Planting trees seems like a great way to tackle climate change – but preserving forests might be even more important. CC-licensed photo by Dmitry Burdakov on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. One more week to go! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Rishi Sunak considers curbing social media use for under-16s • The Guardian

Aletha Adu and Dan Milmo:

»

Rishi Sunak is considering limiting social media access for teenagers under the age of 16 to try to protect them from online harm, with reports suggesting a potential ban is on the cards.

The government is considering further action despite bringing in the Online Safety Act, which requires social media platforms to shield children from harmful content or face fines of up to 10% of a company’s global revenue.

A consultation would be launched in the new year, Bloomberg first reported, to explore the risks that children were exposed to while using social media.

While some sources told the news website that social media bans for under-16s were under consideration, a government spokesperson played down such a prospect on Thursday.

“From our point of view, we’re looking at ways to empower parents rather than crack down on anything in particular,” they said. “We’ve identified that there is a gap in research so we’ll be looking at what more research into it needs to be done, but nothing is yet signed off by ministers.”

The Molly Rose Foundation, a charity set up by the family of Molly Russell, who killed herself at the age of 14 after viewing harmful content on Instagram and Pinterest, said the emphasis of any review should be on giving more powers to the communications watchdog, Ofcom.

“It is clear that further measures are necessary to protect children from online risks,” said Andy Burrows, an adviser to the foundation. “But the emphasis should firmly be on strengthening the regulator’s hand to ensure platforms are no longer awash with a set of avoidable dangers.”

«

Yet another wild surmise ejected from the implosion of the Conservative Party. Who does Sunak or his SpAds (special advisers, the political aides who suggest policy and run around making tea) think is going to be persuaded by this vague offering? It would require companies to get access to the birthdates, ie identification papers, for any child between 13 and 16. You could do it via the government, since it should hold that information, except do you want the government to coordinate with social media companies about your children?
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I saw my life in iPhone Spatial Video on Apple Vision Pro • CNET

Scott Stein:

»

Apple has its own recording recommendations for spatial video, suggesting not to move too much and stay in well-lit areas. I broke a lot of those rules, floating around and sometimes going into dim spaces (a dark bar with CNET colleagues, or the museum and its glow-in-the-dark rocks). The results still worked well, but brighter places pop more.

The 30-frames-per-second frame rate limitation was also visibly apparent, especially with movement. I wish 60fps were possible. If someone’s running by fast, like my kids as I followed them in Central Park as they climbed a rock next to a pond near The Ramble, that frame rate can sometimes feel too choppy for my tastes in an extremely fast refresh-rate headset like Vision Pro.

…The most compelling experiences for me were playing clips where I held the iPhone near my own line of sight with family. A clip where I’m sitting around a table at Thanksgiving with my mom at my sister’s house, telling her I’m recording in 3D for a future project. She sort of raised her eyebrows a bit, and the way she looked at me in 3D — at a scale close to normal size, with her seeming to make eye contact — made me feel like I was almost there. It made me want to climb through that fuzzy-bordered window and join my family again on the other side.

With less motion, the frame rate limit doesn’t stand out as much. The more intimate framing is better suited for the contained nature of the spatial video playback frame, as well.

I also got a kick out of seeing some of my favorite exhibits at the Museum of Natural History in 3D. I went to the Hall of Ocean Life, where a trio of little tanks on the top floor house dioramas of prehistoric sea creatures that I’ve loved since I was a kid. I captured the ammonites and trilobites, gliding from case to case. In 3D on Vision Pro, it felt like a little home diorama revisited. I could see the joy of capturing little immersive installations, or spaces, that aren’t easy to go back to, and having them in front of you again. Given the subject matter, that smaller scale in that fuzzy frame was lovely.

«

Keep saying, this is going to be big. Once people have them, obviously.
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I’ve used a foldable laptop for a month, and I’m ready to return to a clamshell • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Although foldable smartphones have been available for five years, the devices are still trying to justify themselves. And after using a foldable-screen laptop as my primary PC for about four weeks, I’m not sure they’re ready for prime time.

I’m leaving my time with HP’s first foldable laptop with a sense of anticipation for the future of laptops, which I think would benefit from a resurgence of creative ideas that cater to the unique ways people use their computers. But I seriously question if the benefits of having a 17-inch screen in a 12-inch laptop body are worth the trade-offs inherent in today’s foldable PCs.

Early participants in the foldable laptop world have an opportunity to define the space, while consumers can decide if this is something they even want. HP’s foldable is the most beefed-up option ever, and weeks of use have shown me a lot about what I want and don’t want to see when the dust settles.

Ultimately, the question I’m facing regarding foldable laptops is, “Why this instead of a clamshell or 2-in-1 laptop?”

…Foldables aren’t for people looking for a PC with a favorable price-to-performance ratio. But the value proposition of the Spectre Fold is even worse than we see with other foldable laptops.

«

There’s a problem of a crease down the middle if you’re watching full-screen videos; but they’re also big and heavy. It
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UK spy agency GCHQ reveals its Christmas challenge for children. Can you solve it? • CNN

Hafsa Khalil:

»

What do secret codes and kids have to do with Christmas?

GCHQ, the UK’s largest intelligence agency, has sent out its annual Christmas card, complete with a set of puzzles aimed at Britain’s youngest minds.

This year’s challenge is the “toughest” one yet, the organization said in a statement Thursday, with 11- to 18-year-olds facing a series of seven “complex puzzles” masterminded by the agency’s puzzlers to uncover the final festive message.

“Puzzles have been at the heart of GCHQ from the start. These skills represent our historic roots in cryptography and encryption and continue to be important to our modern-day mission to keep the country safe,” GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler said in the statement.

“Our puzzlers have created a Challenge which is designed for a mix of minds to solve. Whether you are an analyst, an engineer or a creative, there is a puzzle for everyone,” she added, calling it “one for classmates, family and friends to try to solve together.”

The puzzles are contained within GCHQ’s Christmas card, available to download.

«

Well, I can do one of the maths sums easily enough.. Enterprising kids might enjoy it.
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Stop planting trees, says guy who inspired world to plant a trillion trees • WIRED

Alen Luhn:

»

The popularity of planting new trees is a problem—at least partly—of [the ecologist Thomas] Crowther’s own making. In 2019, his lab at ETH Zurich found that the Earth had room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees, which, the lab’s research suggested, could suck down as much as two-thirds of the carbon that humans have historically emitted into the atmosphere. “This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date,” the study said. Crowther subsequently gave dozens of interviews to that effect.

This seemingly easy climate solution sparked a tree-planting craze by companies and leaders eager to burnish their green credentials without actually cutting their emissions, from Shell to Donald Trump. It also provoked a squall of criticism from scientists, who argued that the Crowther study had vastly overestimated the land suitable for forest restoration and the amount of carbon it could draw down. (The study authors later corrected the paper to say tree restoration was only “one of the most effective” solutions, and could suck down at most one-third of the atmospheric carbon, with large uncertainties.)

Crowther, who says his message was misinterpreted, put out a more nuanced paper last month, which shows that preserving existing forests can have a greater climate impact than planting trees. He then brought the results to COP28 to “kill greenwashing” of the kind that his previous study seemed to encourage—that is, using unreliable evidence on the benefits of planting trees as an excuse to keep on emitting carbon.

«

Even so, trees remain the most effect direct carbon capture (DCC) systems we know of: no external power source required, self-feeding, no external infrastructure required, and so on.
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Beeper Mini’s iMessage fight with Apple is about platforms, protocols, and power • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

What’s odd about this story is that you have two sides completely at odds, both saying entirely correct things. Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky has been telling anyone who will listen that SMS is insecure, that Apple is doing its users a disservice by requiring them to use such old and crummy tech to communicate with the vast majority of the world’s smartphone users, and that Beeper’s solution is both a better user experience and a better privacy solution. It’s all true: if you start from the premise that anything is better than SMS, which is a pretty reasonable premise for a lot of reasons, the Beeper way is a good one.

But here’s another way to look at it, which I suspect is the way Apple sees the situation: Who the hell is Beeper? This tiny company has effectively hacked a closed protocol, and now millions of iPhone users are potentially having their messages handled by a company they’ve never heard of. What’s worse, since they’re sending blue-bubble messages, those users will assume they’re sending encrypted messages through a trusted source — Apple — and they’ll never know about this intermediary that promises it’s trustworthy, but who really knows? Apple is well within its rights to run iMessage however it sees fit, and to kick out any provider or person it wants.

A fully interoperable, cross-platform messaging system would be a good thing for the world. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial. …It’s also not great how much of the world is wholly reliant on WhatsApp, a platform that has thus far mostly done right by its users but could change ownership, strategy, or business model at a moment’s notice. If messaging was based on open protocols, and you could talk to your friends across apps, the whole system would be more resilient and functional.

«

I think the response to that is “And if my aunt had wheels, she’d be a bicycle”.
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The commercial surveillance marketing storm driving the Albertsons and Kroger deal • TechPolicy.Press

Jeffrey Chester:

»

The insatiable quest to acquire more data has long been a force behind corporate mergers in the US—including the proposed combination of supermarket giants Albertsons and Kroger. Both grocery chains have amassed a powerful set of internal “Big Data” digital marketing assets, accompanied by alliances with data brokers, “identity” management firms, advertisers, streaming video networks, and social media platforms.

Albertsons and Kroger are leaders in one of the fastest-growing sectors in the online surveillance economy—called “retail media.” Expected to generate $85bn in ad spending in the US by 2026, and with the success of Amazon as a model, there is a new digital “gold rush” by retailers to cash in on all the loyalty programs, sales information, and other growing ways to target their customers.

Albertsons, Kroger, and other retailers including Walmart, CVS, Dollar General and Target find themselves in an enviable position in what’s being called the “post-cookie” era. As digital marketing abandons traditional user-tracking technologies, especially third-party cookies, in order to address privacy regulations, leading advertisers and platforms are lining up to access consumer information they believe comes with less regulatory risk.

Supermarkets, drug stores, retailers and video streaming networks have massive amounts of so-called “first-party” authenticated data on consumers, which they claim comes with consent to use for online marketing. That’s why retail media networks operated by Kroger and others, as well as data harvested from streaming companies, are among the hottest commodities in today’s commercial surveillance economy. It’s not surprising that Albertsons and Kroger now have digital marketing partnerships with companies like Disney, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Google and Meta—to name just a few.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently reviewing this deal, which is a test case of how well antitrust regulators address the dominant role that data and the affordances of digital marketing play in the marketplace.

«

Supermarket mergers in the cause of data analysis certainly is a big step into a new age.
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Misunderstanding the fertility crisis • Quillette

Alex Nowrasteh on the reason why birthrates are dropping in the developed world:

»

Tomorrow, I could book a flight to over 100 countries to see wondrous natural and man-made sights. There are thousands of good restaurants and bars within an hour’s drive. I could never hope to sample fully the range of tasty cuisine and alcoholic beverages available to me. The internet is at my fingertips, with billions of interesting articles, tweets, and videos that could fill my day. The number and quality of new books that I can download is difficult to even describe. Shooting ranges (I’m an American, after all), axe throwing, cigar lounges, rock climbing, and various novel and new exercise classes at gyms are close by—to say nothing of activities I’m not even aware of yet. And I have numerous friends and many potential friends who are just a phone call or text away. Streaming services bring the golden age of television and movies into my household. And the list goes on.

These and other options mean that every choice we make has a high opportunity cost regarding our careers and entertainment options. When countries develop, fertility falls for this and other reasons. New immigrants drop their fertility because the opportunity cost of raising children is higher in a country with enormous economic opportunities, high incomes, and vast cheap entertainment possibilities. 

But the effect isn’t limited to immigrants; it also crushes fertility for native-born Americans. Despite the nostalgianomics of Robert Reich and Josh Hawley, two-income households aren’t vastly more common than they used to be because of a brutal Malthusian competition for increasingly scarce resources. Women work because their wages are so much higher than they used to be. There isn’t a two-income trap—there’s expanded female economic opportunity, and this opportunity cost is contributing mightily to the decline in fertility.

«

Nowrasteh has three children, in case you’re wondering, and says he’d lay down his life for any of them. I was a little dubious of his argument before he revealed that. But it certainly fits the pattern of growing per-capita GDP seeing lower fertility, and birth control leading to lower birthrates.
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Using AI to talk to the dead • The New York Times

Rebecca Carballo:

»

Dr. Stephenie Lucas Oney is 75, but she still turns to her father for advice. How did he deal with racism, she wonders. How did he succeed when the odds were stacked against him?

The answers are rooted in William Lucas’s experience as a Black man from Harlem who made his living as a police officer, F.B.I. agent and judge. But Dr. Oney doesn’t receive the guidance in person. Her father has been dead for more than a year.

Instead, she listens to the answers, delivered in her father’s voice, on her phone through HereAfter AI, an app powered by artificial intelligence that generates responses based on hours of interviews conducted with him before he died in May 2022.

His voice gives her comfort, but she said she created the profile more for her four children and eight grandchildren.

“I want the children to hear all of those things in his voice,” Dr. Oney, an endocrinologist, said from her home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., “and not from me trying to paraphrase, but to hear it from his point of view, his time and his perspective.”

«

Black Mirror from top to bottom and people don’t even realise they’re doing it. (Via John Naughton.)
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More questions than answers • Science

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel:

»

Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year is the development of glucagon-like peptide–1 (GLP-1) agonists to treat obesity and weight gain, and this year’s discovery that they can blunt obesity-associated health problems. GLP-1 agonists have been around since 2005 to treat type 2 diabetes and were approved for weight loss as early as 2014. But it was only since 2021, when the GLP-1 drug semaglutide was approved (as Wegovy) for obesity (it is sold as Ozempic for diabetes), that the frenzy really began, and mainstream media started referring to them as “the medical sensation of the decade.”

…But for all their promise, GLP-1 agonists have raised more questions than they have answered—a hallmark of a true breakthrough. The first is about their cost and availability. These issues are likely to be worked out over the next few years, but for the moment, access to these drugs is limited. The cost can be over $1000 per month and is not always covered by insurance, if the medicine can even be obtained.

Over time, the price may well come down as supply goes up, and insurance will likely cover the medication as more benefits are demonstrated that save on health care costs down the line—both in terms of catastrophic disease and the need for additional medications required to treat other conditions known to be associated with excess weight. The pressure is on—and should stay on—the drug companies and insurance providers to work this out.

Other questions relate to the need to stay on the drugs indefinitely to avoid regaining weight. A major assumption is that these are lifetime drugs. Are there safety implications associated with long-term use? How will clinicians decide how much weight loss justifies lifetime use of the drug? And at what age? These concerns become more pronounced for younger patients who will be on the drug for longer; at the same time, obesity among adolescents is a pressing problem on multiple fronts.

«

The question of who pays becomes different in the UK, where the issue is whether it’s worth funding past a certain age.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A software update intends to make the Autopilot in two million Tesla cars in the US safer – but can it improve the drivers? CC-licensed photo by pedrik on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Look, no hands! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

ChatGPT to summarize Politico and Business Insider articles in ‘first of its kind’ deal • The Guardian

Blake Montgomery (and agencies):

»

Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider and Politico, said on Wednesday it was partnering with OpenAI, which will pay the German media group to allow ChatGPT to summarize current articles in responses generated by the chatbot.

“ChatGPT users around the world will receive summaries of selected global news content from Axel Springer’s media brands,” which also includes the German tabloid Bild, the two companies said in a statement.

The chatbot’s answers will include material otherwise kept behind a paywall and offer “links to the full articles for transparency and further information”, they said. Axel Springer will be paid for making its content available to the US artificial intelligence firm, a spokesman for the media group told AFP. The deal is valid for several years and does not commit either side to exclusivity, leaving them free to sign new agreements, the spokesman said without giving more detail.

…The Axel Springer spokesman said that with the advent of platforms such as Google and Facebook, media companies had missed the opportunity to establish a new source of income “and we are all still running after the money”.

The partnership with OpenAI was “the first of its kind”, Axel Springer’s CEO, Mathias Döpfner, said in the statement.

“We want to explore the opportunities of AI empowered journalism – to bring quality, societal relevance and the business model of journalism to the next level,” Döpfner said.

«

Enterprising move by Springer: if it is getting paid by OpenAI and will continue to get paid, it might have made a smart move.
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The cable news kayfabe is dead • Nieman Journalism Lab

Ben Collins:

»

Too many news institutions have been sucked into the theatre of the absurd, and people are looking for champions who allude to that.

The good news is, the kids see the kayfabe of it all. They are now aware of the game within the game.

They aren’t watching the news because of it, but they are interested in how that kayfabe frames the ever-increasing powerlessness they feel in the ambient horrors playing in the background of their daily lives.

The cable news kayfabe, as you know, goes as follows: a powerful person says something shocking — a far-right politician launches a nativist talking point, or a billionaire speaks of a threat of financial doom if demands aren’t met. A more reasonable voice reacts, frequently asking to please remove the racism, but conceding an underlying but unprovable point that should never have been conceded. The story is framed as reaction to the initial statement, no matter how ludicrous or even impossible that initial statement is.

The reality, in this situation, is and has never been a consideration. This is how you build a world of kayfabe, and you have to turn off parts of your brain to enter it.

You can apply this to countless stories that required a nuance many mainstream news outlets have so far refused to deploy: the apocalyptic hype cycle and predictable burnout of AI, the Israel-Hamas war, TikTok’s influence on American culture and politics.

There are strict parameters on how we talk about each of these things. It’s a sort of news kayfabe: a binary, good guy–bad guy game we’ve invented that has all too often been infiltrated by all bad guys.

…Here’s the good news: The faster you stop playing those games, the faster you stop making Faustian bargains for access, the faster you stop presenting weird false choices that leave out seemingly every American under 40 years old, the faster we can gain their trust back.

The other good news is that they’re right. The kind of news that they want does not have these internecine power structures and middle school-style influence games built into it. That’s not a lot to ask.

«

Certainly seems to be true of the American media ecosystem Collins lives in; I’d like to think that other countries do less badly. But he makes many good points.
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Dear journalists: here’s how to talk to women on the Hugging Face team • LinkedIn

Emily Witko (and coworkers):

»

We here at Hugging Face have been noticing a concerning trend in tech journalism. The real achievements of women on our team often get overshadowed by a focus on personal, and sometimes very intrusive, details that aren’t relevant to their work. It’s time for that to change. Here’s a set of guidelines that the team has put together, aiming for a more respectful and balanced approach to reporting:

Highlight achievements: Center your articles on professional accomplishments, not on personal attributes like looks, age, or family status. This one is pretty self-explanatory, right folks?

Avoid gendered language: At the moment, we see lots of over-associating women with certain words and concepts, such as ‘children’ and ‘family.’ Proofread your articles to eliminate gendered descriptions that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes. 

• Problematic: Jane Janey, despite being a mother of two, has surprisingly managed to lead her team to develop a groundbreaking AI algorithm.
• Good: Jane Janey, an accomplished leader in her field, has successfully spearheaded the development of a groundbreaking AI algorithm with her team.

Respect privacy: Honour the interviewee’s wishes regarding the disclosure of personal information.

«

There’s quite a few more advisements. I’m slightly surprised that journalists – and especially American journalists – would need telling any of this.
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Russian foreign intelligence service spotted exploiting JetBrains vulnerability • The Record

Jonathan Greig:

»

Government agencies in the US, Poland and the UK said on Wednesday that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has been exploiting a vulnerability that was exposed earlier this year in a popular product from Czech software giant JetBrains.

Officials said they have notified dozens of companies across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia after discovering hundreds of compromised devices.

The agencies attributed the attacks to hackers within the SVR known as APT29 — also tracked by cybersecurity researchers as CozyBear or Midnight Blizzard — and said the “large scale” campaign began in September.

Microsoft previously said North Korean hackers were exploiting the bug — labeled CVE-2023-42793 — in September. It affects a product called TeamCity, which is used by developers to test and exchange software code before its release.

Now the SVR has been spotted “using the initial access gleaned by exploiting the TeamCity CVE to escalate its privileges, move laterally, deploy additional backdoors, and take other steps to ensure persistent and long-term access to the compromised network environments,” Wednesday’s alert said.

“Generally, the victim types do not fit into any sort of pattern or trend, aside from having an unpatched, Internet-reachable JetBrains TeamCity server, leading to the assessment that SVR’s exploitation of these victims’ networks was opportunistic in nature and not necessarily a targeted attack.”

The organizations attacked include an energy trade association; companies that provide software for billing, medical devices, customer care, employee monitoring, financial management, marketing, sales, and video games; as well as web hosting companies, tool manufacturers, and small and large IT companies.

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A story which comes the same day that the British government was warned that the UK is very vulnerable to ransomware attacks. It doesn’t rain but it pours.
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Tesla recalls two million cars with ‘insufficient’ Autopilot safety controls • The Washington Post

Leo Sands, Aaron Gregg and Faiz Siddiqui:

»

Tesla is recalling more than two million vehicles to fix Autopilot systems that US safety regulators determined did not have enough controls to prevent misuse, the largest recall of Tesla’s driver-assistance software to date.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tesla’s method of ensuring drivers are still paying attention while the driver-assistance system is activated is “insufficient.”

“There may be an increased risk of a crash,” the agency wrote, in some situations when the system is engaged “and the driver does not maintain responsibility for vehicle operation and is unprepared to intervene as necessary or fails to recognize when Autosteer is canceled or not engaged.”

The recall comes days after The Washington Post published an investigation that found Teslas in Autopilot had repeatedly been involved in deadly crashes on roads where the software was not intended to be used.

NHTSA said Tesla will send out a software update to fix the problems affecting its 2012-2023 Model S, 2016-2023 Model X, 2017-2023 Model 3, and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles, effectively encompassing all Tesla vehicles equipped with Autopilot on US roads. Autopilot is a standard feature on Tesla’s vehicles; only some early Tesla models are not equipped with the software.

…The software update, which was to be deployed on “certain affected vehicles” starting Dec. 12, will add extra controls and alerts to “encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility,” the recall report said. The update also will include controls that prevent Autosteer from engaging outside of areas where it is supposed to work as well as a feature that can suspend a driver’s Autosteer privileges if the person repeatedly fails to stay engaged at the wheel.

«

“Recall” in this context doesn’t actually mean “take back into its factories” – at least for Tesla, which can (as the story says) just send out a software update over the air; nobody’s car has to move an inch. The problem of inattentive or unready drivers, though, can’t be so easily fixed.
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20 things we learned from the Epic v. Google trial • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

I have spent 15 days reporting live from the Epic v. Google trial: an antitrust dispute over whether Google’s Android app store is an unfair monopoly. I’ve watched a parade of witnesses go by, including Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. We’re now in a weeklong break before both parties return on December 11th to make their closing arguments, after which a jury will decide who’s right. I’ve chronicled every major thrust, parry, and riposte leading up to that in our Verge StoryStream, writing nearly 600 dispatches from the courtroom so far.

But who’s got the time to dig through all that, am I right?

So here are straightforward versions of the 20 most interesting things we’ve learned — starting with the fact that Epic could win the whole thing.

«

This was last week, but Hollister was right about Epic winning, and a number of the other details are just as interesting – notably No.9: “This trial destroyed any notion that Google treats developers fairly and equally”. Also No.13: profit margins for the Play Store were north of 70%.
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Cop28 is a farce rigged to fail, but there are other ways we can try to save the planet • The Guardian

George Monbiot:

»

Since this horrible farce [of Cop] began 31 years ago, plenty of people have proposed reforms. The proposals fall into three categories. One is to improve the way consensus decisions are made. Well-meaning as these are, they’re futile: you can tweak the process, but it will remain dysfunctional.

Another approach is to replace consensus decision-making with voting, an option that remains, in draft form, in the UN rules. The obvious objection is that a majority would impose decisions on other nations. But this reflects a narrow conception of what voting could do. There are plenty of ways of ensuring everyone can be heard, without relying on crude binary choices. One of the most promising is the Borda count, a decision-making method first proposed in 1435.

The modified Borda count developed by the de Borda Institute looks especially useful. First, the delegates agree on what the principal issues are. These are then turned into a list of options, on which everyone is asked to agree (the options could range from the immediate phase-out of fossil fuels to planetary Armageddon). The options are listed on a ballot paper, and each delegate is asked to rank them in order of preference. A scoring system awards points for every ranking. The more options a delegate ranks, the more points each one is worth to them. This enables complex decisions to be made without excluding anyone.

The third approach, which could run alongside the second, is to bypass the Cop process by developing new binding treaties. The professor of environmental politics Anthony Burke suggests an approach modelled on the 2017 treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, the 1997 anti-personnel mine ban convention and the 2008 convention on cluster munitions. In these cases, states and citizens’ groups frustrated with a lack of progress began building treaties without the participation of the powerful nations – the US in particular – that sought to resist them. They developed enough momentum not only to push the treaties through the UN general assembly, but also to establish new diplomatic norms that made defiance of the treaties much harder to justify, even for nations that refuse to ratify them.

«

In retrospect, it’s absolutely incredible that the Montreal Protocol – to drastically cut CFC production and use – was agreed and implemented. Could it be done today?
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Bluesky isn’t a mere Twitter clone, says CEO Jay Graber • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

As 2023 winds down, Bluesky, which still hasn’t opened up to all comers, has grown to 2.3 million users. Like Mastodon, Threads, and other refuges for Twitter expatriates, it hasn’t become the sort of one-stop conversation megahub that Twitter once was. Instead, an eclectic subset of the Twitter masses has landed there. CEO Jay Graber says the 30-person Bluesky team tried to recreate “the platonic ideal of microblogging as it once was” and calls out some constituencies who have bonded with the service: meme lovers, writers and artists, and people who find enforced pithiness to be a fun, creative challenge. (Bluesky has a 300-character limit.)

Why has Bluesky kept its invite system in place even though that means many would-be members still haven’t gotten in? “To be honest, we didn’t have the capacity to absorb all of that in a day,” says Graber. “It’s a full-time effort for engineers to scale up the service at the level that we were going. We actually have not had significant downtime, which is a testament to this controlled-growth strategy—you know, Twitter early on had a lot of failwhales.”

Whether you’re already on Bluesky or not, thinking of it purely as a Twitter-esque app misses the point. The app is just a testbed for the protocol the startup has been building to help nudge us out of the era of centralized social networking. And Graber—who got her job as CEO in 2021 after DMing Dorsey to express enthusiasm for the Bluesky project—says that the founding goal is soon to get its first major real-world test.

«

That test will be in early 2024, when decentralisation will be tried, and the invite system will become redundant.
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Apple is holding the final nail for X’s coffin • Bloomberg

Dave Lee:

»

To celebrate the return of such a man [as Infowars’ Alex Jones], Musk joined Jones in a live audio chat on Sunday. Other attendees included Andrew Tate, who faces rape and sex-trafficking charges, and Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who last week rattled off a raft of unfounded conspiracy theories on the debate stage. With saner minds abandoning X, this is the clientele that’s left.

Apple’s marketing team clearly wants no part of it. It’s among the companies that have decided to “pause” advertising on the platform, having previously been its biggest spender. While not mentioned directly, Apple was implied among the group — along with Disney, Walmart and others — that Musk recently told to go f— themselves.

But Apple holds an even greater power than that. Having decided X is too dangerous for its brand, the reinstatement of Jones now forces it to confront a bigger question: When does X become too dangerous for Apple’s users? Or when do Apple’s supposed corporate principles demand it no longer take the 30% it enjoys from sign-ups to X’s premium services? (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

Apple has answered this question before. Jones’s InfoWars app was banned from the App Store in 2018. His content, the company said at the time, fell afoul of “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or place a targeted individual or group in harm’s way.” The company did not specify which specific material had forced it to act. The ban appears to remain in place today.

…The fallout would be several magnitudes greater were Apple to take any action against X. But on its current trajectory — with Musk himself amplifying some of the platform’s most vicious elements — there will come a time when inaction would be just as damaging to Apple.

«

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Musk’s X 2023 ad sales projected to slump to about $2.5bn • Bloomberg via MSN

Kurt Wagner:

»

Elon Musk’s X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, is on track to bring in roughly $2.5bn in advertising revenue in 2023 — a significant slump from prior years, according to people familiar with the matter.

X generated a little more than $600m in advertising revenue in each of the first three quarters of the year, and is anticipating a similar performance in the current period, according to a person familiar with the numbers. That compares to more than $1bn per quarter in 2022. 

Ad sales currently make up between 70% and 75% of X’s total revenue, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. That would imply 2023 sales of roughly $3.4bn, including sales from subscriptions and data licensing deals. 

The previously unreported sales figures underscore with greater clarity advertisers’ unease with how X is handling content moderation under Musk, and in particular the new owner’s posts that amplify antisemitic and other extremist views.

X executives had originally targeted $3bn in revenue from advertising and subscriptions in 2023, but will fall far short of that number, one of the people said. The annual number is still in flux because the holiday quarter isn’t yet over. 

“This presents an incomplete view of our entire business, as the sources you’re relying on for information are not providing accurate and comprehensive details,” said Joe Benarroch, head of business operations for X.

«

For comparison, revenue in the year before Musk was $5bn (though it wasn’t profitable then either). No publisher would think they were making a roaring success of things if they halved income, though he may have halved – or cut even further – the outgoings.

What’s notable is that Wagner actually got a response from a human at the company. That’s how significant it sees both Bloomberg, and this revelation. Anyway, perhaps he can blame it all on whoever let that sink in, and the bozo who was holding it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The E3 video games show is officially dead: it failed to power up and Covid was a boss level too far. CC-licensed photo by Sergiy Galyonkin on Flickr.

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

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

Apple’s forthcoming iOS 17.3 Stolen Device Protection update aims to stop iPhone thieves • WSJ

Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen:

»

Apple is addressing a security vulnerability that has allowed iPhone thieves to take over customers’ accounts, access saved passwords, steal money and lock people out of their digital memories.

A new [forthcoming – Overspill Ed.] iOS setting called Stolen Device Protection is designed to defend against these attacks. It is rolling out to beta testers starting Tuesday.

The Wall Street Journal reported on a nationwide spate of thefts where criminals used the iPhone passcode to break into victims’ accounts and upend their lives. Thieves in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis and other cities watch iPhone owners tap in their passcodes before stealing the targets’ devices.

The Journal’s reporting outlined for the first time how these thefts resulted in losses far beyond phones, and how Apple’s security settings gave victims few ways of preventing harm once their passcodes fell into the wrong hands. We have heard from hundreds of people over the past year whose iPhones and digital lives were stolen.

…Your passcode, that short string of numbers that grants access to an iPhone, has powerful reach. With this number, typically four or six digits, thieves can access a lot of your data and make sweeping changes to your accounts. And when Face ID or Touch ID fails, the passcode serves as a fallback.

If you enable the new Stolen Device Protection, your iPhone will restrict certain settings when you are away from a location familiar to the iPhone, such as your home or work. Here’s the rundown:

…• With Stolen Device Protection: If you want to change an Apple ID password when away from a familiar location, the device will require your Face ID or Touch ID. It will then implement an hour-long delay before you can perform the action. After that hour has passed, you will have to reconfirm with another Face ID or Touch ID scan. Only then can the password be changed.

«

That first one is the big one, but there are plenty more. This should be a free link, available to all, but in case not there’s an Apple Insider writeup. Credit to Stern and Nguyen, who first revealed this flaw back in February.
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The 21 most defining memes of 2023 • Rolling Stone

Julia Reinstein:

»

2023 was a heck of a year on the internet. Whether we were eating our girl dinners or declaring our allegiances in the orca wars, this year was jam-packed with memes that captivated us even harder than the Roman Empire. The following are some of the most defining memes of 2023, from nepo babies to babygirl. Here’s to our bygone memes, and may 2024 be as fruitful. 

«

The web headline for this story was “The 21 Best Memes of 2023 That Took Over the Internet”, which feels like an overstatement. My internet definitely wasn’t taken over by many of those, though of course you now have plenty to bone up on and talk about at the Christmas dinner table.
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E3 is officially dead, and so is the version of the industry it was made for • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

As smartphones and high-speed Internet access became more popular, though, publishers increasingly found they could get much of the same effect with widely downloadable game demos and choreographed YouTube video presentations. Why pay to impress the media with an E3 press conference when a Nintendo Direct-style video stream can get as much media attention and reach your customers directly as well?

Sure, these purely digital promotions lacked some of the glitz and glamor of the ostentatious, console-war-driven E3 booths of the past. But everyday gamers only got to experience that glamor vicariously, anyway—the show only started offering limited public access in 2017. Meanwhile, the growth of fan-focused events like the Penny Arcade Expo and countless regional expos gave publishers large and small more direct (and cheaper) in-person access to their most devoted fans.

Earned media aside, E3’s importance as a gathering place for business meetings has also eroded over the years. When brick-and-mortar retailers ruled the industry, a summer show was an important place for publishers to woo retail buyers with demos and hype ahead of the all-important holiday season releases. Those relationships and orders had to be established early to allow time for production and shipping to the stores that would make or break a publisher’s year.

Contrast that with today’s industry, where gamers tend to download games without ever leaving the house, and major titles can be released any time of the year—2022’s biggest release quickly sold 12 million copies after a February launch, after all. Just as the Internet blunted E3’s importance as a media show, this transition largely obviated the need for a business gathering as well.

By the time COVID hit in 2020, the writing was already on the wall for what was once the industry’s most important annual showcase. The show’s legacy branding helped it limp along for a while as an important place to be seen as a major industry player. But that bubble of earned self-importance was also remarkably easy to pierce once major publishers started examining what they were actually getting for the sizable expense of a show floor booth.

«

E3, which was the video games industry’s big thing, is dead; will that ever happen to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas?
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Why Li-Fi might be better than Wi-Fi • IEEE Spectrum

Qusi Alqarqaz:

»

IEEE 802.11bb defines the rules for how Li-Fi devices will communicate with each other and how fast they can transfer data. According to the standard, such devices should be able to send and receive data at speeds between 10 megabits per second and 9.6 gigabits per second.

The standard introduces a new realm of fast, reliable wireless communication that promises to revolutionize the way we connect and communicate.

Li-Fi uses special light fixtures that have small control units and solid-state light emitters and photosensitive receivers. The fixtures can send and receive information using light waves. To connect to Li-Fi, smartphones, tablets, and other devices need emitters and sensors that can send and see the light signals. Advanced mobile phones already use the emitters and sensors for other applications such as face recognition and lidar.

In a typical installation, we connect to the Internet via a local-area network. LANs now will be able to offer a new wireless access opportunity via Li-Fi-enabled access points (APs) installed in areas such in ceilings or inside desk lamps connected via power over Ethernet or power-line communications.

…One of the key factors driving the adoption of Li-Fi is that it enables peak rates by using the same advanced modulation techniques to encode data onto light waves that are used for Wi-Fi. The optical wireless transmission channel is less disturbed by multipath, Doppler, phase noise, and other interference. Therefore, it can realize the highest speeds through a variant of multicarrier modulation, called orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. OFDM implements subcarriers transmitting multiple parallel data streams. By leveraging the properties of light, Li-Fi results in unprecedented data transfer speeds over short distances typically inside one room.

«

Of course, light travels at the same speed as electromagnetic waves used in Wi-Fi because.. light is an EM wave. But the interference risk is different from something at 2.4GHz. Plenty more in the interview that follows the explanation in the article.
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iOS 17.2 arrives with new Journal app and spatial video capture support • The Verge

Jon Porter:

»

Apple’s iOS 17.2 update is now available for recent iPhones. The update includes Apple’s new Journal app, which is designed to get you writing about events in your life with prompts that draw from data on your phone as well as the option to record spatial videos.

Announced back at WWDC in June, the Journal app is a health- and wellness-focused feature that aims to get you reflecting on the small and big moments in your life. Although we found its interface a little basic when we tried it out in beta for ourselves, its superpower is its ability to recognize “Moments” based on your phone’s data, including locations you’ve visited, photos you’ve taken, or workouts you’ve done. It can then make writing suggestions based on these Moments.

There’s also support for recording spatial videos, a feature announced alongside the iPhone 15 in September. This works by recording footage simultaneously from the phone’s main and ultrawide cameras to create 3D video. You might struggle to find much to do with the footage for now, but it’s designed to be played back on the upcoming Vision Pro headset after its release next year.

«

I think one of these features will be used a lot more than the other. Hint: it’s not the Journal app (which might have been welcomed during the pandemic, but now?). I agree with Dan Moren at Six Colo(u)rs:

»

Though Apple may have great hopes for its new Journal app, I think it unlikely that it will transform the average person into an avid journal-keeper if they aren’t already. And, frankly, if they already are, I’m not sure Apple’s Journal app is going to sway those folks from their current journal of choice.

«

Spatial video, on the other hand, feels like one of those slow-burn giants. We’ve seen it in SF films of the future; now we just need to fulfil it.
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Women buy more cars, so why are the designs so macho? • WIRED

Nicole Gull McElroy:

»

Funnily enough, while the topic feels timely, electric cars [which offer a reset in design terms] have been around since the late 1800s. Ferdinand Porsche’s first car, the Egger-Lohner Model C.2 Phaeton, was electric, and by the turn of the 19th century, the US Department of Energy estimates, one-third of all cars were electric. They were quiet, easy to use, and perfect for local trips around town—which is why they were marketed to women. One model, the 1912 Waverly Electric, highlighted cleanliness and space (“delicate gowns not marred in this roomy electric!”).

As for what’s next in EVs today, [Volvo’s global head of design, Jeremy] Offer says the objective is to “explore a level of customization and modularity in a vehicle that can flex to your own needs: shopping, camping, taking the kids to school. It’s about making the vehicle adaptable whether you’re a man, woman or neither.” Data from the Organisation for Economic Coordination and Development shows that, worldwide, women still do most of the heavy lifting in unpaid household chores and responsibility. Men average a touch more than 2 hours per day, while women complete a little more than 4 hours daily.

Building design elements into cars that make sense for dogs and kids and groceries isn’t sexist, or buying into a stereotype—it’s a nod to the invisible labour women do every day, regardless of whether they work full-time, stay home, or something in between. And, incidentally, plenty of men do that labour, too, and might appreciate a small detail that makes dealing with a car seat or traveling with a golden retriever easier.

Scotty Reiss, founder of the site A Girls Guide To Cars, spends her time helping women navigate the car industry, exploring things like which cars have headrests best suited for ponytails (which lots of people wear regardless of gender), or the way fashion influences car design, even profiling designers at OEMs like GMC and Toyota. She says she’s seeing some inklings of Offer’s notion already, namely at Buick (which, incidentally, S&P Mobility said accounted for more than 55% of all new female vehicle registrations in 2022).

«

The Cybertruck, and various other “concept” EV designs, are presented as the counterpoint. One person suggests that Formula 1 cars are the epitome of “masculine” design, which seems wrong to me: they tend to be incredibly thin, like flying insects. It’s NASCAR cars which look beast-like.

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F-150 Lightning: Ford cuts 2024 production plans in half • CNBC

Michael Wayland:

»

Ford Motor will cut planned production of its all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup roughly in half next year, marking a major reversal after the automaker significantly increased plant capacity for the electric vehicle in 2023.

The new production plans call for average volume of around 1,600 F-150 Lightnings a week at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan, starting in January, according to a source familiar with the decision. The automaker most recently planned to produce roughly 3,200 of the vehicles on average per week.

“We’ll continue to match production with customer demand,” a Ford spokeswoman said Monday.

Ford executives have recently said the automaker will match production to demand, as the company cancels or postpones $12bn in upcoming EV investments.

…Sales of the F-150 Lightning have steadily increased in 2023, notching a monthly record of roughly 4,400 sold in November. The company has only sold 20,365 of the trucks this year through November, up 54% from a year earlier.

«

Meanwhile Ford’s F-150 petrol-fuelled pickup has been the best-selling truck for 46 years. In 2022, Ford sold more than 640,000. So the EV 2023 sales are about 3% of that total. There’s a long way to go.
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Your Smart TV knows what you’re watching; here’s how to stop it • The Markup

Mohamed Al Elew and Gabriel Hongsdusit:

»

If you bought a new smart TV during any of the holiday sales, there’s likely to be an uninvited guest watching along with you. The most popular smart TVs sold today use automatic content recognition (ACR), a kind of ad surveillance technology that collects data on everything you view and sends it to a proprietary database to identify what you’re watching and serve you highly targeted ads. The software is largely hidden from view, and it’s complicated to opt out. Many consumers aren’t aware of ACR, let alone that it’s active on their shiny new TVs. If that’s you, and you’d like to turn it off, we’re going to show you how.

First, a quick primer on the tech: ACR identifies what’s displayed on your television, including content served through a cable TV box, streaming service, or game console, by continuously grabbing screenshots and comparing them to a massive database of media and advertisements. Think of it as a Shazam-like service constantly running in the background while your TV is on.

These TVs can capture and identify 7,200 images per hour, or approximately two every second. The data is then used for content recommendations and ad targeting, which is a huge business; advertisers spent an estimated $18.6 billion on smart TV ads in 2022, according to market research firm eMarketer. 

For anyone who’d rather not have ACR looking over their shoulder while they watch, we’ve put together a guide to turning it off on three of the most popular smart TV software platforms in use last year. Depending on the platform, turning off ACR took us between 10 and 37 clicks.

«

Instructions provided for Roku (boxes), and for Samsung and LG TVs. No word on whether Amazon’s Fire Stick or Google’s Chromecast are doing the same. I’d think probably they are, but as they’re the conduit, no way to stop them.
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BOOM: Google loses antitrust case • BIG

Matt Stoller on the Google/Epic verdict:

»

So what happens now? In this case, the judge will come up with remedies next year. The order could be broad, and will likely loosen Google’s control over the mobile app ecosystem. Google has already announced that it will appeal, so the case isn’t over.

That said, Google is likely to be in trouble now, because it is facing multiple antitrust cases, and these kinds of decisions have a bandwagon effect. The precedent is set, in every case going forward the firm will now be seen as presumed guilty, since a jury found Google has violated antitrust laws. Judges are cautious, and are generally afraid of being the first to make a precedent-setting decision. Now they won’t have to. In fact, judges and juries will now have to find a reason to rule for Google. If, say, Judge Amit Mehta in D.C., facing a very similar fact-pattern, chooses to let Google off the hook, well, he’ll look pretty bad.

There are a few important takeaways. First, this one didn’t come from the government; it was a private case by a video game maker that sued Google over its terms for getting access to the Google Play app store for Android, decided not by a fancy judge with an Ivy League degree but by a jury of ordinary people in San Francisco. In other words, private litigation, the “ambulance-chasing” lawyers, are vital parts of our justice system.

Second, juries matter, even if they are riskier for everyone involved. It’s kind of like a mini poll, and the culture is ahead of the cautious legal profession. This quick decision is a sharp contrast with the six-month delay to an opinion in the search case that Judge Mehta sought in the D.C. trial.

Third, tying claims, which is a specific antitrust violation, are good law. Tying means forcing someone to buy an unrelated product in order to access the actual product they want to buy. The specific legal claim here was about how Google forced firms relying on its Google Play app store to also use its Google Play billing service, which charges an inflated price of 30% of the price of an app. Tying is pervasive throughout the economy, so you can expect more suits along these lines.

And finally, big tech is not above the law. This loss isn’t just the first antitrust failure for Google, it’s the first antitrust loss for any big tech firm.

«

Stoller is very big on antitrust and monopoly abuse (to the extent that I feel he sees it everywhere, even when its presence is difficult to prove). What he doesn’t mention is that Apple won against Epic in a similar (though, Google insisted, not legally identical) case, decided by a judge.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The COP28 summit on Monday offered a milquetoast text with no mention of phasing out fossil fuels. CC-licensed photo by Palácio do Planalto on Flickr.

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

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

Cop28: Australia, US and UK say they won’t sign agreement that would be ‘death certificate’ for small islands • The Guardian

Adam Morton:

»

A group of countries including Australia, the US, the UK, Canada and Japan have said they will “not be a co-signatory” to “death certificates” for small island states, and have demanded a stronger agreement at the Cop28 summit to deal with fossil fuels and address the climate crisis.

A statement delivered by the Australian climate change minister, Chris Bowen, on behalf of what’s known as the umbrella group of countries, came as tensions flared at the United Arab Emirates over the text of a draft deal proposed by the summit presidency.

Released early on Monday evening local time, the draft avoided highly contentious calls for a “phase-out” or “phase-down” of fossil fuels in an attempt to find consensus from nearly 200 countries that have been meeting in Dubai for nearly a fortnight.

Some observers welcomed elements of the draft, including the first mention in a Cop text of reducing fossil fuel production, but others were scathing, describing it as “grossly insufficient” and “incoherent”.

Cedric Schuster of Samoa, the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, said: “We will not sign our death certificate. We cannot sign on to text that does not have strong commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.”

Bowen referred to Schuster’s statement in his intervention in a later meeting between government representatives and the UAE summit president, Sultan Al Jaber. He was speaking on behalf of the umbrella group of countries, which also includes New Zealand, Norway, Israel, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

“My friend Cedric Schuster, the Samoan minister, said tonight of this draft that we will not sign our death certificates,” Bowen said. “That’s what’s at stake for many countries who are represented here tonight and many people who do not have a voice. We will not be a co-signatory to those death certificates.”

«

Israel v Hamas is awful: people dying unnecessarily, playing out over the course of weeks. The climate indifference has the same effect, but much, much more slowly, without obvious bombs or guns.
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Podcasts aren’t as doomed as they look. But some of the best ones are • Slate

Scott Nover:

»

By just about every metric, podcasts are still gaining popularity with listeners: 130 million Americans will have listened to a podcast each month of this year, according to Insider Intelligence, which expects that figure to jump to 150 million by 2027. Meanwhile, in the decade since podcasting’s Serial moment, casuals have become die-hards: In 2015, weekly podcast listeners spent about 4.5 hours listening to podcasts, according to Edison Research. Now that figure is north of 9 hours a week.

Melissa Kiesche, senior vice president of research at Edison, continues to see growth both in the share of Americans listening to podcasts and how much time they’re dedicating to podcasts. “Both monthly and weekly listenership reached their highest levels this year,” she says.

Ad revenue is growing too. In 2022, podcasts generated $1.8bn in ad revenue in the US, up 26% from the year prior, says the industry body Interactive Advertising Bureau. That’s drastically outpacing the 11% growth for the rest of the online ad sector. Furthermore, the IAB expects that revenue to double to about $4bn by 2025.

Advertisers have reduced spending this year amid rising prices, rising interest rates, and still-unrealized fears of an economic recession, but it seems to be more of a pullback from runaway COVID-era spending rather than a full stoppage.

Rachael King, the founder and CEO of Pod People, which makes branded podcasts for companies like Netflix and Intuit, says the sales pitch for podcasts is as strong as ever. “It’s the most desirable demographic in the world,” she says. Podcast listeners “are curious, intellectual, and more likely to take action” based on what they hear.

But perhaps there was too much hype, too many unrealistic expectations—and, dare we say, too many podcasts? Or at least too many podcasts that couldn’t turn a profit based on high talent or production costs?

«

Ad revenue might be growing, but the number of podcasts is probably growing faster, and Spotify isn’t pumping money in as it previously did. Result, less money on average.
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Mail Online looks set to adopt partial ‘freemium’ paywall in 2024 • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

Mail Online users could soon be asked to pay to access a small amount of content each day under a new paywall model as advertising revenues plunge across the digital news market.

Most of the up to 1,500 stories published daily on the Mail Online website would remain free to access but a “freemium” paywall model could ask people to pay to read around ten to 15 stories per day, Press Gazette understands.

The new model would only apply to Mail Online users in the UK and would likely begin to be implemented in January.

The plan is understood to be based on German tabloid Bild’s model. Bild began charging for access to premium content in 2013 and has now reached more than 675,000 subscribers.

It is also a similar model to the The Independent, which puts certain in-depth stories and analyses behind a paywall under the Independent Premium branding, while also in the UK GB News began charging users for “exclusive analysis and opinion” last month.

…Although the online ad market is growing, the share of revenue going to publishers has plunged this year as all the growth has instead gone to tech platforms.

«

This is a quietly significant development: the implication is that free-to-read ad-supported just doesn’t cut it, even for the most-read news site in the world. The phrase “difficult advertising market”, which also appears in the story, is typical publishers’ understatement. It means apocalyptically bad.
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Apple foldable is coming soon, new Samsung Display rumor says • BGR

José Adorno:

»

It’s been a few years since we first heard rumors about Apple’s foldable strategy. While Samsung, Motorola, and other brands already sell foldable devices, Cupertino decided to take the long route and wait until this technology matures.

This foldable Apple product could be an iPhone or an iPad/MacBook hybrid. But, so far, we only know that this release is at least a couple of years ahead of us, so nothing is concrete at the moment.

That said, while a foldable Apple product might not be nearing its release, it doesn’t mean Apple and its manufacturers aren’t doing everything they can to ship this product as soon as possible. In the latest report by the Korean publication The Elec, Samsung is reorganizing its teams to focus on the capabilities to respond to Apple’s foldable initiatives.

According to the publication, the South Korean manufacturer wants a new source of income. Despite the leadership with OLED panels, Samsung aims to secure Apple orders for future foldable products since both Samsung and LG are working on projects for Apple foldable products, including 20.25in panels.

Several DSCC, Bloomberg, and Omdia reports have corroborated this future device. They believe Apple is working on a hybrid foldable iPad/MacBook with a 20in display. The latter stated that this device could be released by 2026.

In 2022, DSCC Ross Young shared that suppliers were in talks with Apple to create a 20in foldable of some kind. The idea would be to bring together the usefulness of a notebook with a singular display like you might see on the iPad. Young even went so far as to say that the foldable MacBook Hybrid could serve as a true dual-use product.

«

This is not really “soon” except in the perspective of the heat death of the universe. Also, while I can just about believe Apple could make such a product, I don’t really know why it would. Plus, and this is the most important question, would it fold from top to bottom, or from side to side? Those create very different use cases.
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Beeper Mini is back • Beeper Blog

Beeper:

»

The security and privacy of Beeper Mini is unchanged. It is still local, end-to-end encrypted on your device, as we described in our post.

Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now sign in with an AppleID. Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently working on a fix for this.

We’ve made Beeper free to use. Things have been a bit chaotic, and we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this. As soon as things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on subscriptions again. If you want to keep supporting us, feel free to leave the subscription on 🙂.

Our Play Store ranking dropped precipitously on Friday. Leaving us a nice review there would help tremendously.

It’s been an extremely busy, tiring, exciting, and eventful week.

…What happened: on Friday, we started getting reports that Beeper Cloud and Beeper Mini users could not send or receive messages. We investigated the issue [“the issue” being that Apple had determined this was a form of hacking – Overspill Ed] and started working on a fix.

Within 24 hours, we fixed the issue for Beeper Cloud and published an update. Beeper Cloud users can now send and receive messages. It’s working exactly as it did before Friday.

(Note: Beeper Cloud’s new Oct 2023 iMessage bridge never used Mac relay servers and still does not today. It uses a similar method to Beeper Mini, but runs on a cloud server.)

At the same time, we took steps to deregister all phone numbers associated with Beeper Mini, and we sent push notifications to all users updating them on the situation. In hindsight, our timing was a mistake: we should have communicated to our users sooner. We’re extremely sorry for the inconvenience caused by the outage.

Today, less than three days later, we are publishing an update to fix Beeper Mini. Users can now sign in, send and receive messages. Beeper Mini is back.

Despite reaching out, we still have not heard anything directly from Apple.

«

So Beeper now works, if you use an Apple ID to sign in. That’s rather different from the previous system which did work on phone numbers and didn’t seem to need an Apple ID. Now we wait to see if Apple will swat this too. Macworld’s editor Michael Simon thinks it will.
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The weird world of celebrity training: how Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Madonna get in shape for their shows • The Guardian

Elle Hunt:

»

Being a pop star used to mean having a nice face and a good voice, and learning a few dance routines. That no longer cuts it at the top, as Taylor Swift reminded us last week, when she revealed how she had prepared for her Eras tour. “Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud,” she told Time magazine. “Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs. Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones.”

If you have seen Eras live, or watched it at the cinema, you will know why she had to put in the work. Part pop extravaganza, part endurance feat, it involves almost three hours of costume changes, vigorous dancing and sprints from one end of the stage to the other – all while belting out songs. As the colour rises in Swift’s face and the sweat gathers at her hairline, you start to feel tired yourself. Swift is not unique. Beyoncé’s film Renaissance also documents the physical labour required for a tour, while 65-year-old Madonna’s current Celebration tour, which is due to conclude next April after 78 shows, makes clear how long that commitment can last.

“We treat them as athletes: what stress is going to be put on the body?” says Dan Roberts. A personal trainer based in London, he is one of a handful of fitness professionals engaged in what he calls the “weird world of celebrity training”. Most often, it involves getting actors in shape for superhero roles (or shirtless scenes); some of his clients are on Broadway, on stage for two hours a night for six months at a time. But he also works with royalty and famous musicians. Nondisclosure agreements mean he can’t name names – but he can speak generally.

Sometimes, Roberts is flown out to support an artist mid-tour, but more often he liaises with other A-list trainers around the world to look after his regular clients. And he trains those who are passing through London. His first step is to assess the needs of the individual and their goals. “Someone like Beyoncé, for example, has got very energetic dance routines, whereas Liam Gallagher can just stand there.”

«

Trying to imagine what Liam Gallagher’s fitness routine would look like.
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Continued treatment with Tirzepatide for maintenance of weight reduction in adults with obesity: the SURMOUNT-4 randomized clinical trial • JAMA Network

Louis Aronne et al from multiple academic centres:

»

Key Points:
Question: Does once-weekly subcutaneous tirzepatide with diet and physical activity affect maintenance of body weight reduction in individuals with obesity or overweight?

Findings: After 36 weeks of open-label maximum tolerated dose of tirzepatide (10 or 15 mg), adults (n = 670) with obesity or overweight (without diabetes) experienced a mean weight reduction of 20.9%. From randomization (at week 36), those switched to placebo experienced a 14% weight regain and those continuing tirzepatide experienced an additional 5.5% weight reduction during the 52-week double-blind period.

Meaning: In participants with obesity/overweight, withdrawing tirzepatide led to substantial regain of lost weight, whereas continued treatment maintained and augmented initial weight reduction.

«

Further meaning: the pharma companies making GLP-1 agonists (semaglutide etc) are going to be able to persuade people to keep taking them for years and years.
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Apple, Google, and Comcast’s plans for L4S could fix internet lag • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

»

The L4S standard [which was only published in January] adds an indicator to packets, which says whether they experienced congestion on their journey from one device to another. If they sail right on through, there’s no problem, and nothing happens. But if they have to wait in a queue for more than a specified amount of time, they get marked as having experienced congestion. That way, the devices can start making adjustments immediately to keep the congestion from getting worse and to potentially eliminate it altogether. That keeps the data flowing as fast as it possibly can and gets rid of the disruptions and mitigations that can add latency with other systems.

In terms of reducing latency on the internet, L4S or something like it is “a pretty necessary thing,” according to Greg White, a technologist at research and development firm CableLabs who helped work on the standard. “This buffering delay typically has been hundreds of milliseconds to even thousands of milliseconds in some cases. Some of the earlier fixes to buffer bloat brought that down into the tens of milliseconds, but L4S brings that down to single-digit milliseconds.” 

That could obviously help make the everyday experience of using the internet nicer. “Web browsing is more limited by the roundtrip time than the capacity of the connection these days for most people. Beyond about six to 10 megabits per second, latency has a bigger role in determining how quickly a web page load feels.”

However, ultra-low latency could be vital for potential future use cases. We’ve touched on game streaming, which can turn into a mess if there’s too much latency, but imagine what would happen if you were trying to stream a VR game. In that case, too much lag may go beyond just making a game less fun to play and could even make you throw up.

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A good article which is also an excellent backgrounder on why your “fast” internet connection might feel snail-slow, and how large amounts of data really get sent.
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Google’s Gemini AI model looks remarkable, but it’s still behind OpenAI’s GPT-4 • Bloomberg Opinion

Parmy Olson:

»

Then there’s the video demo that technologists described as “jaw-dropping” on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

On first viewing, this is impressive stuff. The model’s ability to track a ball of paper from under a plastic cup, or to infer that a dot-to-dot picture was a crab before it is even drawn, show glimmers of the reasoning abilities that Google’s DeepMind AI lab have cultivated over the years. That’s missing from other AI models. But many of the other capabilities on display are not unique and can be replicated by ChatGPT Plus, as Wharton professor Ethan Mollick has demonstrated here and here.

Google also admits that the video is edited. “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity,” it states in its YouTube description. This means the time it took for each response was actually longer than in the video.

In reality, the demo also wasn’t carried out in real time or in voice. When asked about the video by Bloomberg Opinion, a Google spokesperson said it was made by “using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text,” and they pointed to a site showing how others could interact with Gemini with photos of their hands, or of drawings or other objects. In other words, the voice in the demo was reading out human-made prompts they’d made to Gemini, and showing them still images. That’s quite different from what Google seemed to be suggesting: that a person could have a smooth voice conversation with Gemini as it watched and responded in real time to the world around it.

The video also doesn’t specify that this demo is (probably) with Gemini Ultra, the model that’s not here yet. Fudging such details points to the broader marketing effort here: Google wants us remember that it’s got one of the largest teams of AI researchers in the world and access to more data than anyone else. It wants to remind us, as it did on Wednesday, how vast its deployment network is by bringing less-capable versions of Gemini to Chrome, Android and Pixel phones.

«

It is worth discussing this tendency of Google’s to overstate what its technologies can do right now. The first was probably Google Glass, where the 2012 intro concept video wildly overstated its capabilities. (Though consider how much the initial view is like Apple’s Vision Pro.) More recently there was the 2018 “Duplex assistant can book your haircut”, which wasn’t real then either. Now this. Is it a culture thing, Google?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, the top 10% of drivers use more fuel than the bottom 60%. CC-licensed photo by The Library of Congress on Flickr.

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

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

EU agrees ‘historic’ deal with world’s first laws to regulate AI • The Guardian

Lisa O’Carroll:

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The world’s first comprehensive laws to regulate artificial intelligence have been agreed in a landmark deal after a marathon 37-hour negotiation between the European Parliament and EU member states.

The agreement was described as “historic” by Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner responsible for a suite of laws in Europe that will also govern social media and search engines, covering giants such as X, TikTok and Google.

Breton said 100 people had been in a room for almost three days to seal the deal. He said it was “worth the few hours of sleep” to make the “historic” deal.

Carme Artigas, Spain’s secretary of state for AI, who facilitated the negotiations, said France and Germany supported the text, amid reports that tech companies in those countries were fighting for a lighter touch approach to foster innovation among small companies.

The agreement puts the EU ahead of the US, China and the UK in the race to regulate artificial intelligence and protect the public from risks that include potential threat to life that many fear the rapidly developing technology carries.

Officials provided few details on what exactly will make it into the eventual law, which would not take effect until 2025 at the earliest.

The political agreement between the European Parliament and EU member states on new laws to regulate AI was a hard-fought battle, with clashes over foundation models designed for general rather than specific purposes.

But there were also protracted negotiations over AI-driven surveillance, which could be used by the police, employers or retailers to film members of the public in real time and recognise emotional stress.

The European Parliament secured a ban on use of real-time surveillance and biometric technologies including emotional recognition but with three exceptions, according to Breton.

It would mean police would be able to use the invasive technologies only in the event of an unexpected threat of a terrorist attack, the need to search for victims and in the prosecution of serious crime.

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I’ll just emphasise that middle sentence: “few details on what exactly will make it into the eventual law”.
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Ex-commissioner for facial recognition tech joins Facewatch firm he approved • The Guardian

Mark Townsend:

»

The recently-departed watchdog in charge of monitoring facial recognition technology has joined the private firm he controversially approved, paving the way for the mass roll-out of biometric surveillance cameras in high streets across the country.

In a move critics have dubbed an “outrageous conflict of interest”, Professor Fraser Sampson, former biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, has joined Facewatch as a non-executive director.

Sampson left his watchdog role on 31 October, with Companies House records showing he was registered as a company director at Facewatch the following day, 1 November. Campaigners claim this might mean he was negotiating his Facewatch contract while in post, and have urged the advisory committee on business appointments to investigate if it may have “compromised his work in public office”. It is understood that the committee is currently considering the issue.

Facewatch uses biometric cameras to check faces against a watch list and, despite widespread concern over the technology, has received backing from the Home Office, and has already been introduced in hundreds of high-street shops and supermarkets.

Mark Johnson, advocacy manager at Big Brother Watch, said the hiring of Sampson painted a “murky picture.” He added: “It cannot be acceptable for those in taxpayer-paid oversight roles to negotiate contracts with the very companies they scrutinise while still in post.”

“There is no specific law regulating the use of facial recognition surveillance in the UK. Given that this Orwellian technology is already operating in a legal vacuum, we cannot have a revolving door between those tasked with scrutinising the use of facial recognition surveillance and those selling it. When the independence of public officials is compromised by private interests, it undermines public trust in our institutions.”

«

Astonishing. Sampson however says the government proposed to abolish his job and so he handed in his notice on August 1. Three months later is 1 November.
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Military briefing: the Israeli bombs raining on Gaza • FT

John Paul Rathbone:

»

“We need three things from the US: munitions, munitions, and munitions,” the Israeli prime minister told a group of local government officials, according to a recording obtained by the Israel Hayom newspaper.

“There are huge demonstrations in western capitals,” added Netanyahu, who is concerned political pressure overseas might threaten the US arms shipments. “We need to apply counter-pressure . . . There have been disagreements with the best of our friends.”

Israel has expended vast amounts of ammunition in its war against Hamas in Gaza. The modern western weaponry used, from satellite-guided “bunker busting” bombs to pinpoint-accurate laser-guided missiles, have eroded Hamas’s military capabilities and, according to the Israel Defense Forces, killed more than 5,000 of the group’s estimated 30,000 fighters.

However, the damage wrought by Israel’s attack — triggered by Hamas’s assault on October 7 when it killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages — has been catastrophic.

Citing estimates of damage to urban areas, military analysts say the destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war.

“Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne — some of the world’s heaviest-ever bombings are remembered by their place names,” said Robert Pape, a US military historian and author of Bombing to Win, a landmark survey of 20th century bombing campaigns. “Gaza will also go down as a place name denoting one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns.”

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The real research behind the wild rumors about OpenAI’s Q* project • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

»

OpenAI hasn’t published details on its supposed Q* breakthrough, but it has published two papers about its efforts to solve grade-school math problems. And a number of researchers outside of OpenAI—including at Google’s DeepMind—have been doing important work in this area.

I’m skeptical that Q*—whatever it is—is the crucial breakthrough that will lead to artificial general intelligence. I certainly don’t think it’s a threat to humanity. But it might be an important step toward an AI with general reasoning abilities.

In this piece, I’ll offer a guided tour of this important area of AI research and explain why step-by-step reasoning techniques designed for math problems could have much broader applications.

«

If you choose to read all of this (long) piece, you will understand the current problems with LLMs very well.
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52 things I learned in 2023 • Magnetic Notes on Medium

Tom Whitwell with his usual selection of fascinating discoveries:

»

25. The top 10% of US motorists use more petrol than the bottom 60%. [Robert N. Charette]

26. New research shows that placebos are effective in reducing feelings of guilt, but they work less well on shame. [Shayla Love, Dilan Sezer]

27. People in historically rice-farming areas are less happy and compare themselves socially more than people in wheat-farming areas. [Thomas Talhelm]

28. French Champagne is too cheap. [Daniel Langer]

«

Also unmissable: No.4 about payola guitars (Bruce Springsteen uses what used to be one) and No.13 (human heights over history; you won’t come close to guessing this one). Though they’re all fascinating.
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The Copia Institute tells the Copyright Office again that copyright law has no business obstructing AI training • Techdirt

Cathy Gellis:

»

trying to use copyright to obstruct development of the technology instead creates its own harms, especially when applied to the training aspect.

One of those harms, as we reiterated here, is that it impinges on the First Amendment right to read that human intelligence needs to have protected, and that right must inherently include the right to use technological tools to do that “reading,” or consumption in general of copyrighted works. After all, we need record players to play records – it would do no one any good if their right to listen to one stopped short of being able to use the tool needed to do it. We also pointed out that this First Amendment right does not diminish even if people consume a lot of media (we don’t, for instance, punish voracious readers for reading more than others) or at speed (copyright law does not give anyone the right to forbid listening to an LP at 45 rpm, or forbid watching a movie on fast forward). So if we were to let copyright law stand in the way of using software to quickly read a lot of material to it would represent a deviation from how copyright law has up to now operated, and one that would undermine the rights to consume works that we’ve so far been able to enjoy.

Which is why we also pointed out that using copyright to deter AI training distorted copyright law itself, which would be felt in other contexts where copyright law legitimately applies. And we highlighted a disturbing trend emerging in copyright law from other quarters as well, this idea that whether a use of a work is legitimate somehow depends on whether the copyright holder approves of it. Copyright law was not intended, or written, to give copyright owners an implicit veto over any or all uses of works – the power of a copyright is limited to what its exclusive rights allow control over and fair use doesn’t otherwise justify.

A variant of this emerging trend also getting undue oxygen is the idea that profiting from a use of a copyrighted work used for free is somehow inherently objectionable and therefore ripe for the copyright holder to veto. But, again, such would represent a significant change if copyright law could work that way. Copyright holders are not guaranteed every penny that could potentially result from the use of a copyrighted work, and it has been independently problematic when courts have found otherwise.

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I find this argument persuasive.
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Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science? • Nature

Philip Ball:

»

During the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020, testing kits for the viral infection were scant in some countries. So the idea of diagnosing infection with a medical technique that was already widespread — chest X-rays — sounded appealing. Although the human eye can’t reliably discern differences between infected and non-infected individuals, a team in India reported that artificial intelligence (AI) could do it, using machine learning to analyse a set of X-ray images1.

The paper — one of dozens of studies on the idea — has been cited more than 900 times. But the following September, computer scientists Sanchari Dhar and Lior Shamir at Kansas State University in Manhattan took a closer look2. They trained a machine-learning algorithm on the same images, but used only blank background sections that showed no body parts at all. Yet their AI could still pick out COVID-19 cases at well above chance level.

The problem seemed to be that there were consistent differences in the backgrounds of the medical images in the data set. An AI system could pick up on those artefacts to succeed in the diagnostic task, without learning any clinically relevant features — making it medically useless.

Shamir and Dhar found several other cases in which a reportedly successful image classification by AI — from cell types to face recognition — returned similar results from blank or meaningless parts of the images. The algorithms performed better than chance at recognizing faces without faces, and cells without cells. Some of these papers have been cited hundreds of times.

«

Classic cases of not realising what it is you’re training, but the potential for AI to make the content space explode means a real prospect of non-reproducibility.
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Apple cuts off Beeper Mini’s access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Was it too good to be true? Beeper, the startup that reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users, is experiencing an outage, the company reported via a post on X on Friday. And Apple is to blame, it seems. Users, including those of us at TechCrunch with access to the app, began seeing error messages when trying to send texts via the newly released Beeper Mini and messages are not going through.

The error message reads: “failed to lookup on server: lookup request timed out” spelled out in red letters.

In a response to a question on Reddit as to whether or not the app was broken, a Beeper team member had earlier replied, “Report a problem from the app, give us a chance to look into it.”

However, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky responded to TechCrunch’s inquiry about Beeper Mini’s status by pointing us to the X post acknowledging the outage, and providing more detail. Asked if possibly Apple found a way to cut off Beeper Mini’s ability to function, he replied, “Yes, all data indicates that.”

«

Apple confirmed this on Sunday, with a statement saying in part ““We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.”

This was inevitable: Beeper worked by using faked credentials, as Apple notes in the full statement. So it’s going to be blocked just as a(ny) hacker would be.

I still don’t get the desire to create cross-platform iMessage, though, beyond hackers’ fascination with doing something. Encrypted cross-platform messaging apps exist (Signal, WhatsApp). iMessage isn’t even the best messaging app out there. All of which makes Senator Elizabeth Warren’s intervention look even more foolish.
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Verizon gave phone data to armed stalker who posed as cop over email • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

The FBI investigated a man who allegedly posed as a police officer in emails and phone calls to trick Verizon to hand over phone data belonging to a specific person that the suspect met on the dating section of porn site xHamster, according to a newly unsealed court record. Despite the relatively unconvincing cover story concocted by the suspect, including the use of a clearly non-government ProtonMail email address, Verizon handed over the victim’s data to the alleged stalker, including their address and phone logs. The stalker then went on to threaten the victim and ended up driving to where he believed the victim lived while armed with a knife, according to the record.

The news is a massive failure by Verizon who did not verify that the data request was fraudulent, and the company potentially put someone’s safety at risk.

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I think “massive failure” is putting it mildly. “Culpable near-homicide” gets closer.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The subtleties of flavouring crisps, and choosing how to name the same flavours in different countries, are all part of the snack business. CC-licensed photo by Leonard J Matthews 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. Tasty? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

»

At CES in 2021, 5G was just about everywhere you looked. It was the future of mobile communications that would propel autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, and AR into reality. The low latency! The capacity! It’ll change everything, we were told. Verizon and AT&T wrote massive checks for new spectrum licenses, and T-Mobile swallowed another network whole because it was very important to make the 5G future happen as quickly as possible and win the race.

CES 2024 is just around the corner, and while telecom executives were eager to shout about 5G to the rafters just a few years ago, you’ll probably be lucky to hear so much as a whisper about it this time around. While it’s true that 5G has actually arrived, the fantastic use cases we heard about years ago haven’t materialized. Instead, we have happy Swifties streaming concert footage and a new way to get internet to your home router. These aren’t bad things! But deploying 5G at the breakneck speeds required to win an imaginary race resulted in one fewer major wireless carrier to choose from and lots of debt to repay. Now, network operators are looking high and low for every bit of profit they can drum up — including our wallets.

If there’s a poster child for the whole 5G situation in the US, it’s Verizon: the loudest and biggest spender in the room. The company committed $45.5 billion to new spectrum in 2021’s FCC license auction — almost twice as much as AT&T. And we don’t have to guess whether investors are asking questions about when they’ll see a return — they asked point blank in the company’s most recent earnings call. CEO Hans Vestberg fielded the question, balancing the phrases “having the right offers for our customers” and “generating the bottom line for ourselves,” while nodding to “price adjustments” that also “included new value” for customers. It was a show of verbal gymnastics that meant precisely nothing. 

«

This is very reminiscent of the 3G bidding wars in the UK in 2000, which raised £22.5bn for five licences – and then saw huge writedowns by the licence holders a few years later. But they then did recoup it once the phones arrived that could make use of 3G. But that took until about 2010 for substantial penetration and adoption.

On that basis, it might be some time in the 2030s before we see 5G really making a mark.
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USING AI to search for case law and make submissions: it makes cases up – it really does • Civil Litigation Brief

Gordon Exall:

»

If ever there was a judgment where the clue is in the name, it is Harber v Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (INCOME TAX – penalties for failure to notify liability to CGT – appellant relied on case law which could not be found on any legal website – whether cases generated by artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT) [2023] UKFTT 1007.

This is a case that exemplifies the danger of relying on “Artificial Intelligence” to make legal submissions. In this case the appellant cited cases that do not exist. “Having considered all the points set out above, we find as a fact that the cases in the Response are not genuine FTT judgments but have been generated by an AI system such as ChatGPT.”

The appellant appealed to the First Tier Tax Tribunal in relation to a penalty arising from capital gains tax.  The procedure involved her filing a Response. That Response set out a number of previous decisions that appeared to assist the appellant. However there was no citation and, upon close examination, it was clear that the cases did not in fact exist. The Tribunal concluded that this was because the Response had been generated by an AI system.

«

The linked judgment did, I confess, make me laugh out loud. This is the first paragraph:

»

Mrs Harber disposed of a property and failed to notify her liability to capital gains tax (“CGT”). HMRC issued her with a “failure to notify” penalty of £3,265.11. Mrs Harber appealed the penalty on the basis that she had a reasonable excuse, because of her mental health condition and/or because it was reasonable for her to be ignorant of the law.

«

“It was reasonable for her to be ignorant of the law”?? A core principle of the law is that “ignorance is no excuse.” Secondly, this is an appeal, which means some costs have already been racked up. And all over a demand for three thousand pounds from a property sale? This surely has cost Mrs Harber a lot more than that. Plus an embarrassing place in British legal history as the first known attempt to win a case via AI-generated case law.
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Early impressions of Google’s Gemini aren’t great • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

»

A “lite” version of Gemini, Gemini Pro, began rolling out to Bard yesterday, and it didn’t take long before users began voicing their frustrations with it on X (formerly Twitter).

The model fails to get basic facts right, like 2023 Oscar winners. Note that Gemini Pro claims incorrectly that Brendan Gleeson won Best Actor last year, not Brendan Fraser — the actual winner.

I tried asking the model the same question and, bizarrely, it gave a different wrong answer.

“Navalny,” not “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” won Best Documentary Feature last year; “All Quiet on the Western Front” won Best International Film; “Women Talking” won Best Adapted Screenplay; and “Pinocchio” won Best Animated Feature Film. That’s a lot of mistakes. [It also offers a link to “the official Oscars website” which is not the official Oscars website oscars.org.]

Science fiction author Charlie Stross found many more examples of confabulation in a recent blog post. (Among other mistruths, Gemini Pro said that Stross contributed to the Linux kernel; he never has.)

Translation doesn’t appear to be Gemini Pro’s strong suit, either. It struggles to give a six-letter word in French [it suggested “amour” to one Twitter user]. When I ran the same prompt through Bard (“Can you give me a 6-letters word in French?”), Gemini Pro responded with a seven-letter word instead of a five-letter one — which gives some credence to the reports about Gemini’s poor multilingual performance.

«

This is about as unimpressive as you can get. As with anything, fast and unreliable is not preferable over slow and reliable. Plus: Google’s video showing it off was heavily edited (which isn’t that surprising, to be honest).
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‘How do you reduce a national dish to a powder?’: the weird, secretive world of crisp flavours • The Guardian

Amelia Tait:

»

Reuben and Peggy’s jobs are not top secret in the way top secret jobs usually are. They don’t have guns, for example – and the grey conference table they sit at is much the same as you’d find in any office in the UK. They even have LinkedIn profiles that tell you their job titles. But this is where things get odd: search the name of the company they work for – a name I have agreed not to print – and you’ll find little information about the work Reuben and Peggy do. You could click through every page on their company’s website and leave with no idea that it creates the most beloved crisp flavours in the world.

Reuben and Peggy are not their real names. Reuben is a snacks development manager and Peggy is a marketer, and they work for a “seasoning house”, a company that manufactures flavourings for crisps.

I meet the pair on Zoom, hoping they can answer a question that has consumed me for years. In January 2019, I was visiting Thailand when I came across a pink packet of Walkers with layered pasta, tomato sauce and cheese pictured on the front. Lasagne flavour, the pack said. You can’t get lasagne Walkers – or Lay’s, as they are known in most of the world – in Italy. Relatively speaking, Italians have a small selection of Lay’s – paprika, bacon, barbecue, salted and Ricetta Campagnola, a “country recipe” flavour featuring tomato, paprika, parsley and onion. I’ve sampled Hawaii-style Poké Bowl crisps in Hungary and chocolate-coated potato snacks in Finland; I have turned away from Sweet Mayo Cheese Pringles in South Korea. So why can you get lasagne flavour Lay’s in Thailand but not in Italy, home of the dish? Who figures out which country gets which crisps?

«

This is wonderful. It was referred to by Stuart Maconie and Mark Radcliffe, who do the RadMac show on BBC 6 Music on weekend mornings, because they do the amazing “Crisps on the radio” segment in which a listener sends in a packet of crisps – the weirder and more obscure the flavour the better – and they have to try to work out what it is from a live taste test. It’s as strange and wonderful as it sounds.
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Podcasters took up her sister’s murder investigation. Then they turned on her • The New York Times

Sarah Viren:

»

[Liz] Flatt was at a crossroads in what she had taken to calling her journey, a path embarked on after a prayer-born decision five years earlier to try and find who killed her sister, Deborah Sue Williamson, or Debbie, in 1975. It was now 2021. Flatt was middle-aged and coming out of one of the darkest moments of her life. Her mother had died, quite suddenly, two years earlier, and the grief from her death almost destroyed Flatt. Her father was gone, too — dead from a heart attack after years of fighting for the police to reinvestigate Debbie’s killing — and her older brother, Ricky, who was once a suspect in the murder, took his own life five years before that.

She had come to Austin [in Texas] for a conference, CrimeCon, which formed around the same time that Flatt began her quest, at a moment now seen as an inflection point in the long history of true crime, a genre as old as storytelling but one that adapts quickly to new technologies, from the printing press to social media. The gathering was smaller in 2021 because of the pandemic, but Nancy Grace, queen of true crime’s TV era, still showed up, as did Dr. Phil. On “Podcast Row,” Flatt wandered among booths for “Cults, Crimes & Cabernet” and “Murderish,” for “True Crime Garage” and “Die-alogue,” less a fan of the genre, which she never liked that much, than a scout on a search.

She ran into a podcaster who covered Debbie’s story a couple of years before, a man who goes by the name Vincent Strange, and she commiserated with a woman whose mother’s murder also remained unsolved. Then, at another booth, Flatt met a woman who would later put her in touch with two investigators who presented at the conference that year: George Jared and Jennifer Bucholtz. They were podcasters, but Jared was also a journalist and Bucholtz an adjunct professor of forensics and criminal justice at the for-profit American Military University. Their presentation was on another cold case, the murder of Rebekah Gould in 2004, whose killer they claimed to have helped find using a technique that has quickly become a signature of the changing landscape of true crime: crowdsourcing.

«

Crowdsourcing, however, means Facebook, and a group of people trying to “solve” a crime on Facebook means you have a tiger by the tail.
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COP28 so far: a cheat sheet • Heatmap News

Jessica Hullinger:

»

• The loss and damage fund: On day one of the conference, world leaders reached a landmark deal to help vulnerable nations deal with the costly effects of climate change. The early accomplishment set an optimistic tone for the summit — although The Guardian notes that wealthy countries have so far pledged $700m to the fund, “far short of what is needed.” In total, countries have announced $57bn of various funding pledges at the conference.

• Methane cuts: About 50 oil and gas companies pledged to slash their methane leaks by 2030. Critics cry greenwashing, but as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo points out, recent technological advances in methane monitoring – including satellites, drones, and handheld detectors – could help in the international effort to hold these companies accountable. A planned $40m infusion from billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg will bolster the cause, too.

• A renewables pledge: At least 120 countries backed a pledge to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030. That goal made it into an early draft of the global stocktake report, the summit’s final deliverable, but that’s no guarantee it will be formally adopted.

• A nuclear energy declaration: More than 20 countries including the US, Canada, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates, pledged to triple global nuclear energy capacity by 2050.

• Growing support for a fossil phase-out: The number of countries pledging to voluntarily end oil and gas extraction and exploration grew to 24 when Spain, Kenya, and Samoa joined the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance

• A global cooling pledge: More than 60 countries pledged to reduce their cooling-related emissions by at least 68% by 2050.

«

That last one puzzled me, so I looked it up: it’s about emissions caused by air conditioning and similar. Heatmap News is an interesting new media site covering climate and related issues. Worth a look.
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iPad Air 12.9-inch and MacBook Air with M3 expected in March 2024 • Apple Insider

Mike Wuerthele:

»

The end of the winter may herald hardware refreshes for Apple, with a new report from the industry’s most prolific leaker predicting the long-rumoured larger iPad Air and refreshed MacBook Air models will hit store shelves by the end of March 2024.

To combat sales doldrums for Mac and iPad, Apple is rumored to be prepping many new releases before the first calendar quarter of 2024 ends. On tap are allegedly a larger iPad Air, new iPad Pros with OLED screens, and a New MacBook Air model, presumably with M3 processor.

«

The OLED iPad Pros should do well – deeper blacks and wider colours is attractive. Apparently there are new keyboards for the iPads coming too.

I linked to this rather than Mark Gurman’s original report at Bloomberg because 1) this version avoids the strangulated “people familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified” formulation for “my sources in the supply chain” 2) it also avoids the struggling construction that Apple’s doing this “to combat [a] sales slump”. Nope, it’s just doing this because it refreshes products. Sales go up and down, and – iPhones apart – it’s unusual to make a big difference.
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23andMe is updating its TOS to force binding arbitration with a limited opt-out window • Stackdiary

Alex Ivanovs:

»

23andMe, the personal genomics and biotechnology company, has been trying to contain a security breach that was first disclosed on October 6th. On October 19th, 23andMe disclosed another security breach by the same hacker who had initially claimed responsibility. The hacker said he had access to more than 4 million genetic profile records this time. And on December 4th, 23andMe confirmed that the total scope of the breach was 6.9 million users in total.

The fallout of this disclosure, which started in October, was swift. By October 14th, several individuals had already filed lawsuits against 23andMe for negligence, as Stack Diary reported. Likewise, the general consensus of 23andMe users has been that the company handled the situation very poorly.

To add insult to injury, Stack Diary can reveal that 23andMe is now rolling out an update to its Terms of Service. This change will force its users into binding arbitration, which is a means to resolve disputes (such as a cybersecurity breach leaking your DNA data) outside of court.

In this process, both parties in a disagreement present their cases to an arbitrator, who is a neutral third party. The arbitrator listens to both sides, reviews the evidence, and decides. The key aspect of binding arbitration is that the arbitrator’s decision is final and legally enforceable, meaning both parties must accept it and cannot appeal to a regular court.

«

Users get 30 days to opt out of these terms which Stack Diary says “significantly reduce their rights”, adding

»

The email doesn’t mention that you must email the “arbitrationoptout@23andme.com” address to opt out of forced arbitration, as outlined in the updated Terms of Service

«

I’d call that fundamentally sneaky, but the news is going to get around pretty quickly.
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‘Signs of life’: Sycamore Gap tree will live on, experts say • NPR

Bill Chappell:

»

The tree occupied a magical spot in the landscape of Northumberland, England, and in the hearts of people who visited it. So the news that efforts to propagate the ancient tree will likely succeed is being welcomed now, after the tree was felled in September.

“[We] are encouraged by positive signs of life, and are hopeful that over 30% of the mature seeds and half of the cuttings (scions) will be viable,” said Andy Jasper, the National Trust’s director of gardens and parklands, in a statement sent to NPR.

“Over the next year, we’ll be doing all we can to nurture the seeds and cuttings, in the hope that some will grow into strong, sturdy saplings,” Jasper said, “providing a new future for this much-loved tree.”

The sycamore’s trunk might also regrow, Jasper said, but it could be several years before it’s known whether that will bear out.

…A 16-year-old boy was arrested shortly after the tree was cut down, in what police said was an act of deliberate vandalism. But Northumbria Police recently said the teen “will now face no further action by police.” Instead, their focus is on three men — two in their 30s and one in his 60s — who were arrested in the weeks since the incident.

Police haven’t divulged many details about the three remaining suspects, but media reports have suggested at least one of them is a former lumberjack who was in possession of a large chainsaw.

«

Pah, just circumstantial. Did you take the tree’s DNA, copper? Did ya? Oh… really, you did?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Golf balls will be altered so they don’t fly as far, under rules being introduced from 2028, as pros drive them further and further. CC-licensed photo by cretinbob 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. Clubbing together. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google just launched Gemini, its long-awaited answer to ChatGPT • WIRED

Will Knight:

»

Gemini, a new type of AI model that can work with text, images, and video, could be the most important algorithm in Google’s history after PageRank, which vaulted the search engine into the public psyche and created a corporate giant.

An initial version of Gemini starts to roll out from Wednesday inside Google’s chatbot Bard for the English language setting. It will be available in more than 170 countries and territories. Google says Gemini will be made available to developers through Google Cloud’s API from December 13. A more compact version of the model will from today power suggested messaging replies from the keyboard of Pixel 8 smartphones. Gemini will be introduced into other Google products including generative search, ads, and Chrome in “coming months,” the company says. The most powerful Gemini version of all will debut in 2024, pending “extensive trust and safety checks,” Google says.

“It’s a big moment for us,” Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, told WIRED ahead of today’s announcement. “We’re really excited by its performance, and we’re also excited to see what people are going to do building on top of that.”

Gemini is described by Google as “natively multimodal,” because it was trained on images, video, and audio rather than just text, as the large language models at the heart of the recent generative AI boom are. “It’s our largest and most capable model; it’s also our most general,” Eli Collins, vice president of product for Google DeepMind, said at a press briefing announcing Gemini.

Google says there are three versions of Gemini: Ultra, the largest and most capable; Nano, which is significantly smaller and more efficient; and Pro, of medium size and middling capabilities.

From today, Google’s Bard, a chatbot similar to ChatGPT, will be powered by Gemini Pro, a change the company says will make it capable of more advanced reasoning and planning.

«

You can use it in the Bard Chatbot right now if you want. The little video that went with it is… entertaining, but I still want something that will organise calendars, reply sensibly to emails for me, point to odd things happening which shouldn’t be in my electronic life. (But would you trust a chatbot with all of your life? There’s a Black Mirror episode waiting to be written.)
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Animate Anyone • Institute for Intelligent Computing, Alibaba Group

Li Hu and others:

»

In this paper, we leverage the power of diffusion models and propose a novel framework tailored for character animation. To preserve consistency of intricate appearance features from reference image, we design ReferenceNet to merge detail features via spatial attention. To ensure controllability and continuity, we introduce an efficient pose guider to direct character’s movements and employ an effective temporal modeling approach to ensure smooth inter-frame transitions between video frames.

By expanding the training data, our approach can animate arbitrary characters, yielding superior results in character animation compared to other image-to-video methods. Furthermore, we evaluate our method on benchmarks for fashion video and human dance synthesis, achieving state-of-the-art results.

«

You have to see the video clips, really, but this is the sort of thing that actors are concerned about: their images being used to create moving pictures, made to be doing anything.
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Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications, US senator reveals • Reuters

Raphael Satter:

»

Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps’ push notifications, a US senator warned on Wednesday.

In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet’s Google and Apple. Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.

Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible “dings” or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple’s servers.

That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn puts them “in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps,” Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to “repeal or modify any policies” that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.

In a statement, Apple said that Wyden’s letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications. “In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information,” the company said in a statement. “Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.”

Google said that it shared Wyden’s “commitment to keeping users informed about these requests.”

«

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Running Signal will soon cost $50 million a year • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»

Signal was originally founded with money from the US government-funded Open Technology Fund, but the service has since turned to donations to keep afloat. When the Signal Foundation was created in 2018 and WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton left Facebook to become its president, he donated $50m. But with Signal’s growing user base and staff, that donation wouldn’t cover much more than a year’s current budget for the company. Other major donors continue to cover the foundation’s costs, Whittaker says—Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, for instance, has pledged $1m a year, and others Whittaker declines to name have given similarly large contributions.

But Signal hopes to increasingly rely on donations of as little as $3 that can be made through the app itself. Monthly donations of $5 or more are rewarded with a badge for the user’s account. Those small donations, Signal says, now account for 25% of its operating costs, up from 18% last year, the first full year after Signal enabled in-app contributions. But for Signal to continue to exist and grow without depending on a few wealthy individuals, Whittaker says small user donations will need to ramp up significantly.

With a nearly $50m annual budget, can Signal actually survive on those donations? “We have to,” says Whittaker. “Signal needs to find a way to survive in perpetuity because it is the tool that we have to ensure meaningfully private communications.”

Whittaker says that charging users has never been an option—Signal would never have grown its network to a degree that could compete with iMessage or WhatsApp if it hadn’t been free all along. Nor can Signal adopt a venture capital-funded business model that would leave the service vulnerable to investors or shareholders demanding a profitable exit. Exhibit one: Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and his decisions that triggered an exodus of its users.

«

What, another article about Signal and its funding? Yes, because it’s been pointed out to me (thanks, Paul C) that yesterday’s article was written by an author who could be thought of as unreliable in claiming that the CIA has suddenly cut funding. As this shows, that happened quite a while back. Anyway, if you use it, donate.
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iMessage will reportedly dodge EU regulations, won’t have to open up • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

The EU is deciding what should and shouldn’t be under the new rules set out by the “Digital Markets Act.” The idea is that Big Tech “gatekeepers” will be subject to certain interoperability, fairness, and privacy rules. So far the wide-ranging rules have targeted 22 different services, including app stores on iOS and Android, browsers like Chrome and Safari, the Android, iOS, and Windows OSes, ad platforms from Google, Amazon, and Meta, video sites YouTube and TikTok, and instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Google recently rolled out a campaign to implore the EU to qualify iMessage for regulation, as Android’s iMessage incompatibility is a big deal in the US. iMessage hasn’t made the list, though, and that’s despite meeting the popularity metrics of 45 million monthly active EU users. In the EU and most other parts of the world, the dominant messaging platform is WhatsApp, and with the Digital Market Act’s focus on business usage, not general consumers, iMessage will just squeak by. Right now the EU is “investigating” a handful of borderline additions to the Digital Markets Act, with a deadline in February 2024.

Qualifying for the law would have forced iMessage to allow interoperability with other services, so theoretically, you’d be allowed to log in to iMessage from WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and whatever else.

«

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The inside story of Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI • The New Yorker

Charles Duhigg was embedded in OpenAI when Everything Happened:

»

Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.”

Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the paper might be perceived). Altman began approaching other board members, individually, about replacing her. When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them as supporting Toner’s removal. “He’d play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought,” the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me. “Things like that had been happening for years.” (A person familiar with Altman’s perspective [it’s Altman – Overspill Ed] said that he acknowledges having been “ham-fisted in the way he tried to get a board member removed,” but that he hadn’t attempted to manipulate the board.)

… when four members of the board—Toner, D’Angelo, Sutskever, and Tasha McCauley—began discussing his removal, they were determined to guarantee that he would be caught by surprise. “It was clear that, as soon as Sam knew, he’d do anything he could to undermine the board,” the person familiar with those discussions said.

The unhappy board members felt that OpenAI’s mission required them to be vigilant about AI becoming too dangerous, and they believed that they couldn’t carry out this duty with Altman in place. “The mission is multifaceted, to make sure AI benefits all of humanity, but no one can do that if they can’t hold the C.E.O. accountable,” another person aware of the board’s thinking said. Altman saw things differently. The person familiar with his perspective said that he and the board had engaged in “very normal and healthy boardroom debate,” but that some board members were unversed in business norms and daunted by their responsibilities. This person noted, “Every step we get closer to AGI [artificial general intelligence], everybody takes on, like, ten insanity points.”

«

So that seems to be the story: basically the board didn’t like Altman or his attitude about AGI. Nothing much more complicated than that.
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Is this the end of ‘Intel Inside’? • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»

The threats to Intel are so numerous that it’s worth summing them up: The Mac and Google’s Chromebooks are already eating the market share of Windows-based, Intel-powered devices. As for Windows-based devices, all signs point to their increasingly being based on non-Intel processors. Finally, Windows is likely to run on the cloud in the future, where it will also run on non-Intel chips.

Apple has moved almost entirely away from Intel’s chips, which it used for over a decade for all of its desktop and notebook computers. At the same time, its overall market share for desktops and notebooks has climbed from around 12% of devices in the US in 2013 to nearly one in three today, according to Statcounter.

These days, it’s not just Apple moving away from Intel’s chips. Microsoft is accelerating its yearslong effort to make Windows run on ARM-based processors, so that the entire PC ecosystem isn’t doomed by Intel’s failure to keep up with Apple and TSMC. Google’s Chrome OS, which works with either Intel or ARM-based chips, is also an emerging threat to Microsoft.

This means the threat to Intel comes from a whole ecosystem of companies with deep pockets and sizable profit margins, each trying to take their piece of the company’s market share. In many ways, it really is Intel versus the world—and “the world” includes nearly every tech giant you can name. 

It wasn’t always this way. For decades, Intel enjoyed PC market dominance with its ride-or-die partner, Microsoft, through their “Wintel” duopoly.

It’s ironic, then, that Microsoft is one of the companies leading the charge away from Intel’s chips.

«

That Statcounter figure seems quite optimistic; the caveat is that it’s only the US, and it’s measured via browsers (so that won’t include PCs used just on intranets without external connections). Intel, though, is in all sorts of trouble.
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Maybe we already have runaway machines • The New Yorker

Gideon Lewis-Kraust:

»

One of the things that make the machine of the capitalist state work is that some of its powers have been devolved upon other artificial agents—corporations. Where [Cambridge professor David] Runciman compares the state to a general AI, one that exists to serve a variety of functions, corporations have been granted a limited range of autonomy in the form of what might be compared to a narrow AI, one that exists to fulfill particular purposes that remain beyond the remit or the interests of the sovereign body.

Corporations can thus be set up in free pursuit of a variety of idiosyncratic human enterprises, but they, too, are robotic insofar as they transcend the constraints and the priorities of their human members. The failure mode of governments is to become “exploitative and corrupt,” Runciman notes. The failure mode of corporations, as extensions of an independent civil society, is that “their independence undoes social stability by allowing those making the money to make their own rules.”

There is only a “narrow corridor”—a term Runciman borrows from the economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson—in which the artificial agents balance each other out, and citizens get to enjoy the sense of control that emerges from an atmosphere of freedom and security. The ideal scenario is, in other words, a kludgy equilibrium.

«

This is a review of Runciman’s book, in which he points out that states and corporations have in effect been uncontrolled AIs of a sort for quite some time already; and so the concerns about the new machine-based AIs have already been rehearsed, just in a different context. (And how well, exactly, have we managed them?)
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New golf ball rules: R&A and USGA opt to limit distance ball will travel in air • BBC Sport

Iain Carter:

»

Modern premium golf balls (which cost around £6 each) when struck with the latest large-headed drivers have never flown as far as they do today.

The PGA Tour’s biggest hitter, Rory McIlroy, is among several players whose drives average more than 320 yards, with 98 pros beating the circuit’s average of 299.9 yards last season.

In 2002 only one player, John Daly (306 yards), beat the 300 yard barrier. This year the Masters was forced to lengthen Augusta’s famous par-five 13th hole from 510 to 545 yards to make sure it remains an appropriate challenge.

The new measures come into force in January 2028 for the elite game, with a phased introduction for recreational golfers in 2030.

Golf balls must conform to the rules and pass strict testing protocols which determine their ‘Overall Distance Standard’. The playing characteristics of a ball can be altered through its composition and/or dimple patterns which in turn can affect spin rates that could limit the distance it flies.

Under current regulations, a ball struck by a robotic club swung in laboratory conditions at 120mph (193kph) is only allowed to travel 317 yards (289.9m) (with three yards/1m tolerance). The new rules will maintain the same distance outcome, but for a club swung at the increased rate of 125mph, which is the top end of the speed generated by pros.

“We feel very strongly that we need to act and update the rules for the modern game,” Slumbers said. “It is 20 years since we last updated the golf ball and a lot has changed in sport, and in golf, in that time.”

The St Andrews-based boss added: “We feel that [a reduction of] 15 yards for the longest hitters is fair and will have a meaningful impact.

“But it is very important to understand that for the average recreational golfer we will see an impact of less than five yards.”

«

And what’s going to happen? Top golf pros will figure out how to swing their club faster – perhaps 140mph. Though 160 mph could be the top speed humanly possible. (But if you make the club longer…) I do like these tales of equipment being reined in to try to keep sports within their stadia.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How old was the world’s oldest dog? And how hard has Guinness World Records tried to confirm it? CC-licensed photo by Daniel Spils 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. Following a lead. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Signal facing collapse after CIA cuts funding • Kit’s Newsletter

Kit Klarenberg:

»

On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple – the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part due to the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.

Never acknowledged in any serious way by the mainstream media, Signal’s origins as a US government asset are a matter of extensive public record, even if the scope and scale of the funding provided has until now been secret. The app, brainchild of shadowy tech guru ‘Moxie Marlinspike’ (real name Matthew Rosenfeld), was launched in 2013 by his now-defunct Open Whisper Systems (OWS). The company never published financial statements or disclosed the identities of its funders at any point during its operation.

Sums involved in developing, launching and running a messaging app used by countless people globally were nonetheless surely significant. The newly-published financial records indicate Signal’s operating costs for 2023 alone are $40m, and projected to rise to $50m by 2025. Rosenfeld boasted in 2018 that OWS “never [took] VC funding or sought investment” at any point, although mysteriously failed to mention millions were provided by Open Technology Fund (OTF).

«

This is not good news. But it’s also puzzling: what has changed that has led the US to stop funding Signal? Klarenberg doesn’t know. And nor do we.
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Linda Yaccarino, Elon Musk and X: behind the mess, ad exodus • The Hollywood Reporter

Kim Masters:

»

By now, Yaccarino has become one of the best-known CEOs in America, if not for the most desirable reasons. Amid all the noise and controversy, prominent voting-rights attorney Marc Elias posted: “I had never heard of Linda Yaccarino before her joining X, but was she this ridiculous in her last job?”

According to many former associates at NBCU, the answer is a qualified no. Though several describe her as a difficult and volatile boss or colleague, they say she was an extremely hardworking and capable ad-sales executive. Advertisers — who she was, of course, always courting — also praise her. In mid-November, after Forbes reported that marketing leaders were urging Yaccarino to resign, Axios quoted Lou Paskalis, founder and CEO of marketing consultancy AJL Advisory, saying that “the advertising community is now working to save the reputation of a beloved member of our industry who does not share Elon Musk’s views.” 

In fact, it’s unclear what Yaccarino thinks of Musk’s views; after his Nov. 15 tweet endorsing an antisemitic trope as “the actual truth,” she touted the site’s “efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination.” (Her views on Donald Trump are much clearer. Associates say she was an enthusiastic supporter. She was appointed to the President’s Council on Sport, Fitness and Nutrition during his administration.)

Based on conversations with multiple sources who worked with or for Yaccarino at NBCU, the word “beloved” is not one that many would use to describe the way she was seen internally. “She was good at ad sales but wrecked the culture,” says a former insider. “She was not collegial. She was a scorched-earth manager.”

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This is not, it is safe to say, a hagiography.
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Seven new features to express yourself on Google Messages • Google Blog

Sanaz Ahari, VP and GM of Android and Business Communications at Google:

»

Today marks a new milestone that we are incredibly proud of: there are now more than one billion monthly active users with RCS enabled in Google Messages. We are grateful to our partners and our users that have advocated for RCS over the years — it’s been a lot of work to get here, and we want to thank you.

Beyond Google Messages, there are other messaging clients that use RCS and we are pleased that Apple also took their first step two weeks ago in announcing that they’re embracing RCS.

«

One billion, but monthly users – so someone who uses that once in a month, just a single time, counts. And it’s not a huge proportion of all the Android users. Getting RCS onto iOS will certainly expand that number significantly… in the US. I suspect that in the rest of the world, people use WhatsApp and Signal and so on, and don’t get hung up about blue and green bubbles. (Or they just use WhatsApp or Signal from the off.)
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A new kind of solar cell is coming: is it the future of green energy? • Nature

Mark Peplow:

»

A few niche perovskite-based PV products are already on the market, but announcements this year signal that many more are set to join them. Case says that end users should get their hands on solar panels made from Oxford PV’s cells around the middle of next year, for example. In May, a large silicon PV manufacturer, Hanwha Qcells, headquartered in Seoul, said it plans to invest US$100m in a pilot production line that could be operational by the end of 2024.

Silicon is the workhorse material inside 95% of solar panels. Rather than replace it, Oxford PV, Qcells and others are piggybacking on it — layering perovskite on silicon to create so-called tandem cells. Because each material absorbs energy from different wavelengths of sunlight, tandems could potentially deliver at least 20% more power than a silicon cell alone; some scientists project much greater gains.

Perovskite supporters say that this extra electricity could more than offset the additional costs of tandem cells, particularly in crowded urban areas or industrial sites where space is at a premium. “Our biggest initial demand is from utilities, because they simply don’t have enough accessible land,” says Case.

«

Back in August 2020 I linked to a Guardian article about perovskites which said they’d be in production by 2021. Oh well, a few years here and there.. though the problem is degradation, which might delay things by another couple of years. Again.
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Your 2023 WebMD Wrapped • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Like Spotify Wrapped, but for your hypochondria. McSweeney’s is always a great read.
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Streaming apps are trying to bundle their way out of customer disenchantment • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

A Netflix-Max bundle through Verizon and a potential bundle with Apple TV+ and Paramount+ follow a trend that sees streaming apps partnering with other apps (including rivals) and other types of companies with subscription-based revenue to ultimately offer TV streaming at a lower monthly price.

Similarly to Verizon, T-Mobile offers bundles for its mobile services with Netflix and Apple TV+. You can get Disney+ with Hulu and ESPN, and Disney, which will soon own all of Hulu, is launching a unified Disney+ and Hulu app. HBO’s Max and Discovery+ merged into Max. Paramount+ offers Showtime content, and Showtime’s Anytime app (for people subscribed to Showtime via a TV provider) is shutting down on December 14. Other streaming-related bundle deals currently being pushed include Paramount+ with Walmart+ and Peacock with Instacart+ or Xfinity.

Striking a deal between multiple conglomerates is complex, though. Companies see less revenue per user when adding customers through promotions and bundles compared to direct sales, WSJ reported in October 2022. Involved companies need to agree on how to divide monthly subscription fees, customer data, and advertising sales. As a result, “such talks in the industry have progressed slowly,” The Washington Post reported at the time.

But over a year after WSJ’s report, streaming bundles are happening “faster than we thought” and are “here to stay,” Erin McPherson, senior vice president and chief content officer at Verizon Communications, said, according to WSJ’s report Friday. Verizon’s CEO, Hans Vestberg, added at a UBS conference today that creating new types of bundles is a company priority, as per The Hollywood Reporter.

«

So basically, there were terrestrial channels, then cable bundled lots together, then streaming unbundled them, and now streaming is bundling them back together again. Place your bets on when the cycle turns around, and what prompts the next unbundling.
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Thieves rob DC Uber Eats driver, reject Android phone for not being iPhone • KATV Washington

Carl Willis:

»

After working into the early morning hours, a woman who asked not to be identified said her husband insisted he meet her outside of their apartment in Northwest [Washington] D.C. and go park the car.

“As soon as he parked the car two masked gentlemen came up to him, armed,” she said. “They robbed him, took everything he had in his pockets, took the keys to my truck and got in and pulled off.”

She said one of them approached on foot in the 2400 block of 14th Street, NW. The other was in a black BMW, both of them armed with guns. She said the robbers were bold taking her husband’s phone, but then giving it back because it wasn’t to their liking. “They basically looked at that phone and was like ‘Oh, that’s an Android? We don’t want this. I thought it was an iPhone,'” she said.

The bizarre encounter lasted only seconds, but she said the impact turned her life upside-down.

“That [truck] was my income,” she said. “That was the way I made money. I did Uber Eats and Instacart so, that was our livelihood.”

«

The opening paragraph is a bit confusing. I interpret what happened as the following: the husband arrives home, and parks his car. The two thieves confront him: they have had their eyes on the truck, so they tell him to call his wife (because he doesn’t have its key) and get her to come outside; she does. Et voila.

And the Android phone? Insufficient resale value.
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Misinformation researcher Joan Donovan accuses Harvard of bowing to Facebook • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

»

A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.

Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500m pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.

As research director of Harvard Kennedy School projects delving into mis- and disinformation on social media platforms, Donovan had raised millions in grants, testified before Congress and been a frequent commentator on television, often faulting internet companies for profiting from the spread of divisive falsehoods.
Last year, the school’s dean told her that he was winding down her main project and that she should stop fundraising for it. This year, the school eliminated her position. The surprise dismissal alarmed fellow researchers elsewhere, who saw Donovan as a pioneer in an increasingly critical area of great sensitivity to the powerful and well-connected tech giants.

Donovan has remained silent about what happened until now, filing a 248-page legal statement obtained by The Washington Post that traces her problems to her acquisition of a trove of explosive documents known as the Facebook Papers and championing their importance before an audience of Harvard donors that included Facebook’s former top communications executive.

Harvard disputes Donovan’s core claims, telling The Post that she was a staff employee and that it had not been able to find a faculty sponsor to oversee her work, as university policy requires. It also denies that she was fired, saying she “was offered the chance to continue as a part-time adjunct lecturer, and she chose not to do so.”

«

The timing does look suspicious, but at the same time it’s all coincidental; the money from the Zuckerberg foundation is (as the filing says) for “a university-wide centre on artificial intelligence”. One suspects that any nudges and winks about Donovan’s position, if they occurred, happened verbally behind closed doors.
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Was Bobi the world’s oldest dog—or a fraud? • WIRED

Matt Reynolds:

»

On October 21, 2023, Bobi the dog died. As with most celebrity deaths, the press coverage was wall-to-wall, but Bobi’s demise wasn’t unexpected. At 31 years and 163 days (or 217 in “human” years), he was old. So old, in fact, that in February 2023 Bobi had been crowned the “oldest dog ever” by Guinness World Records, which is the authority when it comes to these kinds of things.

Or is it? Shortly after Bobi’s death, experts started raising questions about the Portuguese mastiff’s advanced years. “Not a single one of my veterinary colleagues believe Bobi was actually 31 years old,” veterinarian Danny Chambers told The Guardian. “For the Guinness Book of Records to maintain their credibility and authority in the eyes of the veterinary profession, they really need to publish some irrefutable evidence.”

The reputation of the world’s foremost Irish dry stout turned recordkeeper was on the line here. Someone needed to establish the truth about the oldest dog to ever have lived. That someone—it turned out—was me.

A quick email to Guinness World Records would clear this up, I thought. This is the organization that verified the fastest time to eat a banana with no hands (17.82 seconds) and the longest human tunnel traveled through by a skateboarding dog (30 pairs of legs). For more than 60 years, Guinness World Records has cataloged the stinkiest flowers, widest mouths, and largest chicken nuggets. It had the receipts for the world’s oldest horses, cats, flags, trees, headstanders, llamas (in captivity), customer complaints, working post offices, and road surfaces. Dating the world’s oldest dog would be child’s play.

«

Of course it wasn’t, and the trail includes questions about a conspiracy by Big Dog Food. (That’s not food for big dogs, it’s.. anyway.) An entertaining read. Note in passing: the average confirmed dog age at death is a bit over 11 years.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new theory that aims to unite Einstein’s equations and quantum theory suggests we should look at weight as a key to unification. CC-licensed photo by Janet Ramsden 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. Does it scale? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sellafield nuclear site hacked by groups linked to Russia and China • The Guardian

Anna Isaac and Alex Lawson:

»

The UK’s most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has been hacked into by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China, the Guardian can reveal.

The astonishing disclosure and its potential effects have been consistently covered up by senior staff at the vast nuclear waste and decommissioning site, the investigation has found.

The Guardian has discovered that the authorities do not know exactly when the IT systems were first compromised. But sources said breaches were first detected as far back as 2015, when experts realised sleeper malware – software that can lurk and be used to spy or attack systems – had been embedded in Sellafield’s computer networks.

It is still not known if the malware has been eradicated. It may mean some of Sellafield’s most sensitive activities, such as moving radioactive waste, monitoring for leaks of dangerous material and checking for fires, have been compromised.

Sources suggest it is likely foreign hackers have accessed the highest echelons of confidential material at the site, which sprawls across 6 sq km (2 sq miles) on the Cumbrian coast and is one of the most hazardous in the world.

The full extent of any data loss and any ongoing risks to systems was made harder to quantify by Sellafield’s failure to alert nuclear regulators for several years, sources said. The revelations have emerged in Nuclear Leaks, a year-long Guardian investigation into cyber hacking, radioactive contamination and toxic workplace culture at Sellafield.

The site has the largest store of plutonium on the planet and is a sprawling rubbish dump for nuclear waste from weapons programmes and decades of atomic power generation.

Guarded by armed police, it also holds emergency planning documents to be used should the UK come under foreign attack or face disaster. Built more than 70 years ago and formerly known as Windscale, it made plutonium for nuclear weapons during the cold war and has taken in radioactive waste from other countries, including Italy and Sweden.

The Guardian can also disclose that Sellafield, which has more than 11,000 staff, was last year placed into a form of “special measures” for consistent failings on cybersecurity, according to sources at the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) and the security services.

«

Well that would be fun if the hackers gained any control of the systems. At a guess: the poor security is the result of ancient computer systems which are almost impossible to lock down, and there’s too little money allocated to computer security. (Storage is, of course, the potential downside of nuclear power.)
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Federal government investigating multiple hacks of US water utilities • POLITICO

Maggie Miller and John Sakellariadis:

»

The [US] federal government is investigating multiple hacks suspected to have been launched by an Iranian government-linked cyber group against US water facilities that were using Israeli-made technology, according to two individuals familiar with the probes.

One of the breaches made headlines Saturday after the Tehran-linked Cyber Av3ngers group claimed responsibility for hitting a water authority in Pennsylvania. In total, the government is aware of and examining a “single digit” number of facilities that have been affected across the country, according to the two people who were granted anonymity to discuss details that had not yet been made public.

None of the hacks caused significant disruption, according to the individuals, while cyber experts familiar with the Pennsylvania incident say the activity appears designed to stoke fears about using Israeli devices.
Washington has been bracing for increased cyber breaches from Iran since the latest conflict broke out between Israel and the militant group Hamas, which Tehran has long supported. It also comes amid a spate of recent drone and rocket attacks on American troops in the Middle East, conducted by Iranian proxy groups.

Water facilities in general are a particularly vulnerable part of U.S. infrastructure, often due to a lack of funding and personnel for the issue at smaller utilities. The Biden administration has sought to address this problem, including through expanding partnerships with private organizations involved in the water sector.

«

This happened near the end of last week. (On Friday the US put out a formal alert about it: use better passwords!) Lucky that the attacks were of the script kiddie defacement level, rather than actively manipulating controls at water plants.
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New theory claims to unite Einstein’s gravity with quantum mechanics • Phys.org

»

A radical theory that consistently unifies gravity and quantum mechanics while preserving Einstein’s classical concept of spacetime has been announced in two papers published simultaneously by UCL (University College London) physicists.

Modern physics is founded upon two pillars: quantum theory on the one hand, which governs the smallest particles in the universe, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity on the other, which explains gravity through the bending of spacetime. But these two theories are in contradiction with each other and a reconciliation has remained elusive for over a century.

The prevailing assumption has been that Einstein’s theory of gravity must be modified, or “quantized,” in order to fit within quantum theory. This is the approach of two leading candidates for a quantum theory of gravity, string theory and loop quantum gravity.

But a new theory, developed by Professor Jonathan Oppenheim (UCL Physics & Astronomy) and laid out in a paper in Physical Review X, challenges that consensus and takes an alternative approach by suggesting that spacetime may be classical—that is, not governed by quantum theory at all.

Instead of modifying spacetime, the theory—dubbed a “postquantum theory of classical gravity”—modifies quantum theory and predicts an intrinsic breakdown in predictability that is mediated by spacetime itself. This results in random and violent fluctuations in spacetime that are larger than envisaged under quantum theory, rendering the apparent weight of objects unpredictable if measured precisely enough.

A second paper, published simultaneously in Nature Communications and led by Professor Oppenheim’s former Ph.D. students, looks at some of the consequences of the theory, and proposes an experiment to test it: to measure a mass very precisely to see if its weight appears to fluctuate over time.

«

This comes under the heading of “big if true”. (Also: hard to really understand.)
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Spotify to lay off 17% of workforce, its third round of job cuts this year • WSJ

Anne Steele:

»

Despite efforts to reduce costs, [founder and CEO Daniel] Ek said Spotify is still spending too much money. The audio streaming company has been squeezed by slower economic growth as well as interest-rate increases that have made it more expensive to borrow, he said.

“The Spotify of tomorrow must be defined by being relentlessly resourceful in the ways we operate, innovate, and tackle problems,” he said in a 1,000-word letter to staff. “Being lean is not just an option but a necessity.”

…Spotify, like other technology companies, grew in size and scope during the pandemic, with its head count nearly doubling over the past three years to more than 8,000 workers, as a result of hiring and acquisitions. As investors have become more focused on profitability than growth, many streaming-focused companies have aggressively cut costs. 

At Spotify that meant scaling back a $1bn bet on podcasting, including through layoffs earlier this year. It continues to back top podcasters Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper and Emma Chamberlain, and stopped making a number of other shows such as Meghan Markle’s “Archetypes.” 

Spotify, which reported a €462m loss in the first nine months of the year, is trying to balance investments in emerging areas such as its growing ad business with the need to become consistently profitable. The company also is focused on its audiobooks offering, which rolled out to subscribers in the US last month. 

Last year, during its first investor day since going public, Ek said he wants Spotify to be the world’s largest audio company and announced ambitious growth targets, such as generating $100bn in revenue by 2030. He said the company plans to reach profitability by 2024.

«

The memo is classic management blurb, but its key points are simply: capital used to be cheap, so we took on lots of people, now it isn’t, goodbye then.
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Gmail’s AI-powered spam detection is its biggest security upgrade in years • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

The latest post on the Google Security blog details a new upgrade to Gmail’s spam filters that Google is calling “one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years.” The upgrade comes in the form of a new text classification system called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer). Google says this can help understand “adversarial text manipulations”—these are emails full of special characters, emojis, typos, and other junk characters that previously were legible by humans but not easily understandable by machines. Previously, spam emails full of special characters made it through Gmail’s defenses easily.

…Emails like this have been so difficult to classify becuase, while any spam filter could probably swat down an email that says, “Congratulations! A balance of $1,000 is available for your jackpot account,” that’s not what this email actually says. A big portion of the letters here are “homoglyphs”—by diving into the endless depths of the Unicode standard, you can find obscure characters that look like they’re part of the normal Latin alphabet but actually aren’t.

For instance, the subject “𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐜𝐤_𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫_𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭” is weirdly bolded not because it has bolded styling but because it uses Unicode glyphs like the “Mathematical Bold Capital C.” It’s a math symbol that happens to look like the letter “C” to people, but the robot doing spam filtering accurately views it as a math symbol and doesn’t understand the intended English meaning. The closer you look at an email like this, the worse it gets: “C0NGRATULATIONS” has a zero replacing one of the “O” characters, the underlined letters in “Jᴀ̲ᴄ̲ᴋ̲pot” are so strange they don’t even come up in Unicode searches, and a lot of spaces are swapped out for periods or underscores. The result is that a spam filter looks at this hot mess of an email and basically gives up. (I don’t understand why illegible emails default to “inbox” instead of “spam,” but I’m not in charge.)

Google says RETVec is here to save the day: “RETVec is trained to be resilient against character-level manipulations including insertion, deletion, typos, homoglyphs, LEET substitution, and more. The RETVec model is trained on top of a novel character encoder which can encode all UTF-8 characters and words efficiently. Thus, RETVec works out-of-the-box on over 100 languages w

«

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Federal judge vows to investigate Google for intentionally destroying chats • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Judge James Donato is overseeing Epic v. Google, a case that could determine the future of the Android app store — but testimony in this case may have more repercussions for Google too.

On Friday, Judge Donato vowed to investigate Google for intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence, calling the company’s conduct “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” We were there in the courtroom for his explanation.

“I am going to get to the bottom of who is responsible,” he said, adding he would pursue these issues “on my own, outside of this trial.”

Testimony in the Epic v. Google trial — and in a parallel DOJ antitrust suit against Google in Washington, DC — revealed that Google automatically deleted chat messages between employees, and that employees all the way up to CEO Sundar Pichai intentionally used that to make certain conversations disappear. Pichai, and many other employees, also testified they did not change the auto-delete setting even after they were made aware of their legal obligation to preserve evidence.

And Pichai, among other employees, admitted that they marked documents as legally privileged just to keep them out of other people’s hands.

On November 14th, Pichai told the court that he relied on his legal and compliance teams to instruct him properly, particularly Alphabet chief legal officer Kent Walker — and so Judge Donato hauled Walker into court two days later.

But the judge was not satisfied with Walker’s testimony, either, accusing him of “tap-dancing around.”

«

Google has so many court cases going on that you’d think everything would automatically get filed as potentially liable for discovery.
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Don’t be fooled: “carbon capture and storage” is no solution to oil and gas emissions • Climate Change News

Laurence Tubiana and Emmanuel Guérin:

»

At the Cop28 climate conference taking place in Dubai, oil and gas producers are counting on carbon capture and storage (CCS) for a social license to keep drilling as usual. Don’t fall for it.

While it can be helpful at the margins, CCS cannot possibly deliver reductions in greenhouse gas emissions on the scale needed to avert climate disaster. This can only happen if the main sources of emissions – fossil fuels – are phased out.

CCS is expected to deliver less than a tenth of the cumulative carbon dioxide emission reductions, over the 2023-2050 period, needed to hold global warming to 1.5C.

In the International Energy Agency net zero emission (NZE) scenario, CCS captures approximately 1.5 billion tons (GT) of CO2 in 2030, and 6 GT by 2050. But very little of that is applied to emissions from fossil fuel production and combustion. It is primarily used to capture CO2 from sectors where emissions are harder and more expensive to reduce, such as cement production or chemicals.

Is the IEA NZE scenario the only way to achieve net-zero emission and limit the temperature increase to 1.5ºC? Certainly not. …scenarios coming out of models are not to be confused with reality. The fossil fuel industry claims it can achieve the same objectives as in the IEA NZE scenario, while producing more oil and gas, by relying more heavily on CCS. Is this true?

…Another IEA scenario, the stated policies scenario, gives the answer. Reaching net-zero carbon emissions in this way would require the capture of 32 GT of CO2 emissions by 2050, including 23 GT through direct air capture (DAC).

At this scale, DAC alone would require 26,000 TWh of electricity to operate, which is more than the total global electricity demand today.

«

A while back I considered writing a book about carbon capture – the climate saviours! Then I looked into it and realised it was all Not Going To Happen.
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Meet the first Spanish AI model earning up to €10,000 per month • Euronews

Laura Llach:

»

Last summer, Rubén Cruz, her designer and founder of the agency The Clueless, was going through a rough patch because he didn’t have many clients.

“We started analysing how we were working and realised that many projects were being put on hold or cancelled due to problems beyond our control. Often it was the fault of the influencer or model and not due to design issues,” Cruz told Euronews.

So they decided to create their own influencer to use as a model for the brands that approached them.

They created Aitana, an exuberant 25-year-old pink-haired woman from Barcelona whose physical appearance is close to perfection. The virtual model can earn up to €10,000 a month, according to her creator, but the average is around €3,000.

“We did it so that we could make a better living and not be dependent on other people who have egos, who have manias, or who just want to make a lot of money by posing,” said Cruz.

Aitana’s income is quite scattered. She earns just over €1,000 per advert, and has recently become the face of Big, a sports supplement company, and as if that weren’t enough, she uploads photos of herself in lingerie to Fanvue, a platform similar to OnlyFans.

In just a few months, she has managed to gain more than 121,000 followers on Instagram and her photos get thousands of views and reactions. She even receives private messages from celebrities who are unaware that she is not an actual person.

“One day, a well-known Latin American actor texted to ask her out. This actor has about five million followers and some of our team watched his TV series when they were kids,” said Cruz. “He had no idea Aitana didn’t exist.”

«

Plus also they don’t get stroppy. Which turns out to be a big plus.
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Elon Musk’s xAI will launch ‘Grok’ chatbot this week: what to expect • VentureBeat

Shubham Sharma:

»

The company has already opened signups for the program, but the caveat is that it will be only available to those who have taken the most expensive paid plan of the social networking platform. Those on other plans or using X for free will not get access just yet.

…While many details remain under wraps, the X posts shared by Musk and his team at xAI indicate that Grok will be a ChatGPT competitor, which will be able to engage in back-and-forth conversations when prompted. It is expected to handle all sorts of queries from users, right from mathematical problems to code challenges. 

However, unlike other players in the AI race, Grok will differentiate with exclusive access to X and its realtime, user-generated posts and information. The model behind the assistant has been trained on billions of posts (formerly called tweets) on X and will have access to the most recent data posted on X, enabling it to provide up-to-date information when asked about a current issue. 

«

It’s trained on tweets? This thing is going to make previous racist chatbots look like amateurs.
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Vendor lock-in is a good thing? HP’s CFO thinks so • The Register

Paul Kunert:

»

Tech vendors – software, hardware, and cloud services – generally avoid terms that suggest they’re perhaps in some way pinning down customers in a strategic sales hold.

But as Marie Myers, chief financial officer at HP, was this week talking to the UBS Global Technology conference, in front of investors, the thrust of the message was geared toward the audience.

“We absolutely see when you move a customer from that pure transactional model … whether it’s Instant Ink, plus adding on that paper, we sort of see a 20% uplift on the value of that customer because you’re locking that person, committing to a longer-term relationship.”

Instant Ink is a subscription in which ink or toner cartridges are dispatched when needed, with customers paying for plans that start at $0.99 and run to $25.99 per month. As of May last year, HP had more than 11 million subscribers to the service. Since then it has banked double-digit percentage figures on the revenues front.

By pre-pandemic 2019, HP had grown weary of third-party cartridge makers stealing its supplies business. It pledged to charge more upfront for certain printer hardware (“rebalance the system profitability, capturing more profit upfront”).

HP also set in motion new subscriptions, and launched Smart Tank hardware filled with a pre-defined amount of ink/toner. These now account for 60% of total shipments.

Myers told the UBS Conference she was “really proud” that HP could “raise the range on our print margins” based on “bold moves and shifting models.”

«

As El Reg points out, it’s not often that CxOs say the quiet part out loud, but they will in front of an investor conference.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A company in the US is trying to bring back the dodo in a Jurassic Park-style revival. CC-licensed photo by allispossible.org.uk on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. They won’t fly away, though. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI agreed to buy $51m of AI chips from a startup backed by CEO Sam Altman • WIRED

Paresh Dave:

»

Sam Altman was reinstated soon after being fired as OpenAI CEO last month, but still stood to gain had the company continued to develop ChatGPT without him. During Altman’s tenure as CEO, OpenAI signed a letter of intent to spend $51m on AI chips from a startup called Rain AI into which he has also invested personally.

Rain is based less than a mile from OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco and is working on a chip it calls a neuromorphic processing unit, or NPU, designed to replicate features of the human brain. OpenAI in 2019 signed a nonbinding agreement to spend $51m on the chips when they became available, according to a copy of the deal and Rain disclosures to investors this year seen by WIRED. Rain told investors Altman had personally invested more than $1m into the company. The letter of intent has not been previously reported.

The investor documents said that Rain could get its first hardware to customers as early as October next year. OpenAI and Rain declined to comment.

OpenAI’s letter of intent with Rain shows how Altman’s web of personal investments can entangle with his duties as OpenAI CEO. His prior position leading startup incubator Y Combinator helped Altman become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent dealmakers, investing in dozens of startups and acting as a broker between entrepreneurs and the world’s biggest companies. But the distraction and intermingling of his myriad pursuits played some role in his recent firing by OpenAI’s board for uncandid communications, according to people involved in the situation but not authorized to discuss it.

«

Welllll. There’s a lot more detail in this story (Saudi Arabia forced to sell stake in company by US government! Attempt to corner market for AI chips!). But maybe this is the smoking gun that explains what the previous OpenAI board meant when it said, you’ll recall, that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

The story doesn’t say that. But there’s an undercurrent in this that the board didn’t like it.
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Not so dead as a dodo: “de-extinction” plan to reintroduce bird to Mauritius • CNN

Tom Page:

»

US-based biotechnology and genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences, which is pursuing the “de-extinction” of multiple species, including the woolly mammoth, has entered a partnership with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation to find a suitable location for the large flightless birds.

The dodo has been extinct since 1681; a combination of predation by humans and animals introduced by humans led to its downfall, turning it into a textbook case for extinction. But according to the partners, its return to Mauritius could benefit the dodo’s immediate environment and other species.

Colossal first announced its intention to resurrect the dodo in January 2023. Exactly when it will be able to do so remains unclear, but fresh details regarding how it plans to recreate the species have been revealed.

The full genome of the dodo has been sequenced by Beth Shapiro, lead paleogeneticist at Colossal. In addition, the company says it has now sequenced the genome of the solitaire, an extinct relative of the dodo from Rodrigues Island, close to Mauritius, and the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, which resides on islands in Southeast Asia spanning the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Geneticists at Colossal have found cells that act as a precursor for ovaries or testes in the Nicobar pigeon can grow successfully in a chicken embryo. They are now researching to see if these cells (called primordial germ cells, or PGCs) can turn into sperm and eggs.

«

They start with dodos, then pretty soon they’re saying “maybe just a small dinosaur? Ooh, how about this one for Mauritius too?” Also, we’ll need a new aphorism. Dead as a..?
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Cop28 president says there is ‘no science’ behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels • The Guardian

Damian Carrington and Ben Stockton:

»

The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal.

Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”.

The comments were “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial”, scientists said, and they were at odds with the position of the UN secretary general, António Guterres.

Al Jaber made the comments in ill-tempered responses to questions from Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN special envoy for climate change, during a live online event on 21 November. As well as running Cop28 in Dubai, Al Jaber is also the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company, Adnoc, which many observers see as a serious conflict of interest.

More than 100 countries already support a phase-out of fossil fuels and whether the final Cop28 agreement calls for this or uses weaker language such as “phase-down” is one of the most fiercely fought issues at the summit and may be the key determinant of its success. Deep and rapid cuts are needed to bring fossil fuel emissions to zero and limit fast-worsening climate impacts.

Al Jaber spoke with Robinson at a She Changes Climate event. Robinson said: “We’re in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone … and it’s because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel. That is the one decision that Cop28 can take and in many ways, because you’re head of Adnoc, you could actually take it with more credibility.”

Al Jaber said: “I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation. I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5ºC.”

«

Perhaps he’s been reading the wrong scenarios, because I’ve certainly seen one which suggests how to stay within 1.5ºC of warming. But it essentially requires stopping use of fossil fuels almost immediately. Again, as Upton Sinclair said: can’t get someone to understand something when their salary depends on their not understanding it. And once again Cop is revealed as a fossil fuel talking shop.
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1960s chatbot ELIZA beat OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in a recent Turing test study • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

In the recent study, listed on arXiv at the end of October, UC San Diego researchers Cameron Jones (a PhD student in Cognitive Science) and Benjamin Bergen (a professor in the university’s Department of Cognitive Science) set up a website called turingtest.live, where they hosted a two-player implementation of the Turing test over the Internet with the goal of seeing how well GPT-4, when prompted different ways, could convince people it was human.

Through the site, human interrogators interacted with various “AI witnesses” representing either other humans or AI models that included the aforementioned GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA, a rules-based conversational program from the 1960s. “The two participants in human matches were randomly assigned to the interrogator and witness roles,” write the researchers. “Witnesses were instructed to convince the interrogator that they were human. Players matched with AI models were always interrogators.”

The experiment involved 652 participants who completed a total of 1,810 sessions, of which 1,405 games were analyzed after excluding certain scenarios like repeated AI games (leading to the expectation of AI model interactions when other humans weren’t online) or personal acquaintance between participants and witnesses, who were sometimes sitting in the same room.

Surprisingly, ELIZA, developed in the mid-1960s by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, scored relatively well during the study, achieving a success rate of 27%. GPT-3.5, depending on the prompt, scored a 14% success rate, below ELIZA. GPT-4 achieved a success rate of 41%, second only to actual humans.

«

Good old Eliza, still going strong all these years on.
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It’s official: Evernote will restrict free users to 50 notes • TechCrunch

Ivan Mehta:

»

Days after Evernote started testing with limited users a free plan with access to only one notebook and 50 notes, the company has now made this its new default free plan. The notetaking app said that this change will be applicable for all new and existing free users starting December 4.

In a post on its blog, Evernote specified that users can delete content from their notebooks to add other content within the limit.

“From December 4, the Evernote Free experience has changed. Going forward, new and existing Free users will have a maximum of fifty notes and one notebook per account. These limits refer to the number of notes and notebooks a user can have in their account at one time: you can always delete unwanted content to remain below the threshold,” the company, owned by Milan-based Bending Spoons, said.

Users with more than 50 notes in their existing free accounts will be able to export additional notes and notebooks. Evernote mentioned on its blog that these restrictions will reflect on its compare plans page on December 4, but didn’t specify if limits or pricing of other plans are also changing.

Earlier this week, Evernote confirmed to TechCrunch on its website that the new limited-free plan was part of a test with “less than 1% of its free users.” The test was trying to get people to pay the higher limit plans, which are priced at $14.99 and $17.99 per month.

The company said that most free users fall below the newly set limit. However, Evernote acknowledged that this change might push customers towards “reconsidering” their “relationship with Evernote.”

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Bought a year ago, laid off 129 people in February, “unprofitable for years”. Started in February 2008 but doubtful it ever made money. Another ZIRP casualty. Bending Spoons also canned the entire staff of filmmaking app Filmic on Friday.
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Thames Water told by auditors it could run out of money by April • The Guardian

Miles Brignall:

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The parent company of Thames Water has been warned by its auditors that it could run out of money by April if shareholders do not inject more cash into the debt-laden firm.

In accounts signed off in July and published on the Companies House website last week, PricewaterhouseCoopers said there was “material uncertainty” about whether the main company behind the water supplier can continue as a going concern.

The disclosure was made in the 2022-23 accounts of Kemble Water Holdings, the company at the top of Thames Water’s byzantine ownership structure.

PwC made its assertion after noting that there were no firm arrangements in place to refinance a £190m loan at one of its subsidiary companies.

Thames Water is expected to face further scrutiny over its debt levels when it issues its results on Tuesday, and a possible investigation into whether it misled MPs earlier this year.

In June, it emerged that contingency plans for the collapse of Thames Water were being drawn up by the UK government amid fears that Britain’s biggest water company would not survive because of its huge debt pile.

Sir Robert Goodwill, chair of the environment, food and rural affairs select committee, said it was considering a fresh investigation after the Financial Times reported that Thames Water had originally presented a loan from its shareholders to its parent as new equity funding.

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This would be quite an event. Water companies in the UK were privatised in 1989, and none has collapsed into bankruptcy or similar problems. Until now. Its debts in June were about 80% of its value (about £17.5bn). The current government won’t like having to take that onto its books, so the question is: who will be left with the hot (wet) potato?
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Switzerland put vertical solar panels on a roadside retaining wall • Electrek

Michelle Lewis:

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The canton of Appenzell Ausserhoden in northeastern Switzerland is aiming to generate at least 40% of its electricity from renewables by 2035. So, it exercised a little creativity and covered a roadside retaining wall with 756 glass-glass solar panels.

The panels have an output of 325 kW and an energy yield of around 230,000 kWh annually. This is equivalent to the consumption of about 52 Swiss households. The energy will be fed into the grid of energy supplier St. Gallisch-Appenzellische Kraftwerke, and the canton will get a feed-in tariff in return.

…K2 Systems says that “especially in the winter months (when consumption and dependence on foreign electricity imports are at their highest), the vertically aligned modules will achieve a very good electricity yield.”

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The calculation (230,000 kWh/yr / 245.7 kW / 365 day/yr) works out to 2h33m average per day; ironically, more during the winter because the sun will be lower.
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Amazon deal for iRobot may restrict competition, European Commission says • WSJ

Ben Glickman:

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The EC said that the deal may restrict competition in the making of robot vacuum cleaners and could allow Amazon to fortify its position as an online marketplace services provider.

The commission said Amazon may have the “ability and the incentive” to foreclose iRobot’s rivals by preventing them from selling on Amazon’s platform.

“We continue to work through the process with the European Commission and are focused on addressing its questions and any identified concerns at this stage,” an Amazon spokesperson said in response to the release.

The spokesperson said iRobot [which makes the Roomba] faces “intense competition” in the market for vacuum cleaner products and that the company believes it can invest in iRobot while lowering prices for consumers.

The acquisition by Amazon, announced in August 2022, was cleared by U.K. regulators in June, but faces an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

The EC has until February 14 to make a final decision on the deal.

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Amazon signed the deal back in August 2022 for $1.7bn, all cash. And it’s still bumping back and forth into regulatory barriers.
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iPhone glitch photo explained. It is NOT photoshop. • Threads

So there was a big kerfuffle over the weekend about a photo of a British comedian/actress in a wedding dress which showed her with her arms in three different poses.. in the same photo. It became this year’s blue/silver dress meme. And here a guy called Faruk explains it in a short video. You need the video really.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified