “Best Shoes To Buy” (not the actual keyword analyzed, just an example) list from a big retailer like Nike always seems to outrank a “Best Shoes To Buy” list from an actual, unbiased reviewer. Google’s response was to ask, “Well if we don’t rank those big brands first, won’t they be mad?”

Unable to help myself I blurted out, “Who cares? Reviewing things isn’t their business. Selling shoes is.” The Googler in charge ignored my answer.

«

His solution: move to YouTube. Somehow I feel this is not going to solve the problem.
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Vote-counting machines are too dumb to pose a hacking risk • Bloomberg

Austin Carr:

»

As the US presidential election fast approaches, Elon Musk keeps claiming, with scant evidence [correction: ZERO evidence, AS YOUR STORY GOES ON TO SHOW – exasperated Overspill Ed.], that internet-connected voting machines are vulnerable to hacking and that the country must switch back to paper ballots for better security.

Having spent much of my time lately learning what it’d actually take to hack these devices — speaking with election officials and machine makers and visiting a vendor’s factory — I can assure you Musk’s claims are quite unfounded.

It’s not that election computers are advanced to a level of impenetrability; rather, what makes them so ironically safe at scale is that their functions are intentionally limited and dependent on an absurd degree of bureaucratic logistics and analog-world redundancies.

Keep in mind that most voters (98%!) tomorrow will cast their votes on paper, the majority using pens and Sharpies to mark their choice on slips of paper. The precinct tabulators scanning those sheets are offline (often lacking even the hardware for Wi-Fi, Ethernet or Bluetooth) and undergo pre-election logic and accuracy testing. And all ballots are preserved for backup so authorities can confirm the digital and physical counts match. These votes are usually separately recounted at central county offices, anyway.

Since throwing his weight behind Donald Trump, Musk has made voter fraud a key point of his stumping in swing states like Pennsylvania. Unfounded ideas about rigged voting systems are not new among Trump supporters, but Musk’s Tesla Inc. and SpaceX tech background makes him a uniquely effective and highly misleading messenger of these conspiracy theories. “I’m normally someone who favors technology — I’m a super 21st-century technology boy right here,” Musk said at an October campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “And I’m saying: no machines for voting.”

Even if you managed magically to slip by workers and surveillance cameras at a poll site to insert some undetectable, malware-laced thumb drive into a machine to manipulate votes, you’d still have to figure out how to fake loads of corresponding physical ballots while destroying the real ones. And then, so what? You’ve only broken into one machine.

You’d next have to replicate that in-person hack on thousands of additional voting machines. “It’s bull!” said Jerry Feaser, the recently retired elections director of Dauphin County, PA, where Musk has also campaigned, when I asked him about the X Corp. owner’s claims. “There would have to be so much collusion among so many different people and levels.”

«

That an editor at Bloomberg felt compelled to put (or leave) “scant evidence” in that first sentence is beyond annoying. “Musk keeps claiming Earth is flat, with scant evidence.” Would you pass that?
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Thousands of hacked TP-Link routers used in yearslong account takeover attacks • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government are using a botnet of thousands of routers, cameras, and other Internet-connected devices to perform highly evasive password spray attacks against users of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, the company warned last week.

The malicious network, made up almost entirely of TP-Link routers, was first documented in October 2023 by a researcher who named it Botnet-7777. The geographically dispersed collection of more than 16,000 compromised devices at its peak got its name because it exposes its malicious malware on port 7777.

In July and again in August of this year, security researchers from Sekoia.io and Team Cymru reported the botnet was still operational. All three reports said that Botnet-7777 was being used to skillfully perform password spraying, a form of attack that sends large numbers of login attempts from many different IP addresses. Because each individual device limits the login attempts, the carefully coordinated account-takeover campaign is hard to detect by the targeted service.

Last Thursday, Microsoft reported that CovertNetwork-1658—the name Microsoft uses to track the botnet—is being used by multiple Chinese threat actors in an attempt to compromise targeted Azure accounts. The company said the attacks are “highly evasive” because the botnet—now estimated at about 8,000 strong on average—takes pains to conceal the malicious activity.

«

At first I thought “cameras?” but then realised it meant CCTV. TP-Link and its ilk are a mess that will require cleanup for years and years to come.
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New York Times’ tech staff threatens strike during Election Day crunch • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

Management says that the Guild has bogged down negotiations with what the paper sees as outlandish, even illegal, proposals. As Semafor previously reported, the Guild proposed a ban on scented products in break rooms, unlimited break time, and accommodations for pet bereavement, as well as mandatory trigger warnings in company meetings discussing events in the news.

Times management has been frustrated by proposals that would provide more money for nonwhite staff and others from underrepresented communities to attend conferences, and language that would prioritize non-citizens in the US on visas in the case of layoffs — both of which the paper pointed out couldn’t be fulfilled because they likely violate employment laws.

While the union has withdrawn or reached agreements with the paper on some of these issues, the paper has been alarmed that the union has continued to push for a provision on journalistic integrity that would allow the non-editorial union to have a say in editorial decisions, including the right to request letters to the editor not be published.

«

Unlimited break time? A say in editorial decisions? Couldn’t they just become journalists if that’s what they want? (Lots of journalists presently find themselves on unlimited breaks, but not through choice.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The advent of cheap, far-reaching and powerful drones has made the Red Sea far less safe for even big navies. CC-licensed photo by U.S. Naval Forces Central Command\/U.S. Fifth Fleet on Flickr.

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

OpenAI research finds that even its best models give wrong answers a wild proportion of the time • Futurism

Victor Tangermann:

»

OpenAI has released a new benchmark, dubbed “SimpleQA,” that’s designed to measure the accuracy of the output of its own and competing artificial intelligence models.

In doing so, the AI company has revealed just how bad its latest models are at providing correct answers. In its own tests, its cutting edge o1-preview model, which was released last month, scored an abysmal 42.7% success rate on the new benchmark.

In other words, even the cream of the crop of recently announced large language models (LLMs) is far more likely to provide an outright incorrect answer than a right one — a concerning indictment, especially as the tech is starting to pervade many aspects of our everyday lives.

Competing models, like Anthropic’s, scored even lower on OpenAI’s SimpleQA benchmark, with its recently released Claude-3.5-sonnet model getting only 28.9% of questions right. However, the model was far more inclined to reveal its own uncertainty and decline to answer — which, given the damning results, is probably for the best.

Worse yet, OpenAI found that its own AI models tend to vastly overestimate their own abilities, a characteristic that can lead to them being highly confident in the falsehoods they concoct.

LLMs have long suffered from “hallucinations,” an elegant term AI companies have come up with to denote their models’ well-documented tendency to produce answers that are complete BS.

Despite the very high chance of ending up with complete fabrications, the world has embraced the tech with open arms, from students generating homework assignments to developers employed by tech giants generating huge swathes of code.

And the cracks are starting the show. Case in point, an AI model used by hospitals and built on OpenAI tech was caught this week introducing frequent hallucinations and inaccuracies while transcribing patient interactions.

«

Nothing to see here, move along, it’s all fine.

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Generative AI made all my decisions for a week. Here’s what happened • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

»

Generative AI took over my life.

For one week, it told me what to eat, what to wear and what to do with my kids. It chose my haircut and what colour to paint my office. It told my husband that it was OK to go golfing, in a lovey-dovey text that he immediately knew I had not written.

Generative AI, which can spin up research reports, draft emails and converse like a human being based on patterns learned from enormous data sets, is being widely adopted by industries from medicine to business consulting as a timesaving tool. It’s popping up in widely used consumer apps, including Siri and Alexa. I conducted this admittedly ridiculous experiment to see how its spread might affect the largest work force of them all: harried parents.

One expert called the stunt a “decision holiday.” Another compared it to hiring a butler to handle household logistics. But these AI butlers cost just $20 per month and report everything you say to them back to a tech company.

In all, I used two dozen generative AI tools for daily tasks and nearly 100 decisions over the course of the week. Chief among my helpers were the chatbots that every big tech company released in the wake of ChatGPT. My automated advisers saved me time and alleviated the burden of constantly making choices, but they seemed to have an agenda: turn me into a Basic B.

We’ve been worried about a future where robots take our jobs or decide that humans are earth’s biggest problem and eliminate us, but an underrated risk may be that they flatten us out, erasing individuality in favour of a bland statistical average, like the paint colour AI initially recommended for my office: taupe.

I told the chatbots that I was a journalist conducting an experiment and that I had a family, but not much more. AI’s first task was to plan our meals and generate a shopping list for the week, and within seconds, it was done. (Unfortunately, generative AI couldn’t go pick up the groceries.)

«

What sort of useless robot future is this, where the robot doesn’t do the hard work? Also, taupe? These things have no taste. (Great idea for an article, though.)
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Rise of the middle-class shoplifters: Americans are stealing from stores • Business Insider

Emily Stewart:

»

A lot of people steal, from small-stakes stuff at the drugstore to larger items worth hundreds of dollars at hardware chains. Their motivations are generally not the direct result of economic need, but instead, people make a moral (or amoral) judgment about what goods are unjustly expensive, especially as they deal with the recent bout of inflation. They view it as a way to get back at The Man — many have concocted a code of conduct that amounted to pilfering only from big, evil retailers (and, in one case, overpriced corporate ski resorts).

Case in point: a lot of the one-off shoplifters I talked to steal from Whole Foods with a very clean conscience. “No, I don’t feel bad about stealing from Jeff Bezos,” one 20-something occasional shoplifter in Washington, DC, told me. Her loot of choice is passion fruit, which she rings up as a cheaper item — bananas. She’s even memorized the code: 4011.

Another shoplifter, a 30-something man in New York who asked to be referred to as the “Parmesan cheese bandit,” echoed the anti-Bezos sentiment. The only people who know about his habit of stuffing a block of Whole Foods cheese into his sweatpants pocket after hitting the gym (which he developed after seeing some TikTok videos about Parmesan’s high protein content) are his brother — and, he said, “maybe the fucking surveillance people, I don’t know.”

The National Association of Shoplifting Prevention estimates that about one in 11 people has shoplifted during their lifetime and that men and women are equally likely to be the culprit. Some surveys suggest that number could be higher, like one in five. Survey data, however, often doesn’t account for the difference between someone who shoplifted a candy bar one time as a kid and someone who does it with regularity.

«

“Stealing from Bezos isn’t stealing” is an unsurprising response.
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Exposure to sugar rationing in the first thousand days of life protected against chronic disease • Science

Tadeja Gracner, Claire Boone and Paul Gertler:

»

We examined the impact of sugar exposure within 1000 days since conception on diabetes and hypertension, leveraging quasi-experimental variation from the end of the United Kingdom’s sugar rationing in September 1953.

Rationing restricted sugar intake to levels within current dietary guidelines, yet consumption nearly doubled immediately post-rationing. Using an event study design with UK Biobank data comparing adults conceived just before or after rationing ended, we found that early-life rationing reduced diabetes and hypertension risk by about 35% and 20%, respectively, and delayed disease onset by 4 and 2 years.

Protection was evident with in-utero exposure and increased with postnatal sugar restriction, especially after six months when solid foods likely began. In-utero sugar rationing alone accounted for about one third of the risk reduction.

«

War is good for you, part 12 (at least for those looking back fondly on rationing). People who lived through rationing also tended to live longer. This study provides an argument for less added sugar in food – there’s certainly too much in it. One can guess though that this is probably going to be used, at least in some areas, to insist that pregnant women mustn’t eat various sweet things.
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The Red Sea is now so dangerous even NATO warships are avoiding it • GCaptain

John Konrad:

»

The Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest and most strategically vital waterways, has become so hazardous that even the German Navy is steering clear. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius’s decision to redirect the frigate Baden-Württemberg and support vessel Frankfurt am Main around the Cape of Good Hope on their return from an Indo-Pacific deployment speaks volumes.

The Red Sea is now deemed too perilous, underscoring just how ineffective current US and EU naval protections are in this region.

For months, the U.S. and EU have stationed forces to secure the Red Sea’s shipping lanes. Yet, Houthi rebels, equipped and backed by Iran, continue to harass and attack vessels under the guise of “solidarity” with Palestinian forces in Gaza. Reports reveal Houthi attacks extending into the Indian Ocean and even the Mediterranean, a spread that demonstrates their increased capability and adaptability.

The EU’s mission Aspides commander warned of escalating danger but lacked the ships and resources needed to respond adequately. The United States Navy continues to send warships through the Red Sea, but its mission to protect merchant ships—Operation Prosperity Guardian—is considered a failure by several naval experts we interviewed and has significantly diminished in scope and size. As a result, even many US-flagged commercial vessels – which the US Navy is obligated by law to protect – are opting to divert their routes around Africa.

«

The advent of drone warfare – low-cost, high-impact, hard to deflect – has changed the entire face of naval and land-based warfare.
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A Russian disinfo campaign is using comment sections to seed pro-Trump conspiracy theories • WIRED

David Gilbert:

»

“Video has come out from Bucks County, Pennsylvania showing a ballot counter destroying ballots for Donald Trump and keeping Kamala Harris’s ballots for counting,” an account called “Dan from Ohio” wrote in the comment section of the far-right website Gateway Pundit. “Why hasn’t this man been arrested?”

But Dan is not from Ohio, and the video he mentioned is fake. He is in fact one of hundreds of inauthentic accounts posting in the unmoderated spaces of right-wing news site comment sections as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. These accounts were discovered by researchers at media watchdog NewsGuard, who shared their findings with WIRED.

“NewsGuard identified 194 users that all target the same articles, push the same pro-Russian talking points and disinformation narratives, while masquerading as disgruntled Western citizens,” the report states. The researchers found these fake accounts posting comments in four pro-Trump US publications: the Gateway Pundit, the New York Post, Breitbart, and Fox News. They were also posting similar comments in the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid, and French website Le Figaro.

“FOX News Digital’s comment sections are monitored continuously in real time by the outside company OpenWeb which services multiple media organizations,” a spokesperson for the company tells WIRED. “Comments made by fake personas and professional trolls are removed as soon as issues are brought to our attention by both OpenWeb and the additional internal oversight mechanisms we have in place.”

«

It is exhausting, in its way. Will it all stop, or at least slow down substantially, after Tuesday? Here’s hoping.
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Can the Daily Beast claw its way back to relevance? • The New York Times

Katie Robertson:

»

[New co-editor at the Daily Beast, Joanna] Coles has a specific vision for what The Beast can do: shorter and sharper articles that focus on people, power, politics and pop culture, with a dose of satire to lighten the mood during a perilous time. She says she is fascinated by the extremes of wealth and power and behavior, and pointed to articles about A-list celebrities who gave Sean Combs cover and the troubles of Will Lewis, the chief executive of The Washington Post, as recent highlights.

“I wanted something that curated a lot of news out there that wasn’t about the end of democracy all the time,” she said. Ms. Coles said she felt that The Beast had “some very good editors” over the years, but that its place in the media landscape had been diminished.

“I certainly wasn’t reading it on a regular basis,” she said. “Another editor said to me when we came here, he said: ‘It’s the boring avatar of the resistance.’ I thought he summed it up in one.”

She is trying to spark ideas and reinvigorate the newsroom’s culture, which she said had been affected when the pandemic caused more people to work remotely. Beast employees are now required to work in the office four days a week. “We have some really good people here who were here all along who are excited by the mission and re-energized,” Ms. Coles said.

There are others she was not as fond of. Ms. Coles recounted that a political reporter did not call in to the newsroom on the Sunday that President Biden announced he would drop out of the presidential race, or the previous weekend, after the assassination attempt of Mr. Trump. in Butler, Pa.

Ms. Coles was at her house in the Hamptons on the day of the assassination attempt, hosting her friend Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal and a fellow Briton, and the pair “turned my dining room table into an ad hoc newsroom.”

“I was incredulous that a political reporter would not call in because it was the weekend,” she said. “To me it was madness that we would have political correspondents who didn’t want to cover that story immediately.” That political reporter, Jake Lahut, who has since left The Daily Beast, referred The New York Times to the three articles he filed the day that Mr. Biden dropped out, and said that he was out of the country on leave the previous weekend but had contacted the Beast’s weekend desk. “The most important lesson I’ve learned from this is how not to run a newsroom,” Mr. Lahut said. He added: “I think my track record speaks for itself.”

«

I think Coles is fighting an uphill battle with the Daily Beast staff there. It isn’t going to end well.
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Apple is ‘seriously considering’ Vision device that offloads compute to your iPhone • 9to5Mac

Michael Burkhardt:

»

According to Mark Gurman from Bloomberg, Apple is ‘seriously considering’ developing a cheaper Apple Vision device that offloads all of the computing power to your iPhone, essentially developing a headset with primarily displays and battery.

Gurman has mentioned this idea in the past, but it was just one of the many ideas Apple was toying with for future products in the Apple Vision family, however it sounds like the idea might have more merit now.

This product would be similar to other products on the market like the Xreal glasses, which show content from your iPhone through the displays of the glasses.

Earlier this morning, Ming Chi-Kuo reported that Apple’s cheaper Vision headset has been delayed beyond 2027, so it’s highly possible that this “Vision as an iPhone accessory” product could come in place of it. Gurman says this product “would reinforce the iPhone as the center of [Apple’s] product ecosystem.”

«

Pretty hard to avoid the iPhone – after all, everyone has a smartphone. The Vision Pro already looks like a dead duck, because there simply isn’t enough content for it. Despite Apple’s wish for it to be a “spatial computing” device that people use to do work, that isn’t how people think of these devices; they think of them as consumption devices.
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‘Infinite monkey theorem’ challenged by Australian mathematicians • BBC News

Hannah Ritchie:

»

Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Known as the “infinite monkey theorem”, the thought-experiment has long been used to explain the principles of probability and randomness.

However, a new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.

Which means that while mathematically true, the theorem is “misleading”, they say.

As well as looking at the abilities of a single monkey, the study also did a series of calculations based on the current global population of chimpanzees, which is roughly 200,000.

The results indicated that even if every chimp in the world was enlisted and able to type at a pace of one key per second until the end of the universe, they wouldn’t even come close to typing out the Bard’s works.

There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence – such as “I chimp, therefore I am” – comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.

“It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works,” the study says.

«

“While mathematically true, the theorem is misleading”? This is just abject nonsense. Nobody is suggesting monkey labour for anything. This is purely a thought experiement about the nature of infinity, and our incapability of understanding it.

Bob Newhart would be proud. “If they ever tried this, they would have to hire guys to check whether the monkeys were turning out anything worthwhile…”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Are car headlights too bright, or not bright enough? Experts and drivers disagree, and that matters. CC-licensed photo by Kamal Hamid on Flickr.

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

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

Everything I learned while visiting Google HQ for the “Web Creator Conversation Event”, a recap • TechRaptor

Rutledge Daugette was one of about 20 web publishers who have seen their rankings plummet after recent Google search updates, and were invited to go along and talk about it:

»

we got onto the topic of AI, which was mentioned HEAVILY in the Google Earnings call that occurred during the day. I specifically asked about how Google Docs and other Accounts were posting on X about creating content using AI and publishing it with ease.

There was a little bit of gaslighting from [Google search VP] Pandu Nayak about this one and how we should be using AI as a writing assistant, or to use it to help us create content but not all of the content. That piece, considering many of us were impacted because of the rate of spam that AI is creating, was pretty tone deaf to the audience and none of us were happy about it.

I think that Pandu was probably the wrong person to have speaking here – he was very clearly an engineer, and I’m sure to him everything was “normal” but to us it just fueled the frustration. Elizabeth [Tucker, director of product management] by contrast felt more measured, but both of them expressed frustration around other parts of Google “touting” writing with AI for content creation.

Once again, a bit of the Spider-Man meme when it comes to the different parts and teams within Google. Search is pretty disconnected, and doesn’t get much say in what the Google Docs team or others share and promote.

In my eyes, there is a sitewide classifier. There is no other explanation for the sitewide hits that our sites have taken. Unfortunately, Google refused to really acknowledge this, consistently saying it was all page-level classifications.

I think the exact quote was “There are not sitewide penalties, only page-level classifications.”

This is one point that continues to lead me to believe that Google’s Search Team has somewhat “lost control” of the systems that are in place.

There is absolutely some level of sitewide classifier in place – I’d understand if individual pages dropped out of Search – but losing 200,000 keywords over the last two years doesn’t signify a “page-level” classifier being the reality.

«

Here’s another writeup; they all agree that Google doesn’t seem to be in control of its search engine results any more, and can’t discern new AI-generated junk from long-term human-created work.
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Deadliest weather made worse by climate change, report says • BBC News

Justin Rowlatt:

»

Human-caused climate change made the ten deadliest extreme weather events of the last 20 years more intense and more likely, according to new analysis.

The killer storms, heatwaves and floods affected Europe, Africa and Asia killing more than 570,000 people.
The new analysis highlights how scientists can now discern the fingerprint of climate change in complex weather events.

The study involved reanalysing data for some of the extreme weather events and was carried out by scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group at Imperial College London.

“This study should be an eye-opener for political leaders hanging on to fossil fuels that heat the planet and destroy lives”, said Dr Friederike Otto, co-founder and lead of WWA.

“If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue,” she said.

The researchers focused on the 10 deadliest weather events registered in the International Disaster Database since 2004. That was when the first study was published linking a weather event – a heatwave in Europe – with our changing climate.

The deadliest event of the last two decades was a drought in Somalia in 2011 which is reckoned to have killed more than 250,000 people. The researchers found the low rainfall that drove the drought was made more likely and more extreme by climate change.

The list includes the heatwave that hit France in 2015 killing more than 3,000 people, where researchers say high temperatures were made twice as likely because of climate change.

…The study was carried out before the storms in Spain left more than 100 dead this week.

«

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BYD quarterly sales beat Tesla for first time • Financial Times

Gloria Li:

»

China’s biggest electric vehicle maker BYD has posted higher quarterly revenues than US rival Tesla for the first time, but a bruising price war in its domestic market dragged on its profitability. 

BYD revenues for the third quarter reached Rmb201bn ($28.2bn), surpassing the $25.2bn sales that Tesla reported last week. The Warren Buffett-backed carmaker sold a record 1.1mn cars in the three-month period, boosted by a new round of Chinese government subsidies for EVs.

However, the 24% increase in sales reported on Wednesday came at the expense of BYD’s gross margins, which slipped from 22.1% last year to 21.9%. Net income was Rmb11.6bn, rising 11.5% from a year earlier. 

Instead of directly offering discounts, BYD has in recent months launched longer range models equipped with more advanced features at lower prices than their old versions. The strategy has helped it cement its market leadership amid fierce price competition, but pulled down the group’s net profit per vehicle, analysts said.

A continued price war in the world’s largest car market is eating into the margins of both homegrown brands and foreign carmakers. Volkswagen has warned that operating profit from its Chinese joint ventures could hit the low end of its forecast for 2024, coming at €1.6bn instead of as much as €2bn. 

Due to a high level of vertical integration, including controlling production of batteries and computer chips, BYD’s gross margin of 21.9% is still far ahead of Tesla’s 17% and Chinese rivals Zeekr’s on 14.2% and Xpeng’s on 6.4%.

«

The key point to note in all this is that BYD is not yet in the US market, but Tesla is in the Chinese market. Chinese EV makers are going to dominate within a few years; it might not even be close. US and EU protectionism in the form of tariffs can hold things back for a while, but EVs are where vehicle makers have to be.
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Chinese sanctions hit US drone maker supplying Ukraine • Financial Times

Demetri Sevastopulo, Kathrin Hille and Ryan McMorrow:

»

Skydio, the US’s largest drone maker and a supplier to Ukraine’s military, faces a supply chain crisis after Beijing imposed sanctions on the company, including banning Chinese groups from providing it with critical components.

Skydio is rushing to find alternative suppliers after Beijing’s move, which also blocks battery supplies from its sole provider, said people familiar with the situation.

The drone maker has sought help from the Biden administration. Chief executive Adam Bry last week met US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell and held discussions with senior officials at the White House.

American officials are concerned about China disrupting US supply chains and provision to Ukraine of drones used in intelligence gathering.

“This is a clarifying moment for the drone industry,” Bry wrote in a note to customers obtained by the Financial Times. “If there was ever any doubt, this action makes clear that the Chinese government will use supply chains as a weapon to advance their interests over ours.

“This is an attempt to eliminate the leading American drone company and deepen the world’s dependence on Chinese drone suppliers,” he added.

«

This basically kills Skydio unless it can find alternative sources.
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Zuckerberg: the AI slop will continue until morale improves • 404 Meida

Jason Koebler:

»

During my year-long odyssey into the world of AI-generated slop on Facebook and other Meta platforms, I had come to the conclusion that Meta does not mind—and actively likes—the bizarre AI spam that has taken over its platforms. Wednesday, in a call with investors, Mark Zuckerberg made this clear: the AI-generated content will continue until morale improves.

In a quarterly earnings call that was overwhelmingly about AI and Meta’s plans for it, Zuckerberg said that new, AI-generated feeds are likely to come to Facebook and other Meta platforms. Zuckerberg said he is excited for the “opportunity for AI to help people create content that just makes people’s feed experiences better.” Zuckerberg’s comments were first reported by Fortune.

“I think we’re going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” he said. “And I think that that’s going to be just very exciting for the—for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads or other kind of Feed experiences over time.”

Zuckerberg said this would continue to be an evolution of traditional feeds on Meta products. As we have previously reported, the virality of AI-generated slop made and posted by people trying to make money on Facebook has been powered by Meta’s “recommendation” algorithm, which boosts content that was not posted by your friends or anyone you know—and which is often engagement bait—into feeds because it increases engagement and time on site. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg explained this strategy in the investor call, and said the new AI feeds would be built with the success of the recommended feed in mind.

«

Meta is moving more and more towards being the social network where you’re the only human who creates any real interaction, and all the rest is AI-generated. Wedges have thin ends, remember.
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I replied ‘Stop’ to a political text message. I got a hundred more • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

In the game of political texts, “Stop” apparently means “Go! Go! Go!”

Perhaps you’ve heard there’s an election next week. Ahead of it, campaigns and political groups are scrambling to get their messages out and gather last-minute donations. Some are using shady tactics to get it done.

For years, I’ve passed on—and abided by—the advice of messaging experts: Text “Stop” to end unwanted messages, as long as they’re not blatantly scammy. Often it works. Last week? Not so much.

“Unfortunately, there are unscrupulous texting vendors out there who will perversely use that opt-out message that you sent back,” said Thomas Peters, chief executive of RumbleUp, a political texting platform. “They use that as a data point, that ‘Oh, we found a live number!’”

Even though my flood of messages came from right-leaning groups, others I’ve talked to have had similar barrages from the left. 

Look at that—a nonpartisan issue we can all agree on: relentless political texts need to stop.

Since the text-pocalypse hit my iPhone, I’ve been digging into what happened, and how to filter out the SMS spam. Here’s what I suggest in these final days of election-related text spam.

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In short: don’t reply “Stop” (it just gets passed on as indicating there’s a live person reading messages there, much as clicking the “unsubscribe” link on spam confirms you’re alive and reading spam), report the numbers as junk (to your phone if nothing else), get a spam filter. Thankful that the UK has strict laws preventing this.
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Facebook took more than $1m for ads sowing election lies • Forbes

Emily Baker-White:

»

Just six days before the 2024 presidential election, Facebook is running hundreds of ads from pages that falsely claim that the upcoming election may be rigged or postponed. Facebook parent company Meta’s ad library shows that the pages behind the ads have paid the company more than $1m to run them. They racked up a bill of more than $350,000 for ads run in just the past week.

One of the ads features a stylized image of Vice President Kamala Harris with devil horns and an American flag burning behind her. Other ads feature images of Harris and VP candidate Tim Walz interposed with post-apocalyptic scenes, and pictures of Walz and President Biden mashed up with images of prescription drugs spilling out of bottles. One features an apparently AI-generated image of a smiling Harris in a hospital room preparing to give a screaming child an injection. Another features images of anti-vaxxer and third-party candidate RFK Jr. Some of the ads question whether Harris will remain in the race and suggest that America is “headed for another civil war.”

Meta’s election rules prohibit posts containing “misinformation about the dates, locations, times, and methods of voting” and “misinformation about whether a candidate is running or not,” and its ad rules prohibit ads that “call into question the legitimacy of an upcoming or ongoing election.”

«

Facebook is “reviewing” the ads because of course it is, shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted. Political ads are a huge problem because they need a human to review them, and once they’re shown the damage is done.
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GPT-4o and Co. get it wrong more often than right, says OpenAI study • The Decoder

Matthias Bastian:

»

A new OpenAI study using their in-house SimpleQA benchmark shows that even the most advanced AI language models fail more often than they succeed when answering factual questions.

The SimpleQA test contains 4,326 questions across science, politics, and art, with each question designed to have one clear correct answer. Two independent reviewers verified answer accuracy.

OpenAI’s best model, o1-preview, achieved only a 42.7% success rate. GPT-4o followed with 38.2% correct answers, while the smaller GPT-4o-mini managed just 8.6% accuracy.

Anthropic’s Claude models performed even worse. Their top model, Claude-3.5-sonnet, got 28.9% right and 36.1% wrong. However, smaller Claude models more often declined to answer when uncertain – a desirable response that shows they recognize their knowledge limitations.

Note that the test specifically measures knowledge acquired during training. It does not assess the models’ general ability to provide correct answers when given additional context, Internet access, or database connections.

The key takeaway: users should think of AI models as information processors, not as stand-alone sources of knowledge. For best results, provide them with reliable data rather than relying solely on their built-in knowledge.

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But, of course, many people don’t: they think of them as oracles which can answer anything correctly, and they aren’t warned otherwise.
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Inside Sophos’ five-year war with the Chinese hackers hijacking its devices • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»

For more than five years, the UK cybersecurity firm Sophos engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with one loosely connected team of adversaries who targeted its firewalls. The company went so far as to track down and monitor the specific devices on which the hackers were testing their intrusion techniques, surveil the hackers at work, and ultimately trace that focused, years-long exploitation effort to a single network of vulnerability researchers in Chengdu, China.

On Thursday, Sophos chronicled that half-decade-long war with those Chinese hackers in a report that details its escalating tit-for-tat. The company went as far as discreetly installing its own “implants” on the Chinese hackers’ Sophos devices to monitor and preempt their attempts at exploiting its firewalls. Sophos researchers even eventually obtained from the hackers’ test machines a specimen of “bootkit” malware designed to hide undetectably in the firewalls’ low-level code used to boot up the devices, a trick that has never been seen in the wild.

In the process, Sophos analysts identified a series of hacking campaigns that had started with indiscriminate mass exploitation of its products but eventually became more stealthy and targeted, hitting nuclear energy suppliers and regulators, military targets including a military hospital, telecoms, government and intelligence agencies, and the airport of one national capital. While most of the targets—which Sophos declined to identify in greater detail—were in South and Southeast Asia, a smaller number were in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.

Sophos’ report ties those multiple hacking campaigns—with varying levels of confidence—to Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups including those known as APT41, APT31, and Volt Typhoon…

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Sophos says one important point is to highlight the weaknesses in “security appliances”. These stories are always absorbing, and usually highly complex.
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Headlights are too bright! But US experts say they’re not bright enough • The Guardian

Madeleine Aggeler:

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A few weeks ago, I was driving along a dark road at night. Suddenly, I couldn’t see. The headlights of the cars behind and ahead of me were, by my most conservative estimate, as bright as the surface of the sun. For a few seconds, I was blinded. I managed to pull over and waited for my vision to return.

Complaints about the brightness of modern headlights have become commonplace. On X, thousands of users have tweeted about headlights being too bright. The subreddit r/fuckyourheadlights has over 35,000 members who post blurry photos of offending high beams and LED headlights. Outlets like the New York Times and NBC News have written about the risks of headlight glare. Advocacy groups have called for bans on LED headlights. And the UK government launched a review into the dangers of headlight glare earlier this year, after many driver complaints.

And yet, according to many experts, the problem with headlights is not that they’re too bright – it’s that they’re not bright enough.

“We actually need more light on the road than what we have,” says Greg Bannon, director of automotive engineering at the American Automobile Association (AAA). Only a minority of US roadways have overhead street lighting, as one 2019 AAA report noted. As a result, in many areas, headlights are the sole method of illumination when driving at night.

But which is the safety bigger risk: inadequate illumination, or headlights that impair the vision of other drivers?

Driving at night is significantly more dangerous than driving during the day. “When adjusted for distances travelled, the fatality rate [of driving] at night is two to four times higher than during the daytime,” says Dr Joanne Wood, a professor in the school of optometry and vision science at the Queensland University of Technology who specializes in vision and driving. One reason is that there tend to be more incidents of drunk and fatigued driving at night. The more common reason is it’s simply harder to see at night.

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A counterpoint to the UK’s plan to remove 1.5 million streetlights on the basis that vehicles provide enough light from their headlights.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A single word can improve your control of your to-do lists when something depends on other people. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll 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. To-done. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk says X users fight falsehoods. The falsehoods are winning • The Washington Post

Will Oremus, Trisha Thadani and Jeremy Merrill:

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X users can volunteer to be a Community Notes contributor and, once accepted, can propose notes that debunk or add context to posts on the platform. Participants in the project vote on which notes should be attached to a post and displayed publicly. That process uses a voting algorithm that elevates only notes that receive consensus from users with a history of voting differently.

The CCDH’s analysis, published Wednesday, tracked how Community Notes responded to 283 posts that contained election claims identified as false or misleading by independent fact-checking organizations. The researchers studied only posts that had at least one note proposed by Community Notes contributors. More than 160,000 users have proposed notes in 2024 — a sharp increase from last year.

On 229 of the posts, proposed Community Notes offered accurate, relevant context, the CCDH found. But votes from Community Notes users succeeded in publicly attaching notes to only 20 of those posts. For the other 209, or 91%, participants didn’t reach a consensus under the Community Notes voting system — and the program didn’t provide any public context to the misleading claim.

That findings suggest Community Notes does a poor job of responding to falsehoods relating to politics, even when contributors correctly identify posts lacking context. Separate data analysis by The Post found that even when a Community Note is publicly added to an election-related post, the process typically takes more than 11 hours — by which time the content may have reached millions of users.

«

There’s no good method of stopping falsehoods. What you want is a method that flags them rapidly and then gets them deranked (or even removed) if they’re found to be wrong. But Community Notes doesn’t do the first or the second part. CCDH reckons that “misleading claims about the US election without Community Notes have over 2.2 billion views”. Even if that’s a little off, it’s a colossal amount of misinformation.

And CCDH also finds that misleading posts get 13x more views than their Notes – a totally predictable figure. As someone (identity frequently disputed) said, a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.
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How Russia, China and Iran are interfering in the US presidential election • The New York Times

Sheera Frenkel, Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers:

»

When Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election, spreading divisive and inflammatory posts online to stoke outrage, its posts were brash and riddled with spelling errors and strange syntax. They were designed to get attention by any means necessary.

“Hillary is a Satan,” one Russian-made Facebook post read.

Now, eight years later, foreign interference in American elections has become far more sophisticated, and far more difficult to track.

Disinformation from abroad — particularly from Russia, China and Iran — has matured into a consistent and pernicious threat, as the countries test, iterate and deploy increasingly nuanced tactics, according to U.S. intelligence and defense officials, tech companies and academic researchers. The ability to sway even a small pocket of Americans could have outsize consequences for the presidential election, which polls generally consider a neck-and-neck race.

Russia, according to American intelligence assessments, aims to bolster the candidacy of former President Donald J. Trump, while Iran favors his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. China appears to have no preferred outcome.

But the broad goal of these efforts has not changed: to sow discord and chaos in hopes of discrediting American democracy in the eyes of the world. The campaigns, though, have evolved, adapting to a changing media landscape and the proliferation of new tools that make it easy to fool credulous audiences.

«

More pervasive, but also more targeted, AI-fed, harder to identify and tech companies are even less interested in stopping it.
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Facebook is auto-generating militia group pages as extremists continue to organize in plain sight • WIRED

Tess Owen:

»

Anti-government militia movements have been continuing to use Facebook to recruit, coordinate training, promote ballot box stake outs, and prepare for a civil war that many militants believe will break out after election day. And in some cases, the movement is attracting people who don’t appear to have any prior background in a militia. Meta is even doing the work for extremist movements by auto-generating some group pages on their behalf.

Data shared exclusively with WIRED by the Tech Transparency Project shows that these groups have only continued to grow on Facebook, despite WIRED previously flagging this lapse in Meta’s moderation.

The brazen proliferation of paramilitary activity on the social media platform days before the election highlights Meta’s lackadaisical approach to enforcing its own bans against groups it has labeled dangerous extremists. Militias require platforms like Facebook to grow: It’s a tool for the paramilitary movement to strengthen and radicalize its network. It also helps them facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county, and boost their membership.

…There have also been some recent instances where Facebook has even auto-generated pages for militias. In May, Facebook auto-generated a page for AP3’s Arizona chapter. In June, Facebook auto-generated a page for “AP3 NM [New Mexico] Training Range.”

«

Astonishing: this is exactly what was happening in 2016 and earlier, when Facebook would auto-generate pages for Al-Qa’ida and other terrorist groups. (I wrote about it in Social Warming.) OK, militia groups might not quite be proscribed organisations like those, but you’d think Facebook might have learnt its lesson.
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Controversy after Polish radio station replaces human presenters with AI • Notes From Poland

Daniel Tilles:

»

A Polish radio station has stirred controversy after relaunching one of its channels in a new version run almost completely by artificial intelligence, including its presenters.

Staff who previously worked on the channel have criticised the move. But the station’s manager says that cooperation with them would have been terminated regardless of the AI decision because the channel had previously been unsuccessful.

On Monday, Radio Kraków, a state-owned broadcaster that operates in Poland’s second-largest city, announced that the following day it would launch Poland’s “first radio station created almost entirely by artificial intelligence”.

Its programmes would be presented by three AI characters, each of which would have a specific personality, set of interests and even AI-generated images of how they look.

One character is called Jakub “Kuba” Zieliński (pictured above), a “22-year-old studying acoustic engineering, looking for the latest news in the field of sound production and new technological solutions”.

Another is Emilia “Emi” Nowak (pictured below), a “20-year-old journalism student and pop culture expert, passionately following the latest trends in the world of cinema, music and fashion”.

The third, called Alex Szulc, is “socially engaged on topics related to identity, queer culture and the influence of media on society”.

Radio Kraków said that the three characters were intended to be “model representatives of Generation Z”, a demographic cohort born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s.

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Not a good omen.
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Keeping a suspense file gives you superpowers • Pluralistic

Cory Doctorow:

»

while good to-do lists can take you very far in life, they have a hard limit: other people. Almost every ambitious thing you want to do involves someone else’s contribution. Even the most solitary of projects can be derailed if your tax accountant misses a key email and you end up getting audited or paying a huge penalty.

That’s where the other kind of GTD list comes in: the list of things you’re waiting for from other people. I used to be assiduous in maintaining this list, but then the pandemic struck and no one was meeting any of their commitments, and I just gave up on it, and never went back…until about a month ago. Returning to these lists (they’re sometimes called “suspense files”) made me realize how many of the problems – some hugely consequential – in my life could have been avoided if I’d just gone back to this habit earlier.

My suspense file is literally just some lines partway down a text file that lives on my desktop called todo.txt that has all my to-dos as well. Here’s some sample entries from my suspense file:

WAITING EMAIL Sean about ENSHITTIIFCATION manuscript deadline 10/24/24
WAITING EMAIL Russ about missing royalty statement 10/12/24
WAITING EMAIL Alice about Christmas vacation hotel 10/8/24 10/20/24

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Doctorow is (as John Naughton observes) the most productive person you ever will come across, and this is a terrific little hack to keep even more on top of things.
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Polling paradox: what actually shapes the numbers? • Good Authority

Josh Clinton:

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There is no end of scrutiny of the 2024 election polls – who is ahead, who is behind, how much the polls will miss the election outcome, etc., etc. These questions have become even more pressing because the presidential race seems to be a toss-up. Every percentage point for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump matters.

But here’s the big problem that no one talks about very much: Simple and defensible decisions by pollsters can drastically change the reported margin between Harris and Trump. I’ll show that the margin can change by as much as eight points. Reasonable decisions produce a margin that ranges from Harris +0.9% to Harris +9%.

This reality highlights that we ask far too much of polls. Ultimately, it’s hard to know how much poll numbers reflect the decisions of voters – or the decisions of pollsters.

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He goes through how you get such a wild variation: it shows why a poll of polls makes sense, but even then one wonders how anyone could trust a poll ever again. As they say, there’s only one poll that matters.
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Universal Music in deal with “ethical AI music” company Klay Vision • Hollywood Reporter

Georg Szalai:

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Universal Music Group, led by chairman and CEO Lucian Grainge, is teaming up with L.A.-based AI music company Klay Vision on what they described as “a pioneering commercial ethical foundational model for AI-generated music that works in collaboration with the music industry and its creators.”

Klay is positioning itself to become “the backbone for a new era of innovation, powering new products and experiences, committed to the premise that AI can bolster and grow musical creativity and human artistry,” the partners said. Monday’s press release even called Klay an “ethical AI music company.”

The two companies said that they share “the conviction that state-of-the-art foundational AI models are best built and scaled responsibly through constructive dialogue and consensus with those responsible for the artistry that shapes global culture.” They added: “Building generative AI music models ethically and fully respectful of copyright, as well as name and likeness rights, will dramatically lessen the threat to human creators and stand the greatest opportunity to be transformational, creating significant new avenues for creativity and future monetization of copyrights.”

Klay is led by executives from the fields of music and technology, including music producer and tech visionary Ary Attie, Thomas Hesse, the former president of global digital business at Sony Music Entertainment, and Björn Winckler, who is set to join the firm soon from Google Deepmind.

“Klay is committed to serving artists and songwriters and those who support them, including music publishers and labels, distributors, and other rights holders across the major and Indie label landscape,” the company said. “Klay is developing a global ecosystem to host AI-driven experiences and content, including accurate attribution, and will not compete with artists’ catalogs in traditional music services.”

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My reading of this is “they offered us a lot of money to use our songs, so we accepted it.”
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Weight-loss surgery down 25% as anti-obesity drug use soars • Harvard Gazette

Terry Murphy:

»

A new study examining a large sample of privately insured patients with obesity found that use of drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy as anti-obesity medications more than doubled from 2022 to 2023. During that same period, there was a 25.6% decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric surgery to treat obesity.

The study, by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Brown School of Public Health, is published in JAMA Network Open.

“Our study provides one of the first national estimates of the decline in utilization of bariatric metabolic surgery among privately insured patients corresponding to the rising use of blockbuster GLP-1 RA drugs,” said senior author Thomas C. Tsai, a metabolic bariatric surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Using a national sample of medical insurance claims data from more than 17 million privately insured adults, the researchers identified patients with a diagnosis of obesity without diabetes in 2022-2023. The study found a sharp increase in the share of patients who received glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1 RAs, during the study period, with GLP-1 RA use increasing 132.6% from the last six months of 2022 to the last six months of 2023 (from 1.89 to 4.41 patients per 1,000 patients).

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So in effect, a transfer of wealth from surgeons to pharmaceutical companies?
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Amazon is shutting down its Kindle Vella serialized story platform in February 2025 • Engadget

Mariella Moon:

»

Amazon, in what it described as a “difficult decision,” is winding down Kindle Vella and shutting it down completely in February 2025. When the company launched the serialized story platform in 2021, it said Vella was a way for readers to discover new fictional stories and a new way for authors to earn from the Kindle Direct Publishing service. But it hasn’t caught on as it had hoped, Amazon explains on its website, and it has decided to throw in the towel three years after Vella’s debut.

Authors can only publish stories on Vella until December 4, which is also the last day readers can purchase tokens. While readers will no longer be able to purchase tokens after that, they can continue using those tokens to unlock episodes until the program closes in February. The good news for those who’ve been following specific authors or stories on Vella is that they won’t lose their access to whatever episodes they’ve already unlocked even after the platform shuts down. They can always read the stories they’ve purchased in their library in the Kindle app for iOS and Android, though they can no longer open them on the web. Any token they don’t use by February will be refunded.

Responses to Vella have been pretty lukewarm since it became available. Some authors liked the fact that they could use it to earn money from unfinished stories, while some readers said they’d prefer getting a whole book instead of paying for instalments.

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The modern Dickens is probably on Substack anyway.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Your 44th and 60th birthdays mark a point of no return for your body. Unfortunately. CC-licensed photo by Shannon McGee 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. Ageing gracefully. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third-quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9m, along with $348.4m in revenue — a 68% increase year over year.

The company hasn’t been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575m during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10m last quarter, and is now finally in the green.

Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47% increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.

Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1m, while “other” revenue reached $33.2m on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.

In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature. Reddit started letting users translate posts into French last year before expanding it to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Now Huffman says Reddit plans to expand translation to over 30 countries through 2025.

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So to cut a long story short: without being paid to let AI bots index its content, it would still have lost money. Being the most populous free site on the internet still isn’t enough to pay the bills.
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X algorithm feeds users political content—whether they want it or not • WSJ

Jack Gillum, Alexa Corse and Adrienne Tong:

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New X users with interests in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are being blanketed with political content and fed a steady diet of posts that lean toward Donald Trump and that sow doubt about the integrity of the Nov. 5 election, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

The Journal created accounts on the social-media platform that only signaled an affinity for nonpolitical subjects, but a majority of the posts in their For You feed were partisan or related to the election. Kamala Harris’s campaign topped the list of most-seen accounts, with one post mocking pro-Trump hecklers at her rally in Wisconsin reaching all the Journal’s accounts. Ten of the other top 14 most-seen leaned right, including Trump’s, and overall, pro-Trump content appeared about twice as frequently as pro-Harris material.

“If that cringe, dingbat, zero-votes, airhead Kamala Harris is able to cheat enough to win the presidency—the USA is over,” wrote catturd2 in a post served to nearly all of the Journal’s newly created accounts. 

X has faced tumult since Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover but remains a place where tens of millions of Americans congregate and take in information. What users see has implications for the platform’s business, which has struggled with many big advertisers nervous about controversial content. X has said that politics accounts for only a small percentage of what users see, but the Journal’s analysis found that, at least for new users, political content is hard to escape.

…To gauge X’s role in recommending posts related to politics and the election, the Journal established its accounts with apolitical interests across five states, four of which are battlegrounds. The accounts signed on at regular intervals and scrolled through the platform’s For You timeline, an algorithmic feed. The Journal used a computer program to automatically categorize if and how the posts were political.

Less than a third of unique posts seen by the Journal’s accounts were political in nature. But X’s algorithm reupped political posts so often that they accounted for about half of the total posts on the accounts’ For You feeds.

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Totally predictable. If the algorithm is pushing content that gets a reaction, it will push Trump content, not Harris content. It’s exactly the same as how fake news sites focused on Trump rather than Hillary Clinton in 2016.
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Elon Musk’s xAI in talks to raise funding valuing it at $40bn • WSJ

Berber Jin and Meghan Bobrowsky:

»

Elon Musk’s xAI is in talks with investors for a funding round that would value it around $40bn, according to people familiar with the matter, escalating the tech industry’s race to build advanced generative AI technology.

The startup was last valued at $24bn just a few months ago, when it raised $6bn in the spring.

xAI hopes to raise several billion dollars in the new funding round, one of the knowledgeable people said. The cash raised would be added to the $40bn valuation.

The funding discussions are in the early stages, meaning that terms could change or the talks could fall apart.

Representatives for xAI didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Silicon Valley’s biggest AI startups are raising cash at breakneck speed to fund the intensive computing power needed to develop and run their technology. Earlier this month, OpenAI raised $6.6bn at a $157bn valuation in what was one of the largest private funding rounds in US history. Perplexity, an AI search startup, is in talks to raise new funding that would more than double its valuation to $8bn, The Wall Street Journal recently reported.

They are competing not just with each other, but with huge public companies—like Google parent Alphabet and Meta Platforms—that are pouring profits from their existing businesses into AI.

“If you’re training a frontier model, you need a massive amount of compute,” Musk said while video-calling Tuesday into a conference in Saudi Arabia. 

«

When I first saw this, I thought it was funding for X, and thought that $40bn was wildly overpriced. But it’s for his latest distraction instead. In effect Musk seems to live the life of a venture capitalist, flitting from thing to thing, interfering here and there and leaving messes for other people to clean up.
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The exponential growth of solar power will change the world • The Economist

»

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

As our essay this week explains, solar power faces no such constraint.

«

That data point about nuclear is amazing. But of course, as the objection that’s always raised goes, you need base load, and nuclear does deliver that.
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Nonlinear dynamics of multi-omics profiles during human ageing • Nature Aging

Xiaotao Shen, Michael Snyder et al (at Stanford University):

»

Aging is a complex process associated with nearly all diseases. Understanding the molecular changes underlying aging and identifying therapeutic targets for aging-related diseases are crucial for increasing healthspan. Although many studies have explored linear changes during aging, the prevalence of aging-related diseases and mortality risk accelerates after specific time points, indicating the importance of studying nonlinear molecular changes.

In this study, we performed comprehensive multi-omics profiling on a longitudinal human cohort of 108 participants, aged between 25 years and 75 years. The participants resided in California, United States, and were tracked for a median period of 1.7 years, with a maximum follow-up duration of 6.8 years.

The analysis revealed consistent nonlinear patterns in molecular markers of aging, with substantial dysregulation occurring at two major periods occurring at approximately 44 years and 60 years of chronological age.

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Life begins at 40.. and then gets worse at 44 and at 60. Enjoy your moment, 43-year-olds and 59-year-olds!
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First stage of Australia’s biggest battery project switched on, well ahead of schedule • RenewEconomy

Giles Parkinson:

»

The first stage of what will be the biggest battery in Australia has been officially switched on, ahead of schedule and less than 18 months after the start of construction, and will now get to work shifting rooftop solar output from the middle of the day to the evening peak.

The 219 MW, 877 MWh stage 1 of Neoen’s giant Collie battery in Western Australia is the first instalment of what will be – by the end of next year – the country’s biggest battery installation with a total of 560 MW and 2,240 MWh.

The location in Collie is significant, because it is the home of the state’s last remaining coal fired generators, which are all due to close by 2030. The federal Opposition has identified the site as one of seven in Australia it wants to build nuclear reactors, but the grid capacity is already being taken up by the giant batteries that are being built there.

Apart from Neoen’s battery, state owned Synergy is building another 500 MW, 2,000 MWh battery just up the road – part of the state’s rapid switch to battery storage as a way of soaking up rooftop solar and injecting it back into the grid in the evening, and easing the exit of the remaining coal plants.

The Neoen Collie battery has actually been operating since October 1, and is the company’s first four hour battery, and its first in Western Australia’s main grid, known as the South West Interconnected System.

«

Batteries replacing coal? Sounds good.
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What is it like to be a smartphone? • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

»

You would not be able to know what it’s like to be an AI by examining the 1s and 0s of its machine code any more than you’d be able to understand your own being by examining the As, Cs, Gs, and Ts of your genetic code. A conscious computer would likely be unaware of the routines of its software — just as we’re unaware of how our DNA shapes our body and being or even of the myriad signals that zip through our nervous system every moment. An intelligent computer may perform all sorts of practical functions, including taking our inputs and supplying us with outputs, without having any awareness that it is performing those functions. Its being may lie entirely elsewhere.

The Turing test, in all its variations, would also be useless in identifying an AI. It merely tests for a machine’s ability to feign likeness with ourselves. It provides no insight into the AI’s being, which, again, could be entirely separate from its ability to trick us into sensing it is like us. The Turing test tells us about our own skills; it says nothing about the character of the artificial being.

All of this raises another possibility. It may be that we are already surrounded by AIs but have no idea that they exist. Their beingness is invisible to us, just as ours is to them. We are both objects in the same place, but as beings we inhabit different universes. Our smartphones may right now be having, to borrow Nagel’s words, “experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own.”

Look at your phone. You see a mere tool, there to do your bidding, and perhaps that’s the way your phone sees you, the dutiful but otherwise unremarkable robot that from time to time plugs it into an electrical socket.

«

Good to see that Carr has set up a new home on the internet. Substack may be just another blogging platform, but it is where a lot of the people are, and so is he.
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Bots and fake accounts praise Azerbaijan, host of COP29 climate talks • The Washington Post

Maxine Joselow:

»

At least 1,800 bots on the social media site X are promoting the controversial choice of Azerbaijan, a major oil and gas producer, to host next month’s UN Climate Change Conference known as COP29, according to a new analysis shared exclusively with The Washington Post.

The analysis by Marc Owen Jones, an expert on disinformation at Northwestern University in Qatar, focused on roughly 2,800 X accounts that collectively sent around 10,800 tweets, retweets and replies about the conference between Oct. 17 and Oct. 24. It found that nearly three-quarters of the accounts were created this year and roughly two-thirds had activity patterns consistent with bots.

Jones did not determine who created the bots – defined as automated accounts that are programmed to do specific tasks, often more quickly than a human could manage.

The findings come as Azerbaijan seeks to use the summit to burnish its global image, despite international criticism of its alleged human rights violations and its planned expansion of production of natural gas, a top contributor to climate change.

“Azerbaijan is under scrutiny because of their position as a gas producer, so it makes sense that some entity would be trying to burnish their credentials by artificially amplifying positive messages about COP29,” Jones said.

A spokeswoman for Teneo, a public relations firm representing the COP29 presidency, did not respond to a request for comment.

Azerbaijani officials have argued that countries rich in oil and gas should not be blamed for harnessing their natural resources, and that they are uniquely positioned to lead the global shift to clean energy. The bots amplified posts making this argument in the lead-up to the conference, which is scheduled to start Nov. 11 in Baku.

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The real puzzle is who the bots would be intended to influence. The choice of location has been made. Is the idea just that the noise on social media won’t be opponents of Azerbaijan? What difference will that make really, though?
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Microsoft accuses Google of ‘shadow campaign’ to influence cloud regulation in Europe • TechCrunch

Paul Sawers:

»

The European cloud wars are heating up. Microsoft has accused its old foe Google of waging a clandestine war against the Azure cloud company, to curry favor with policymakers and antitrust authorities in Europe.

In a blog post on Monday, Microsoft deputy general counsel Rima Alaily pre-empted the imminent launch of a new lobby group called the Open Cloud Coalition, which includes Google and several smaller cloud providers. Alaily called the outfit an “astroturf group organized by Google,” alleging that Google had “gone through great lengths to obfuscate its involvement, funding, and control” by positioning smaller European cloud providers as the face of the coalition.

“When the group launches, Google, we understand, will likely present itself as a backseat member rather than its leader,” Alaily writes. “It remains to be seen what Google offered smaller companies to join, either in terms of cash or discounts.”

The Coalition is being led by Nicky Stewart, public sector director of UK cloud hosting company Civo. A document for the initiative, published by Microsoft on Monday, shows that global “advisory firm” DGA Group was behind the recruitment drive. DGA confirmed to TechCrunch that the coalition will formally launch Tuesday (October 29). In answer to a query from TechCrunch, a DGA spokesperson added that it wouldn’t be divulging the funding makeup of the organization at the moment.

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War of the astroturfers! There’s a lot of money washing around these lobby groups, though sometimes the backing might come from hedge funds which have an interest in seeing one or the other company’s share price move in some direction or other.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A study shows that no matter what the language, conversation transmits information at a predictable rate. CC-licensed photo by Simon Law 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. Verbatim. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Man who used AI to create child abuse images jailed for 18 years in UK • Financial Times

Stephanie Stacey:

»

A man who used artificial intelligence technology to create child sexual abuse imagery was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Monday, in a landmark prosecution over deepfakes in the UK.

Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, pleaded guilty to a total of 16 child sexual abuse offences, including transforming everyday photographs of real children into sexual abuse material using AI tools from US software provider Daz 3D. He also admitted encouraging others to commit sexual offences on children.

At Bolton Crown Court, Judge Martin Walsh imposed an extended sentence on Nelson, saying he posed a “significant risk” of causing harm to the public. That means Nelson will not be eligible for parole until he has completed two-thirds of his sentence.

Advances in AI mean fake images have become more realistic and easier to create, prompting experts to warn about a rise in computer-generated indecent images of children.

Jeanette Smith, a prosecutor from the Crown Prosecution Service’s Organised Child Sexual Abuse Unit, said Nelson’s case set a new precedent for how computer-generated images and indecent and explicit deepfakes could be prosecuted.

“This case is one of the first of its kind but we do expect to see more as the technology evolves,” said Smith.

Greater Manchester Police found both real images of children and computer-generated images of child sexual abuse on Nelson’s devices, which were seized last June. 

The computer-generated images did not look exactly like real photographs but could be classified as “indecent photographs”, rather than “prohibited images”, which generally carry a lesser sentence. This was possible, Smith said, because investigators were able to demonstrate they were derived from images of real children sent to Nelson.

«

A landmark case. It’s been the case for decades that non-real, computer-created images could qualify as CSAM (child sexual abuse material), but this is a worrying first: using this software in this way.
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Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says • AP via SFGate

Sylvie Corbet:

»

An investigation by French newspaper Le Monde found that the highly confidential movements of U.S. President Joe Biden, presidential rivals Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and other world leaders can be easily tracked online through a fitness app that their bodyguards use.

But the US Secret Service told the newspaper that it doesn’t believe the protection it provides was in any way compromised.

Le Monde found that some US Secret Service agents use the Strava fitness app, including in recent weeks after two assassination attempts on Trump, in a video investigation released in French and in English. Strava is a fitness tracking app primarily used by runners and cyclists to record their activities and share their workouts with a community.

Le Monde also found Strava users among the security staff for French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one example, Le Monde traced the Strava movements of Macron’s bodyguards to determine that the French leader spent a weekend in the Normandy seaside resort of Honfleur in 2021. The trip was meant to be private and wasn’t listed on the president’s official agenda.
Le Monde said the whereabouts of Melania Trump and Jill Biden could also be pinpointed by tracking their bodyguards’ Strava profiles.

«

Information leakage really is a thing. The Secret Service may be correct in saying that it doesn’t compromise their protection, but letting people know where the location of Secret Service agents isn’t great either. (When I first saw the headline I thought “they wouldn’t use Strava”. Half-right, I guess.)
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On cryptocurrency, 63% of US adults not confident it’s safe, reliable • Pew Research Center

»

While only a minority of Americans have invested in cryptocurrency, a majority of those who have done so still have it.

Among those who have ever invested in, traded or used cryptocurrency:
•
61% say they currently have cryptocurrency, which is down from 69% in 2023
• 39% say they currently do not have any cryptocurrency, up from 31% in 2023.

By income: roughly half (51%) of adults in lower-income households who’ve used cryptocurrency say they no longer have any, outpacing those in middle-income (32%) or upper-income (36%) households who say the same.

These shares are similar to those measured in 2023. The only significant change is among upper-income cryptocurrency users: 36% have given up the currency, an increase from 21% in 2023.

The financial impact of cryptocurrency is still a concern for many users. When asked about their own investments, the largest shares say they’ve done worse (38%) or about as expected (37%). In comparison, 20% say their investments have done better than expected and 4% are unsure.

«

The picture I get is of waning interest and people cutting their losses, while perhaps leaving a little behind just in case it ever comes back. (Or they’ve forgotten how to retrieve it.)
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Russia amplified hurricane disinformation to drive Americans apart, researchers find • AP News

David Klepper:

»

Russia has helped amplify and spread false and misleading internet claims about recent hurricanes in the United States and the federal government’s response, part of a wider effort by the Kremlin to manipulate America’s political discourse before the presidential election, new research shows.

The content, spread by Russian state media and networks of social media accounts and websites, criticizes the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, exploiting legitimate concerns about the recovery effort in an attempt to paint American leaders as incompetent and corrupt, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The London-based organization tracks disinformation and online extremism.

In some cases, the claims about the storms include fake images created using artificial intelligence, such as a photo depicting scenes of devastating flooding at Disney World that never happened, researchers say.

The approach is consistent with the Kremlin’s long-standing practice of identifying legitimate debates and contentious issues in the U.S. and then exploiting them. Previous disinformation campaigns have harnessed debates about immigration, racism, crime and the economy in an effort to portray the US as corrupt, violent and unjust.

«

Odd, because one side of the US presidential election also tries to portray the country in the same way. I guess it’s easier to push on an open door.
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A million people play this video wargame. So does the Pentagon. – WSJ

Daniel Michaels and Juanje Gómez:

»

Wargames—long the realm of top brass and classified plans—let strategists test varying scenarios, using different tactics and equipment. Now they are filtering down the ranks and out among analysts. Digitization, boosted by artificial intelligence, helps yield practical lessons in greater safety and at lower cost than staging military maneuvers would. Wargames can also explore hypotheticals that no exercise could address, such as nuclear warfare.

Proponents of wargames include Tim Barrick, a retired Marine colonel who is now wargaming director at Marine Corps University. He drills students using board games and computers. In one online exercise, he pushed eight Marine majors repeatedly through the same Pacific military engagement, using a program called Command: Professional Edition.

This software is unusual because it didn’t originate with a defence contractor or institute, as most wargames do. It is a simulation program built and marketed by gamers with almost no military background—and rooted in Tom Clancy novels. Users of all stripes have made it a surprise hit.

…Command’s British publisher, Slitherine Software, stumbled into popularity. The family business got started around 2000 selling retail CD-ROM games like Legion, involving ancient Roman military campaigns.

When Defense Department officials in 2016 first contacted Slitherine, which is based in an old house in a leafy London suburb, its father-and-son managers were so stunned they thought the call might be a prank. “Are you taking the piss?” J.D. McNeil, the father, recalled asking near the end of the conversation.

What drew Pentagon attention was the software’s vast, precise database of planes, ships, missiles and other military equipment from around the world, which allows exceptionally accurate modeling.

Former Air Force Air Mobility Command analyst Pete Szabo started using Command around 2017 to model military planes’ fuel consumption in battle scenarios. “It’s been a very powerful tool for us,” said the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. Convincing his superiors to employ commercial, off-the-shelf gaming software, though, took some work, he recalled. “At first it was like, ‘Nooooo.’ ”

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‘Washington Post’ flooded by cancellations after Bezos’ non-endorsement decision NPR

David Folkeflik:

»

The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice-President Kamala Harris for president.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

A corporate spokesperson declined to comment, citing The Washington Post Co.’s status as a privately held company.

“It’s a colossal number,” former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don’t know what led to it.”

Chief executive and publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.”

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The number is so big and the cancellations have been so sudden that the Post has begun emailing those who do it with cheap offers to encourage them back. The pretence that the Post has not made endorsements is false – it’s been doing it for more than 40 years.
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Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: comparable information rates across the human communicative niche • Science Advances

Christophe Coupé et al:

»

Language is universally used by all human groups, but it hardly displays undisputable universal characteristics, with a few possible exceptions related to pragmatic and communicative constraints. This ubiquity comes with very high levels of variation across the 7000 or so languages. For example, linguistic differences between Japanese and English lead to a ratio of 1:11 in their number of distinct syllables.

These differences in repertoire size result in large variation in the amount of information they encode per syllable according to Shannon’s theory of communication. Despite those differences, Japanese and English endow their respective speakers with linguistic systems that fulfil equally well one of the most important roles of spoken communication, namely, information transmission.

We show here that the interplay between language-specific structural properties (as reflected by the amount of information per syllable) and speaker-level language processing and production [as reflected by speech rate (SR)] leads languages to gravitate around an information rate (IR) of about 39 bits/s.

«

Stunning finding: despite the colossal difference in the apparent speed at which people speak, the amount of information transmitted per second is constant. There’s no “better” language. One has to wonder: if there were, would everyone gravitate to it? And does this finding transfer to the written word too?
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Lost at the station? Follow the blind inventor’s navigation app • The Times

Nicholas Hellen:

»

It is, admittedly, one of life’s more trivial annoyances, but one that exasperates many. Why are smartphone navigation apps not accurate enough to show us which way to turn when getting off a bus, or leaving the train or Tube?

Despite their vast wealth and technical resources, Apple and Google leave users to pace back and forth until the blue locator dot on the phone gives a clue by moving decisively one way or the other.

It has taken a blind entrepreneur, Tom Pey, 71, to take the challenge seriously.

His service, an app called Waymap, tells users which way to turn, gives step-by-step directions, and is accurate to the nearest metre, even when there is no phone signal. It works underground and in crowds, when conventional services are notoriously unreliable, and even indoors.

The service is so accurate that it could, for example, guide people directly to their seat in a football stadium, find the cheese counter in a supermarket or help users avoid getting lost and missing an appointment in a hospital.

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Nice idea, because we always need these.
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Indian coal giants pushed for lax pollution rules while ramping up production • Climate Change News

Akshay Deshmane:

»

The Indian government weakened rules to curb pollution caused by its expanding coal industry after lobbying by top producers, even as it agreed internationally to phase down the use of coal, an investigation by Climate Home has found. 

India’s coal giants pushed back hard against environmental regulation meant to tighten up the disposal of fly ash – a byproduct of coal-fired power plants known to harm both humans and the environment if not managed properly.  

Letters sent by coal companies to the Indian government – and accessed by Climate Home News through freedom of information requests to government agencies – reveal lobbying efforts to weaken federal rules between 2019 and 2023.

The state-run firms involved were Coal India Limited (CIL), the world’s third-biggest coal mining company, and National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) Limited, one of the top 10 coal-fired power companies globally.   

Top management at the coal giants claimed their organisations would not be able to comply fully with the government regulations, aimed at controlling fly ash disposal after decades of public health impacts for local communities. Even after the rules were approved, the companies continued efforts to weaken them, in some cases successfully. 

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Fly ash puts more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear power stations. Hooray for lobbying, eh.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Savings of £3.6bn could be made by turning off 1.5 million streetlights which are no longer needed. CC-licensed photo by Stephen Bowler on Flickr.

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

‘It’s important to talk about online abuse’: Marianna Spring on trolls, conspiracy theorists – and positivity • The Guardian

Eva Wiseman:

»

In the first five months of 2023, the BBC received 14,488 messages abusive enough to be escalated by their system designed to detect hate; 11,771 of those, around 80%, were about Spring. Due to her reporting on conspiracy theories she’s regularly targeted with death threats and harassment, both on and offline. For a while, a man camped in a tent outside the BBC’s New Broadcasting House shouting “disinformation agent” in her face as she left work. Which means, while I can say Spring welcomes me with a hug and invites me into her front room for a conversation that will span murder and Kate Middleton and teenage boys, I can’t describe the city she lives in, or who she lives with, or if she lives with anybody else at all, or give any personal details that might put her in danger.

“It’s quite a big deal for me this,” she says nervously, as we settle on her sofa. “I keep so private, because I know that the world I investigate has attracted this group of trolls who will stop at nothing to figure out literally everything about me and then use it in some way.” She once mentioned that her dad was a doctor, which led to strangers suggesting this connection is why she is invested in killing people with the Covid vaccine. Once she shared a picture online of her family’s 19-year-old cat and she was accused noisily of animal cruelty. “They also called her Chairman Miaow,” Spring adds, “which was actually quite funny.”

…What might surprise readers, she says, is that most of the conspiracy theorists she’s met aren’t bad people. She sits with them at home, like we’re doing now. They have tea together. Biscuits. “Often they arrive at these places from really legitimate points. They really care, they’re very worried about other human beings who are being hurt, or powerful people doing bad stuff. But they are themselves being exploited by other people on social media. They’re being pushed that kind of content and others benefit from their attention.”

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Amazingly, given what she goes through, she says she is “fundamentally hopeful about people”.
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The ‘Black Insurrectionist’ was actually white. The deception did not stop there • AP News

Brian Slodysko:

»

“Black Insurrectionist,” the anonymous social media persona behind some of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories about the 2024 election, can be traced to a man from upstate New York.

He’s also white.

With a profile photo of a Black soldier and the tagline “I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS,” the account on the platform X amassed more than 300,000 followers while posting dubious claims about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Some were amplified by former President Donald Trump, his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and their Republican allies in Congress. The most salacious claims have come in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Last month, the account posted what Black Insurrectionist claimed was an affidavit from an ABC News employee, alleging Harris was given questions in advance of the network’s debate with Trump — which ABC News vigorously disputed. Trump approved, though, declaring, “I love the person.” More recently, Black Insurrectionist posted a baseless claim alleging inappropriate behavior between Walz and a student decades ago, a falsehood that U.S. intelligence officials said sprang from a Russian disinformation campaign.

The reach that the Black Insurrectionist account attained with assistance from Trump and his allies demonstrates the ease with which unverified information from dubious sources can metastasize online to shape public opinion.

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People are so easily fooled by things like this: you attach a name to an account, you start pushing a certain sort of message, and they think it’s legitimate. Credit to Slodysko for getting to the bottom of this.

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‘We don’t know where the tipping point is’: climate expert on potential collapse of Atlantic circulation • The Guardian

Jonathan Watts:

»

The dangers of a collapse of the main Atlantic Ocean circulation, known as Amoc, have been “greatly underestimated” and would have devastating and irreversible impacts, according to an open letter released at the weekend by 44 experts from 15 countries. One of the signatories, Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer and climatologist who heads the Earth system analysis department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, explains here why he has recently upgraded his risk assessment of an Amoc breakdown as a result of global heating – and what that means for Britain, Europe and the wider world.

What is Amoc?
Amoc, or the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, is a system of ocean currents that brings heat into the northern Atlantic. Warm surface water from the tropics flows north and releases its heat in the subpolar Atlantic, south of Greenland and west of Britain and Ireland. Then it cools and sinks to a depth of between 2,000m to 3,000 metres before returning south as a cold current. Amoc is one of our planet’s largest heat transport systems, moving the equivalent of 50 times the human energy use, and it has a particularly strong impact on the climate in Europe, affects the ocean’s CO2 uptake and oxygen supply, as well as rainfall patterns in the tropics.

How is Amoc different to the Gulf Stream?
They are connected because the northwards flow of Amoc goes via the Gulf Stream, which is a warm and swift Atlantic Ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico, then flows through the Florida straits, up the coast of the US and then across towards Europe. Amoc contributes just 20% to the Gulf Stream water flow but most of the heat transport, since Amoc’s deep return flow is very cold. It works like a central heating system.

What is happening to Amoc?
There are indications that Amoc has been slowing down for the last 60 or 70 years due to global heating. The most ominous sign is the cold blob over the northern Atlantic. The region is the only place in the world that has cooled in the past 20 years or so, while everywhere else on the planet has warmed – a sign of reduced heat transport into that region, exactly what climate computer models have predicted in response to Amoc slowing as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.

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Why? Because there’s more freshwater, which is less dense, and doesn’t sink. This looks more like when than if. And when that happens, it’s going to have dramatic effects on all sorts of things.
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As bird flu spreads, additional human infection is reported in Missouri • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes:

»

A Missouri resident who shared a home with a patient hospitalized with bird flu in August was also infected with the virus, federal officials reported on Thursday.

But symptomatic health care workers who cared for the hospitalized patient were not infected, testing showed. The news eased worries among researchers that the virus, H5N1, had gained the ability to spread more efficiently among people.

Still, the number of human cases is rising in the United States. California said this week that it had confirmed 15 human cases of bird flu. Washington State has reported two poultry workers who are infected and five others presumed to be positive.

There are 31 confirmed cases in the country, but experts have said the figure is likely to be an undercount. “Additional cases may be found as investigations continue,” Dr. Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news briefing on Thursday.

“The identification of these additional cases of H5 in people with exposures to infected animals does not change CDC risk assessment for the general public, which continues to be low,” he said.

The poultry workers in Washington State were infected with a version of the virus that is distinct from the one circulating in dairy cattle, he added.

«

Ehhh that last little remark doesn’t fill me with joy in this watching brief. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The inside story of the Transport for London cyberattack • London Centric

Jim Waterson:

»

Publicly, the handling of the immediate aftermath of the attack was a mess. TfL initially put out a statement saying it was confident that no customer data had been compromised, before having to backtrack and admit that the bank details of around 5,000 Oyster card users who had applied for refunds had been accessed, although there is no indication anything was done with this data.

While most Londoners were still able to tap in and use transport services as usual, behind the scenes it was chaos. The booking system for Dial-a-Ride buses, used by the disabled, was also shut down, leaving vulnerable people in the lurch. Data on live tube times — fed into apps such as TfL Go and Citymapper — was taken offline.

Staff at TfL’s HQ were unable to log on to the IT network and the WiFi networks taken down. Office-based staff were sent to work from home for the whole of September, although most have now returned to the office. Every single TfL staff member was required to travel into the office to have their password and login details reset. Even now, many basic office tasks remain a struggle. Rebuilding and restoring these systems is a tedious, time-consuming task.

The biggest financial impact has been on the city’s neediest: the young, the old, and those with issues tapping in and out of stations.

People turning 60 have been unable to apply for Oyster cards giving them free travel. Individuals from all age groups have been unable to apply for legitimate refunds after being charged the maximum fare because they were unable to tap out at the end of a journey. Hundreds of thousands of sixth formers and new university students have been unable to apply for their 16+ Zip Oyster card, with the official TfL guidance being that they should make a note of each full-fare journey then reclaim the difference later in an as-yet-unclear manner.

When talking to London Centric, one TfL staffer involved in the recovery process cast doubt on the idea that every 17-year-old student in London is able to carefully note down their journeys and putting them in a spreadsheet for reclaiming at a later date.

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London Centric aims to be what the London Evening Standard has abandoned being – a publication with stories about and for Londoners.
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Britain to axe up to 1.5m lampposts • The Times

Nicholas Hellen:

»

Around 1.5 million of Britain’s 7.2 million lampposts could be removed to save money and reduce carbon emissions and replaced with lighting that will make it safer for pedestrians.

Under existing rules, there is no requirement to light pavements for pedestrians. They are only lit because light spills over from lampposts, which were principally installed to make it safer for motorists.

But today’s cars have such effective headlights that lampposts, which are generally 10m tall on A-roads and 6m tall on residential roads, are not necessary in many parts of Britain. Lampposts will remain in place in many locations where they are necessary, such as in cities where CCTV cameras rely on good lighting.

The first ones scheduled to be removed are in Hayton, a small Yorkshire village on the A1079 road between York and Hull. Starting in December, 30 street lights on each side of the main road are to be switched off and later removed. Around 300 more will be switched off and removed on a 19-mile (30km) stretch of the road.

Rather than plunge the village into complete darkness, the pavements that run alongside the road will be fitted with dedicated footway lights for the first time. On one side they will be on bollards with lights attached. On the other side, they will be on 3m-high columns, also with lights attached.

It is all part of a new strategy by the Department for Transport (DfT) aimed at fundamentally rethinking the purpose of spending £3.5bn each year on the 7.2 million street lights. Around £1bn goes on the energy bill, and the remainder is spent on maintaining them and replacing them at the end of their 40-year life cycle.

Karl Rourke, the street lighting service manager at East Riding of Yorkshire council, who is overseeing the project for Live Labs 2, a £30 million decarbonisation research and innovation programme funded by the DfT, said: “This is about common-sense lighting, not lighting removal at all costs.”

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This sustainable tiny home is made out of an old wind turbine • Fast Company

Grace Snelling:

»

The prototype, which features around 387 square feet (36 sq m) of interior space, is the product of a collaboration between the European renewable power company Vattenfall and the architecture collective Superuse Studios.

The turbine-turned-tiny house is also an experiment in material reuse that could become more critical as wind turbines across the globe reach the end of their life cycles.

Vattenfall has a few near-future sustainability goals. In 2023, 87% of Vattenfall’s electricity production came from renewable sources. The company aims to close that gap and become fossil-free by 2040, and it’s also thinking about how to make its existing material usage more circular. 

One major consideration for the company is its wind turbines, which typically have a lifespan of around 20 years. Once a turbine reaches the end of its utility, Vattenfall has to determine what will be done with its component materials.

That’s a tall order, considering that turbines typically stand at over 300 feet and include a nacelle (the control box that houses the generator, brakes, and other components) as well as three large blades. But the need to address that challenge is climbing. While there are no official decommissioning stats available, Vattenfall estimates that 5,000 wind turbines worldwide will need to be decommissioned annually over the next couple of years, as turbines across the globe begin to age out of their two-decade use window.

On a macro-level, that’s because the first boom of large-scale wind farming infrastructure is reaching the end of its life cycle. While the first electricity-generating wind turbine traces back to the late 19th century, large-scale wind farms have become much more commonplace over the past 30 years or so. In fact, global windpower grew from about 6,100 megawatts to 197,039 megawatts between 1996 and 2010. And that means that now is the time to “find better alternatives of making use of the resources that were developed, and making sure that we get the most out of them,” says Thomas Hjort, Vattenfall’s director of innovation.

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The photos suggest something that could just about suffice for a short holiday, but you might go a little mad living there for a long time: there’s only one window, which is the door.
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Who gets the TikTok in the divorce? The messy fight over valuable social media accounts • WSJ

Katherine Hamilton:

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When Kat and Mike Stickler filed for divorce, their lawyers had a math problem.

Among the couple’s biggest assets was MikeAndKat, a channel on TikTok and YouTube in which they shared their lives with about four million followers. No one knew how to evenly split MikeAndKat between Mike and Kat. 

“The judge was like, ‘what?’” Kat said last month during a podcast interview with Northwestern Mutual. “It’s a whole new terrain.”

Social media pays the bills for millions of Americans. But making a living online is more financially complicated than working a 9-to-5. Influencers need an audience to win advertising deals, and changing what they post risks turning followers away. Couples who showcase their love life online face an existential threat to the family business when they split.  

For the lawyers charged with pinning a dollar value to the accounts to divide them fairly, it’s way harder than assessing a house or car. Fortunes can swing depending on which ex has the keys to the account. That was Kat’s argument in fighting for control of the TikTok channel. 

“If the TikTok account was left to me, it would keep growing, but if it wasn’t, it would stop,” said Kat, 29, in the podcast interview. 

She was right. Kat got the TikTok, changed that handle to KatStickler and now has almost 10.5 million followers. She has another three million across Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. The channels, where Kat posts skits impersonating her mother and snippets of her everyday life, have earned her enough to buy a condo and become a small business investor. Mike ended up with the YouTube account, which is now defunct. He now works in sales and declined to comment.

There are 27 million paid content creators in the US, and 44% of them say social media is their full-time job, consultant The Keller Advisory Group found. 

The big bucks don’t come from views or followers. Brands pay influencers to recommend a product or service to their audience. US advertisers paid content creators $26bn in 2023, according to Statista.

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Former OpenAI researcher says company broke copyright law • The New York Times

Cade MEtz:

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“With a research project, you can, generally speaking, train on any data,” [former OpenAI staffer Suchir] Balaji said. “That was the mind-set at the time.”

Then OpenAI released ChatGPT. Initially driven by a precursor to GPT-4 and later by GPT-4 itself, the chatbot grabbed the attention of hundreds of millions of people and quickly became a moneymaker.

OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies have said that using internet data to train their A.I. systems meets the requirements of the “fair use” doctrine. The doctrine has four factors. The companies argue that those factors — including that they substantially transformed the copyrighted works and were not competing in the same market with a direct substitute for those works — play in their favor.

Mr. Balaji does not believe these criteria have been met. When a system like GPT-4 learns from data, he said, it makes a complete copy of that data. From there, a company like OpenAI can then teach the system to generate an exact copy of the data. Or it can teach the system to generate text that is in no way a copy. The reality, he said, is that companies teach the systems to do something in between.

“The outputs aren’t exact copies of the inputs, but they are also not fundamentally novel,” he said. This week, he posted an essay on his personal website that included what he describes as a mathematical analysis that aims to show that this claim is true.

Mark Lemley, a Stanford University law professor, argued the opposite. Most of what chatbots put out, he said, is sufficiently different from its training data.

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I’m not an expert on copyright law – especially US law – but Balaji’s essay doesn’t entirely persuade me. But I recognise that I’m biased; I already think the use is OK.
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X’s new block function will make people mad. That’s exactly what X wants • The Globe and Mail

Phoebe Maltz Bovy:

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Social-media users block one another all the time, for many reasons unrelated to deterring obsessives. Maybe you’ve blocked someone because they made one annoying post, or were rude to your friend, or are associated with someone you dislike. Maybe you block everyone with certain politics. Or maybe you hit “block” by accident. It is an entirely normal part of online life to be blocked by people you not only have never harassed, but have never interacted with or even heard of.

But under the new order, you might come across a funny or wise post, reply in good faith or even with praise, and then learn that this person has blocked you. That would be maddening. Who wants that?

Which leads me to my theory. It’s not exes who benefit from this change; it’s X. The new block function will raise blood pressure – and thus drive engagement.

To be confronted with someone’s posts and the fact that they blocked you would feel like being taunted, even if it was by no means intended that way. As it currently stands, someone blocking you is a prompt to think about that person less, if indeed you knew who they were to begin with. It is a tranquility- and sanity-preserving system.

Muting, a function that already exists, allows for plausible deniability. Maybe someone didn’t get around to your doubtless brilliant retort because they were busy, not because they’ve hidden your posts because they think you’re a harmless bore. All the new form of blocking amounts to is a form of muting where the muted individual knows what’s up.

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This is a good point. Blocking as a silencing mechanism, in both directions, is underrated.
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