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:

»

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.

«

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.

«

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.

«

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:

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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.”

«

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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

An AI system at Google DeepMind has predicted the structure of nearly half a million novel crystals for future materials technologies. CC-licensed photo by Francisco Anzola 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Biden administration stops warning some social platforms of foreign meddling • The Washington Post

Naomi Nix and Cat Zakrzewski:

»

Meta no longer receives notifications of global influence campaigns from the Biden administration, halting a longtime partnership between the federal government and the world’s largest social media company, senior security officials said Wednesday. Federal agencies have also stopped communicating about political disinformation with Pinterest, according to the company.

The developments underscore the far-reaching impact of a conservative legal campaign against initiatives established to avoid a repeat of the 2016 election, when Russia manipulated social media in an attempt to sow chaos and swing the vote for Donald Trump. Republican lawmakers even have proposed cutting funding for combatting foreign disinformation and subpoenaed government agencies, including the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which counters foreign propaganda.

For months, researchers in government and academia have warned that a barrage of lawsuits, congressional demands and online attacks are having a chilling effect on programs intended to combat health and election misinformation. But the shift in communications about foreign meddling signals how ongoing litigation and Republican probes in Congress are unwinding efforts once viewed as critical to protecting U.S. national security interests.

Ben Nimmo, chief of global threat intelligence for Meta, said government officials stopped communicating foreign election interference threats to the company in July.

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This could be seen as Definitely Bad. But: X/Twitter is now an absolute morass of misinformation, with a falling user base, so Russia isn’t going to have much joy there. (Nor anyone else.) Facebook, well, it’s where the boomers hang out – nobody much else – and they’re always susceptible to any old crap, if they’re susceptible at all. Instagram, folk don’t get taken in by that. TikTok, well, that’s China, and doesn’t really listen to the US. What else is there? (Thanks G for the link.)
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Meta sues FTC, hoping to block ban on monetizing kids’ Facebook data • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

Meta sued the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday in a lawsuit that challenges the FTC’s authority to impose new privacy obligations on the social media firm.

The complaint stems from the FTC’s May 2023 allegation that Meta-owned Facebook violated a 2020 privacy settlement and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The FTC proposed changes to the 2020 privacy order that would, among other things, prohibit Facebook from monetizing data it collects from users under 18.

Meta’s lawsuit against the FTC challenges what it calls “the structurally unconstitutional authority exercised by the FTC through its Commissioners in an administrative reopening proceeding against Meta.” It was filed against the FTC, Chair Lina Khan, and other commissioners in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Meta is seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the FTC proceeding, pending resolution of the lawsuit.

Meta argues that in the FTC’s administrative proceedings, “the Commission has a dual role as prosecutor and judge in violation of the Due Process Clause.” Meta asked the court to “declare that certain fundamental aspects of the Commission’s structure violate the US Constitution, and that these violations render unlawful the FTC Proceeding against Meta.”

Meta says it should have a right to a trial by jury and that “Congress unconstitutionally has delegated to the FTC the power to assign disputes to administrative adjudication rather than litigating them before an Article III court.” The FTC should not be allowed to “unilaterally modify the terms” of the 2020 settlement, Meta said.

The FTC action “would dictate how and when Meta can design its products,” the lawsuit said.

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Well, yes, that’s sort of the point of the FTC order, Meta. The core of Meta’s suit is that the FTC is itself unconstitutional because its commissioners can act as prosecutor, judge and jury in a case. (Explained here; others have tried the same.)
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Nearly 100,000 Gaza buildings may be damaged, satellite images show • BBC News

Dominic Bailey, Erwan Rivault and Daniele Palumbo:

»

New satellite images commissioned by the BBC reveal the extent of destruction across northern Gaza, before the start of the temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

The satellite images were taken last Thursday, just before the suspension of hostilities came into force, following weeks of Israeli air strikes and on-the-ground fighting. Separate satellite data analysis also provides a snapshot of the destruction across the whole of Gaza.

Drone footage and verified video also show buildings and entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. While northern Gaza has been the focus of the Israeli ground offensive and has borne the brunt of the destruction, widespread damage extends across the entire strip.

Israel says northern Gaza, which includes the major urban centre of Gaza City, was a “centre of gravity of Hamas”, the group behind the deadly 7 October attacks on Israel. Israel says its bombing campaign has successfully targeted Hamas commanders and fighters and accuses the group of embedding itself in civilian areas.

Satellite data analysis suggests that almost 98,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip may have suffered damage, with most of it concentrated in the north – as shown in the above map.

«

On the technology front, what’s amazing here is that a media company can commission satellite images and then get them analysed in less than a week to derive information like this.

On the human front, it’s utterly shocking. Yes, Hamas’s murder of more than a thousand Israelis on October 7 was evil and deserved retribution. But even at the last election, in 2006, it only got 44% of the vote, and much of Gaza’s population on October 7 had never voted at all. The idea that there were Hamas commanders and fighters in every single one of those levelled properties is for the birds.
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‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza • 972

Yuval Abraham:

»

The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.

The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.

…According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.

«

The Israel Defence Force (IDF) has been very cagey about talking about its AI system, and what it does, and how it’s used. This is the first report I’ve seen which describes what its role could be.

About 972 Magazine: “+972 Magazine is an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists.” The name comes from the dialling code, which reaches numbers in Israel and Palestine.
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What a bloody San Francisco street brawl tells us about the age of citizen surveillance • WIRED

Lauren Smiley:

»

One day in July, I spotted a camera on the front of a tidy house on Magnolia—the place whose driveway had been the site of the 2021 attack where a man was sprayed in the face for five seconds. I walked up to the open garage and asked the man inside if I could talk to him about the Ring cam footage that had emerged of the incident. He said he’d rather not, that he was thinking he would be subpoenaed. [Assault-accused homeless man Garret] Doty’s trial was coming up—it’s now set for mid-November—and the man said he had to get an attorney himself. He hadn’t authorized the release of his footage to the media, he explained, and he wasn’t happy that it wound up on national TV.

As I became yet another Marina [Bay area in San Francisco] surveillant [by recording some video of a homeless man], I thought of what one regular chronicler of the homeless in the neighborhood had told me—that he doubted all the careful surveillance had added up to much other than “On my phone I have a bunch of stupid photos now.” San Francisco’s police chief has called the city’s bonanza of surveillance footage a “golden” tool for solving crimes, but it can just as easily set people free: The public defender’s office is one of the main requesters of footage from the Tenderloin’s camera network. One defense attorney in the city, Elizabeth Hilton, told me that in many of her cases the trove of San Francisco video evidence ends up helping the accused, contradicting victims’ and witnesses’ accounts of what went down.

…As I kept my eye on the Marina, I couldn’t stop thinking about the guy I’d met in his garage that day in July, bewildered that his Ring footage had ended up on the national news, that this little piece of hardware had unleashed something bigger than he’d ever intended. His reaction struck me as genuine and understandable—what most people would feel in his position. Yet it also seemed quaintly naive, a reminder that those engaged in citizen surveillance in 2023 still don’t totally get what it means to have a camera watching the street.

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An absorbing long read about the incredible tensions between residents and homeless on San Francisco’s streets.
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Message received • The Rebooting

Brian Morrissey:

»

as publishers know well, the ad business is often illogical and possibly more mercurial than [Elon] Musk. It can gyrate wildly. And publishers have little control of their distribution, putting themselves in a double bind. I don’t think it took very long for Musk to figure this out. The parts of the ad business that the engineering mind like are in the direct marketing part that’s driven by math and quantifiable results. Ironically, he bought the one scaled tech platform that is more reliant on the other part of advertising, the part that’s more about branding, since Twitter doesn’t have the kind of intent signals other platforms have. 

Big brands care about flaccid concepts like brand safety and alignment. And sure, they’re hypocrites – aren’t we all? – but you only get a pass if you perform. Twitter has never been a must-buy on the basis of performance. Musk made sure to specifically call out Bob Iger in the audience during his GFY, since Disney is among the advertisers who have paused spending due to Musk’s latest controversial post that strayed into the territory of Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The truth is Disney’s business is not going to be hurt by not advertising on X. 

I believe he knows this. The subscription model is the only path for X, at least as the core of its business if it is truly going to maximize free speech. I believe that’s why he shrunk the size of the organization. The ad business will be niche, more digital [junk catalogue] SkyMall than vying for the TV ad budgets [CEO] Linda Yaccarino has been adept at grabbing. I’m unclear the point of her role at the company with that focus.

«

Yaccarino is now being referred to online as the “CNO”, or CENO – CEO In Name Only. Certainly can’t have been her most comfortable moment sitting in the front row as Musk torpedoed her role. Shall we start a resignation clock?
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Millions of new materials discovered with deep learning • Google DeepMind

Amil Merchant and Ekin Dogus Cubuk:

»

Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation.

Today, in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals – equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials.

With GNoME, we’ve multiplied the number of technologically viable materials known to humanity. Of its 2.2 million predictions, 380,000 are the most stable, making them promising candidates for experimental synthesis. Among these candidates are materials that have the potential to develop future transformative technologies ranging from superconductors, powering supercomputers, and next-generation batteries to boost the efficiency of electric vehicles.

GNoME shows the potential of using AI to discover and develop new materials at scale. External researchers in labs around the world have independently created 736 of these new structures experimentally in concurrent work. In partnership with Google DeepMind, a team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has also published a second paper in Nature that shows how our AI predictions can be leveraged for autonomous material synthesis.

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AI for good. (Though I’m sure someone will come along presently and suggest it can be used by terrorists to do.. something bad.)

In passing, you can tell this didn’t go through a subeditor. The second sentence of the first paragraph should read more like “To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable, or else they can decompose. Finding a new, stable crystal can take months of painstaking experimentation.”
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China’s wind and solar surge threatens Australian coal exports • Australian Financial Review

Ben Potter:

»

Two new reports, from global energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie and Sydney-based Climate Energy Finance, show that China is building wind and solar at twice the rate of the US and Europe combined, and also leading the way with huge energy storage installations.

The startling acceleration comes as world leaders and officials prepare to descend on Dubai for the United Nations climate change conference (COP28) and wrangle over phasing out fossil fuels and supporting developing countries’ clean energy projects.

“China’s demand for Australian exports of thermal and coking coal is set to decline structurally over the longer term due to the greening of China’s power sector and economy,” said Climate Energy Finance director Tim Buckley. “The report recommends that to minimise economic risk, Australia urgently comprehends and responds at speed to align with China’s massive investment pivot.”

China’s accelerating clean energy shift challenges Australia, which has planned for continued exports of coal and gas while cautiously backing US-led efforts to wean the West off China’s clean energy goods and commodities and build up alternative sources of supply.

Wood Mackenzie expects China to continue to command 80% of the global supply chain for solar energy until at least 2026. It says in a new report, “How China became the global renewables leader”, that the giant economy is on track to build 230 gigawatts of wind and solar power this year at a cost of $US140bn ($210bn), compared with 75GW for Europe and 40GW for the US. A gigawatt is the size of a small coal-fired power station.

«

So much implied judgement in this piece. “Startling acceleration” – not really; China loses out from runaway climate change too. And as for China getting ahead on making renewables: Australia could have grasped that opportunity decades ago (it has lots of empty space for wind and solar). It chose not to. Cry me a river.
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Inside Foxconn’s India iPhone factory expansion • Rest of World

Viola Zhou and Nilesh Christopher:

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Foxconn began manufacturing iPhones at Sunguvarchatram in 2019, starting with the iPhone XR. At that point, the model was more than a year old. When Li [Hai, from Foxconn China] arrived at Foxconn Sunguvarchatram in early 2023, the factory was making iPhone 14s, for which production in India had begun two months after its launch. This year, the goal was to have a shipment of made-in-India iPhone 15s ready to go as soon as the model was announced.

The iPhone plant is part of a sprawling 60-hectare campus where Foxconn also makes phones for other brands. About 35,000 employees go to work inside half a dozen white, three-story factory buildings. Li may as well have been walking back into the Chinese plant he was familiar with at home: the same advanced equipment, the same rows of tables with workers repeating tasks thousands of times a day, the same final product. But there was one obvious difference. Unlike in China, the assembly line was staffed almost exclusively by young women.

When electronics manufacturing took off in China in the 1980s, rural women who had just begun moving to the cities made up the majority of the factory workforce. They didn’t have many other options. Managers at companies like Foxconn preferred to hire women because they believed them to be more obedient, Jenny Chan, a sociologist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University who studies labor issues at Foxconn, told Rest of World.

Over the past 30 years, that’s changed. Today, most of China’s iPhone workers are men; women have moved into less arduous service sector jobs. But in India, Foxconn and other electronics manufacturers are once again recruiting from a female workforce beginning to migrate for better jobs.

…Foxconn also had to find a workaround for employing married women. The company typically requires workers to pass through metal detectors when entering and exiting its factories in order to prevent leaks about upcoming products, according to reports. But in India, married women wear a mangalsutra, a metal pendant; and a metti, a metal toe ring. These workers are searched manually and have their jewelry logged in a notebook.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The rise of Nvidia is a story planned 30 years ago by its founder and CEO, who saw AI’s primacy coming ten years ago. CC-licensed photo by Diego Torres Silvestre 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. Faster, processor, grill grill! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Ex-Apple employees new startup wants to bring AI to the desktop • The Verge

Alex Heath:

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AI chatbots like ChatGPT have, to date, been fairly impersonal, existing outside of the apps and data that we use every day. A new startup by three ex-Apple employees called Software Applications Incorporated hopes to change that.

The company’s CEO, Ari Weinstein, is a repeat founder, having sold his last startup, the iOS automation app Workflow, to Apple in 2017 alongside co-founder and CTO Conrad Kramer. This time, the two have been joined by Kim Beverett, a 10-year Apple vet who was onstage at this year’s WWDC and previously oversaw product management for various teams, including Safari, Messages, FaceTime, and user privacy. 

In their first interview since leaving Apple to start something new, the trio tells me that their focus is on bringing generative AI to the desktop in a way that “pushes operating systems forward.” While they don’t have a product to show off yet, they are prototyping with a variety of large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT and Meta’s Llama 2. The ultimate goal, according to Weinstein, is to recreate “the magic that you felt when you used computers in the ’80s and ’90s.”

“If you turned on an Apple II or an Atari, you’d get this basic console where you could type in basic code as a user and program the computer to do whatever you wanted,” he explains. “Nowadays, it’s sort of the exact opposite. Everybody spends time in very optimized operating systems with pieces of software that are designed to be extremely easy to use but are not flexible.”

An example he gives: “Sometimes you’ve got a browser window open with a schedule on it, and you just want to say, ‘add this to my calendar,’ and somehow, there’s no way to do that… We think that language models and AI give us the ingredients to make a new kind of software that can unlock this fundamental power of computing and make everyday people able to use computers to actually solve their problems.”

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Workflow makes a good pedigree. Notable how everyone’s trying to recreate Apple’s Knowledge Navigator now.
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Talking to chatbots is now a $200k job. So I applied • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

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My father was a prompt engineer, like his father before him. I come from a long line of people who toiled day and night, chatting with generative-AI chatbots.

OK, not true. Prompt engineering is a totally new job that would have sounded crazy even a year ago. But it can pay six-figure salaries to people who extract the best results from the mysterious artificial-intelligence black boxes that are now part of daily life.

A year ago this week, OpenAI released ChatGPT. Not since the iPhone had I been this wowed by new technology. 

Me: How do I keep squirrels out of my bird house?  

ChatGPT: Install a baffle on the bird house pole, which acts as a physical barrier to prevent squirrels from climbing up. Place the bird house away from trees, fences, or buildings to minimize jumping-off points for squirrels. Additionally, consider using a birdhouse with a small entrance hole that’s too tiny for squirrels to fit through.

You had to see the bots’ ability to spit out humanlike answers to believe it. And even then, maybe you shouldn’t believe it. Natural as they sound, many chatbot answers are unwieldy, unhelpful and, sometimes, untrue. (These squirrel solutions do seem legit.) Sure, AI can do some of our writing, computer coding and research jobs. But we wouldn’t want to bet our businesses on them alone.

Enter the prompt engineer! This person fine-tunes the prompts that go into a generative-AI large-language model—aka LLM—to extract valuable but buried information for an employer or its clients. Think of it as an AI whisperer.

And there’s a salary premium for the best whispering. On LinkedIn and the job-search site Indeed, thousands of listings came up for the search term “prompt engineer,” and among those that stated salary, the annual pay could range from $100,000 to over $200,000. People I spoke with said they were seeing similar pay figures.

“We’ll have to wait to see the long-term effects of gen AI, but it’s clear right now that jobs related to the field are surging,” according to a recent report from Indeed. 

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Car dealers say they can’t sell EVs, tell Biden to slow their rollout • Ars Technica

Jonathan Gitlin:

»

Almost 4,000 dealers from around the United States have sent an open letter to President Joe Biden calling for the government to slow down its plan to increase EV adoption between now and 2032.

Despite our robust economy, the US trails both Europe and China in terms of EV adoption. More and more car buyers are opting to go fully electric each year, although even a record 2023 will fail to see EV uptake reach double-digit percentages.

Mindful of the fact that transportation accounts for the largest segment of US carbon emissions and that our car-centric society encourages driving, the US Department of Energy published a proposed rule in April that would alter the way the government calculates each automaker’s corporate average fuel efficiency. If adopted, the new rule would require OEMs to sell many more EVs to avoid large fines. This is in addition to an earlier goal from the White House that calls for one in two new cars sold in 2030 to be EVs.

And that’s too ambitious, says the collection of car dealers, who say that new EVs are piling up on their forecourts and can’t be sold.

…Over the summer, industry analysts at Cox Auto made plenty of headlines with data showing that new EV inventory was growing.

“EVs are selling three times as slow as [internal combustion engine] cars. And so dealers that were forced to make investments on the electrification space, forced to have floorplan financing against these cars, are suddenly running against 90–93 days of inventory turn vis-a-vis 31–32 days for the internal combustion cars. And that obviously is a real issue for them,” said Jantoon Reigersman, COO at TrueCar.

“And then not only are EVs more expensive, but their own salespeople are untrained. They don’t even know how to answer most of the questions they get. A lot of them have 100–200% turnover of their sales staff in a given year,” Reigersman told me.

«

Build out the charging network and the EVs will sell themselves.
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Don’t be afraid of the iPhone’s NameDrop feature, experts say • The New York Times

Jesus Jiménez:

»

Police departments from New Jersey to California have been sounding the alarm in recent days about NameDrop, a new feature of the Apple iPhone’s latest operating system that allows users to wirelessly exchange contact information.

Apple declined to comment, but experts say the warnings that “scammers and thieves” could exploit the feature to harvest a user’s personal information appear to be overblown, if not entirely unfounded.

For starters, the devices must be practically touching for NameDrop to work, and both users must agree to share the information.

Mark Bartholomew, a law professor who focuses on cyber law at the University at Buffalo, said that NameDrop had enough stopgaps in place to prevent someone’s information from being stolen.
“To the extent there’s panic here about nonconsensual taking of contact information, I’m not that worried,” he said.

…Users hold one device over the other, within a few centimetres, until NameDrop appears on both screens. They can then choose to exchange contact details, or one may simply receive contact information from the other without reciprocating. An exchange can be canceled by pulling a device away or by locking its screen before the transfer is complete.

NameDrop works similarly to AirDrop, which allows users of Apple laptops, iPhones and iPads to exchange photos as long as they are within Bluetooth and Wi-Fi range. But while some people exploited that feature in its early days to harass unsuspecting strangers with explicit images, it appears to be much harder, if not impossible, to use NameDrop to send unwanted information or harvest personal details without consent.

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Folks always get worked up about this sort of ostensible privacy infiltration, but ignore the drip-drip-drip of smartphone data leaks.
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Elon Musk to advertisers who are trying to ‘blackmail’ him: ‘Go f— yourself’ • CNBC

Lora Kolodny:

»

Speaking at the 2023 DealBook Summit in New York on Wednesday, Elon Musk, the owner of social media site X (formerly Twitter), scoffed at advertisers boycotting the platform because of antisemitic posts he amplified there.

“If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f—yourself.” He added, “Don’t advertise.”

He also implied that fans of his, and of X, would boycott those advertisers in kind. He specifically took aim at Disney. “The whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail,” Musk threatened. He also told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin, “I have no problem being hated. Hate away.”

In recent weeks, Musk has promoted and sometimes verbally endorsed what the White House called “antisemitic and racist hate” on X, formerly Twitter, the social media platform he owns and runs as CTO.

He called those tweets, “one of the most foolish if not the most foolish thing I’ve ever done on the platform.”

“I’m sorry for that tweet or post,” he said. He added, “I tried my best to clarify, six ways to Sunday, but you know at least I think over time it will be obvious that in fact, far from being antisemitic, I am in fact philosemitic.”

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I can’t decide if Musk’s behaviour is exhausting, like a toddler, or boring, like someone else’s toddler. But you can certainly think that he’s not going to take that much notice of threats around money.
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Google agrees to pay C$100m a year for news in Canada • FT

Richard Waters:

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Google has agreed to pay C$100m a year into a fund to support news organisations in Canada as part of a deal with the government, ending a dispute that led it to threaten to cut links to news from its services.

The pact ends a six-month standoff following the passage of an online news law designed to funnel some of the cash that Google and Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, make from online advertising to bolster the finances of news organisations. The dispute blew up into the biggest conflict between the internet giants and a national government over news subsidies since Australia became the first country to pass a law on the issue in 2021.

Meta suspended links to news stories in Canada earlier this year in protest at the law, and Google threatened to follow suit when the law goes into effect in mid-December unless the government diluted the impact of the legislation.

The search giant dug its heels in against being forced to pay for news links in its services, which it feared would set a precedent that could be applied to other types of online links. Rather than hurting the news companies, the internet giants have always claimed that their links deliver valuable traffic to news sites, with Google claiming its news links are worth C$250m a year to Canadian publishers.

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Frankly, I’m a little surprised: I thought Google would hold out against this. But perhaps it thinks that connecting people with news is more important than any principle. Meta still is doing, and I’d expect that it will continue to.
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How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is powering the AI revolution • The New Yorker

Stephen Witt:

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[Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen] Huang has a practical mind-set, dislikes speculation, and has never read a science-fiction novel. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow. “I do everything I can not to go out of business,” he said at breakfast. “I do everything I can not to fail.” Huang believes that the basic architecture of digital computing, little changed since it was introduced by I.B.M. in the early nineteen-sixties, is now being reconceptualized.

“Deep learning is not an algorithm,” he said recently. “Deep learning is a method. It’s a new way of developing software.” The evening before our breakfast, I’d watched a video in which a robot, running this new kind of software, stared at its hands in seeming recognition, then sorted a collection of colored blocks. The video had given me chills; the obsolescence of my species seemed near.

Huang, rolling a pancake around a sausage with his fingers, dismissed my concerns. “I know how it works, so there’s nothing there,” he said. “It’s no different than how microwaves work.” I pressed Huang—an autonomous robot surely presents risks that a microwave oven does not. He responded that he has never worried about the technology, not once. “All it’s doing is processing data,” he said. “There are so many other things to worry about.”

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Nothing like knowing how it all works to make you confident about what it can and can’t do. Huang came up with his plan for Nvidia 30 years ago, and has been following it ever since. *That* is focus.
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Google ad chief Jerry Dischler stepping down weeks after antitrust trial testimony • NY Post

Thomas Barrabi:

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Google’s longtime advertising chief Jerry Dischler will step down from his role – weeks after he drew scrutiny over bombshell admissions about the company’s ad practices at the landmark antitrust trial targeting its search empire.

Dischler, who rose to the title of vice president of advertising products at Google in 2020, will be replaced by Vidhya Srinivasan, an ad executive who joined the company in 2019. Srinivasan previously held roles at Amazon and IBM.

“After more than 15 years on Google’s ads business, Jerry Dischler decided to take on a new challenge,” Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan said in a statement Wednesday. “Our ads business helps millions of businesses thrive and we’re grateful to Jerry for his many accomplishments in this area.”

“With a track record of significant innovations across privacy, measurement, AI, search ads and beyond, Vidhya is the natural successor for this role,” Raghavan said.

Dischler had raised eyebrows in September after admitting under questioning by Justice Department antitrust lawyers that Google had silently raised ad prices within its search results in order to hit revenue goals.

“We tend not to tell advertisers about pricing changes,” Dischler said in the Sept. 18 court appearance.

Dischler also confirmed the accuracy of previous sworn testimony from 2020 in which he told federal investigators that the price changes resulted in hikes from 5% to 10% for advertisers on certain search queries. Raising prices any higher would be a “dangerous thing to do” because it could lead advertisers to turn to rivals like TikTok or Meta, he added.

«

And where or what exactly is this “new challenge” that Jerry is taking up? The timing between his uncomfortable testimony and this seems more than coincidental.
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Study finds no “smoking gun” for mental health issues due to Internet usage • FT via Ars Technica

Tim Bradshaw:

»

A study of more than two million people’s internet use found no “smoking gun” for widespread harm to mental health from online activities such as browsing social media and gaming, despite widely claimed concerns that mobile apps can cause depression and anxiety.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support “popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk” from the technology.

However, Andrew Przybylski, professor at the institute—part of the University of Oxford—said that the data necessary to establish a causal connection was “absent” without more cooperation from tech companies. If apps do harm mental health, only the companies that build them have the user data that could prove it, he said.

“The best data we have available suggests that there is not a global link between these factors,” said Przybylski, who carried out the study with Matti Vuorre, a professor at Tilburg University. Because the “stakes are so high” if online activity really did lead to mental health problems, any regulation aimed at addressing it should be based on much more “conclusive” evidence, he added.

“Global Well-Being and Mental Health in the Internet Age” was published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science on Tuesday. In their paper, Przybylski and Vuorre studied data on psychological wellbeing from 2.4 million people aged 15 to 89 in 168 countries between 2005 and 2022, which they contrasted with industry data about growth in Internet subscriptions over that time, as well as tracking associations between mental health and Internet adoption in 202 countries from 2000-19.

“Our results do not provide evidence supporting the view that the Internet and technologies enabled by it, such as smartphones with Internet access, are actively promoting or harming either wellbeing or mental health globally,” they concluded.

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So it’s not actually quite a clean bill of health: note Przybylski’s point about not having enough data without more cooperation from the tech companies. Which presumably they’d be loth to provide, just in case.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Bike theft, and its lack of solution or prevention, frustrates owners enormously yet the police seem uninterested when it happens. CC-licensed photo by Chetiya Sahabandu 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Backlash over fake female speakers shuts down developer conference • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

After an event organizer, Eduards Sizovs, was accused of making up fake female speakers to attract high-profile speakers to an online developer conference called DevTernity, several of the event’s top-billed speakers promptly withdrew.

“You are charging attendees money and they might be making their purchasing decision based on the list of speakers shown to them on the conference website,” wrote former Google developer advocate Kelsey Hightower in a post on the social media platform X confirming that he can no longer participate. “This is misleading at best.”

On Monday, Sizovs confirmed that the conference, DevTernity—which sold tickets for as much as $870 a pop and anticipated 1,300 attendees—was cancelled.

The controversy arose after Gergely Orosz, the author of a popular tech newsletter called Pragmatic Engineering, first posted the allegations on X on Friday. Orosz alleged that out of three women—Kristine Howard, Julia Krisina, and Anna Boyko—scheduled to speak at DevTernity, Krisina and Boyko were fake profiles created by the event organizers to make the event look diverse in order to “successfully attract some of the most heavy-hitter men speakers in tech.”

“To spell it out why this conference generated fake women speakers,” Orosz alleges, it was “because the organizer wants big names and it probably seemed like an easy way to address their diversity concerns. Incredibly lazy.”

Howard—Amazon Web Services’ head of developer relations and the only woman still scheduled to speak at DevTernity—told Ars that the situation is “baffling,” confirming that she has not heard from Sizovs since he emailed her to verify that the event was cancelled.

Sizovs claimed that Boyko, “a demo persona from our test website version,” was added to DevTernity’s speaker list “by mistake” after two real women cancelled their conference appearances due to “reasons out of our control at the worst possible time.” He said that he “noticed the issue in October” but failed to fix it because “it was not a quick fix” and it was “better to have that demo persona while I am searching for the replacement speakers.”

«

Orosz did fantastic work in pinning all this down. The fallout is entirely to be expected, but noticing the anomalies in the first place is the properly important step. AI fakes strike again.
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Ikea debuts a trio of affordable smart home sensors • The Verge

Thomas Ricker:

»

Ikea’s push to democratize the smart home continues with the introduction of three new Zigbee sensors that won’t break the bank. There’s Parasoll, the door and window sensor; Vallhorn, the motion sensor; and Badring, the water leakage sensor. They’ll all be priced less than $10 when they go on sale globally in the first half of next year.

Parasoll is a typical window and door sensor that can be discretely mounted to trigger an automation when an open / close event is detected. It can also be paired directly with an Ikea light bulb right out of the box without needing to buy and configure an Ikea Home smart hub. It’s priced at €9.99 in Europe, but exact US pricing is yet to be confirmed for it or any of Ikea’s three new sensors.

The Vallhorn motion sensor can be used both indoors and outdoors (with IP44 splash protection against rain) to activate lights or other automations when movement is detected. It’s powered by three AAA batteries and can be paired to directly control up to 10 Ikea smart bulbs right out of the box. It costs just €7.99 and can sense more of the room than Ikea’s existing $14.99 / €12.99 motion sensor that’s smaller but only useable indoors and needs its coin cell battery replaced more frequently.

The Badring water sensor includes a built-in siren (60dBA at 1m) that can alert you when it senses a leak. It can also trigger a mobile notification in the Ikea Home smart app for homes with an Ikea Dirigera hub ($69.99) installed. Sensors like these can save homeowners a ton of money before a water leak has the opportunity to create real damage. It will cost €9.99.

Of the three, the Parasoll and Badring sensors are not compatible with older Trådfri Home smart gateways from Ikea. All support the newer Dirigera hub, of course, which fully integrates the sensors into Ikea’s burgeoning lineup of smart home products and Home smart app. The hub also allows Ikea’s devices to interoperate with smart home ecosystems from Google, Amazon, and Apple when at home or away.

«

When I was researching my book on hacking, I spoke – naturally – to Mikko Hyppönen, then CTO of F-Secure. He told me that the smart home devices he was most impressed by were those from Ikea. And I am too, because they’re easy to use and they integrate with other platforms. If you can think of anything to do with these sensors, these would be a good buy. (Though the lack of compatibility with the old smart gateway is a bore.)
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Hydrogen heating, village trials and explosion risk • LinkedIn

Michael Liebreich on the trial in Redcar to replace natural gas with hydrogen:

»

Throughout their promotion of the Hydrogen Village Trial in Redcar, Northern Gas Networks (NGN) has referred to the five years of work undertaken on safety. For instance, on its main Redcar Hydrogen Community information page, it says “The plan to provide communities with 100% hydrogen has only been made possible following exhaustive research over the last five years to ensure it can be supplied as safely and reliably as natural gas is today.”

What NGN has been less open about is the fact that it is not planning to follow the recommendations of those five years of work. The Safety Case that emerged from Hy4Heat Work Package 7 was based on passive, or “inherent” safety, with measures including two free-flow valves (which shut off the gas supply in the event of a large leak), and 10cm by 10cm non-closable vents in each room with a hydrogen appliance or substantial plumbing. The residents of Ellesmere Port, made aware of Cadent’s plan to knock in their walls at a public meeting with experts (of which I was one), gave that idea short shrift.

Verbally, NGN has told residents it is not planning to implement the measures laid out in the Hy4Heat Safety Case, but to switch to an “active” safety strategy based on the use of hydrogen sensors. Its problem is that although it is working with the HSE to develop the sensors, no Safety Case based on hydrogen sensors for space heating has yet been published – let alone approved by the HSE, let alone communicated by NGN as part of the trial, let alone discussed by residents, let alone accepted by them as adequate.

NGN has repeatedly accused me and the other experts who appeared at the public meetings in Ellesmere Port and Redcar of spreading misinformation. They say they would never do anything unsafe – but that is gaslighting: I never said they would, and in any case the HSE would not let them. What I did say, and continue to say, is that NGN are not planning to follow the published Safety Case, approved by the HSE for the hydrogen heating trials.

«

It’s quite difficult to make out, but reading through towards the end, Liebreich compares the new plans for hydrogen to the old “town gas”, which was 50% hydrogen and used up to the 1970s. And back then, there were eight times as many explosions as with modern gas. If you go to 100% hydrogen.. why would things be safer?
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I have owned 11 bikes. This is how they were stolen • The Times

Tom Whipple:

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Bike 8 was stolen from a station cycle rack, where I had parked it directly beneath a camera. This time, I thought, we have them. Triumphantly I went to the police. “Look!” I said. “You will be able to see them.” They refused to look at the footage unless I could narrow it down to a window shorter than a few hours. This is, I discovered, a common response.

Afterwards I found a chatroom thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of theft no one would look at the footage. He said he had tried to explain sorting algorithms to police — he was a computer scientist, after all.

You don’t watch the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasn’t there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It’s very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of theft. This argument didn’t go down well.

I made a (slightly more diplomatic) nuisance of myself and they eventually looked at the footage. The policewoman I dealt with was lovely about it, but in the end the image wasn’t clear. Maybe they were right not to bother.

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Bicycle theft – along with phone theft – is endemic and enormously annoying to victims, who feel that the police don’t care if nobody is hurt (and won’t do anything that might involve the faintest possibility of harm, such as confronting a potential criminal if, say, a phone is transmitting its location). The police, of course, aren’t going to stand up and say that they don’t care about property crime, but it’s quite close to it.
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An idea-to-video platform that brings your creativity to motion • Pika

»

Video is at the heart of entertainment, yet the process of making high-quality videos to date is still complicated and resource-intensive. When we started Pika six months ago, we wanted to push the boundaries of technology and design a future interface of video making that is effortless and accessible to everyone. Since then, we’re proud to have grown the Pika community to half a million users, who are generating millions of videos per week.
 
Our vision for Pika is to enable everyone to be the director of their own stories and to bring out the creator in each of us. Today, we reached a milestone that brings us closer to our vision. We are thrilled to unveil Pika 1.0, a major product upgrade that includes a new AI model capable of generating and editing videos in diverse styles such as 3D animation, anime, cartoon and cinematic, and a new web experience that makes it easier to use. You can join the waitlist for Pika 1.0 at https://pika.art.
 
We are also excited to announce our fundraising milestones: we have raised $55m, initiated with pre-seed and seed rounds

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Prompt-to-video. There will soon be a ton of companies doing this; yet just as with Pixar, what will mark out the great creators will be their ability to tell stories, not to create animation. What makes Toy Story 1 wonderful is its story, not – viewed now – the quality of its videos.

Also: Stable Diffusion is now offering similar stuff.
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Is Argentina the first AI election? • The New York Times

Jack Nicas and Lucía Cholakian Herrera, in an article written before the result of the election:

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The posters dotting the streets of Buenos Aires had a certain Soviet flair to them.

There was one of Argentina’s presidential candidates, Sergio Massa, dressed in a shirt with what appeared to be military medals, pointing to a blue sky. He was surrounded by hundreds of older people — in drab clothing, with serious, and often disfigured, faces — looked toward him in hope.

The style was no mistake. The illustrator had been given clear instructions.

“Sovietic Political propaganda poster illustration by Gustav Klutsis featuring a leader, masssa, standing firmly,” said a prompt that Mr. Massa’s campaign fed into an artificial-intelligence program to produce the image. “Symbols of unity and power fill the environment,” the prompt continued. “The image exudes authority and determination.”

Javier Milei, the other candidate in Sunday’s runoff election, has struck back by sharing what appear to be AI images depicting Mr. Massa as a Chinese communist leader and himself as a cuddly cartoon lion. They have been viewed more than 30 million times.

Argentina’s election has quickly become a testing ground for AI in campaigns, with the two candidates and their supporters employing the technology to doctor existing images and videos and create others from scratch. AI has made candidates say things they did not, and put them in famous movies and memes. It has created campaign posters, and triggered debates over whether real videos are actually real.

AI’s prominent role in Argentina’s campaign and the political debate it has set off underscore the technology’s growing prevalence and show that, with its expanding power and falling cost, it is now likely to be a factor in many democratic elections around the globe.

Experts compare the moment to the early days of social media, a technology offering tantalizing new tools for politics — and unforeseen threats.

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The irony is that the article implies that Milei has no chance because of all the AI content being aimed at him. Whereas we know the result was in fact completely the opposite. Sometimes you need to evaluate these things after the fact.
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Why Apple is working hard to break into its own phones • The Independent

Andrew Griffin:

»

Unlike with software, where even significant security holes can be fixed relatively simply with a security update, hardware is out of Apple’s hands once a customer buys it. That means that it must be tested years in advance with every possible weakness probed and fixed up before the chip even makes it anywhere near production.

Apple’s chips have to be relied upon to encrypt secure data so that it cannot be read by anyone else, for instance; pictures need to be scrambled before they are sent up to be backed up on iCloud, for instance, to ensure that an attacker could not grab them as they are transferred. That requires using detailed and complicated mathematical work to make the pictures meaningless without the encryption key that will unlock them.

There are various ways that process might be broken, however. The actual chip doing the encryption can show signs of what it is doing: while processors might seem like abstract electronics, they throw out all sorts of heats and signals that could be useful to an attacker. If you asked someone to keep a secret number in their head and let you try and guess it, for instance, you might tell them to multiply the number by two and see how long it takes and how hard they are thinking; if it’s a long time, it suggests the number might be especially big. the same principle is true of a chip, it’s just that the signs are a little different.

And so Apple gets those chips and probes them, blasts them with precisely targeted lasers, heats them up and cools them down, and much more besides. The engineers in its Paris facilities doing this work are perhaps the most highly capable and well resourced hackers of Apple’s products in the world; they just happen to be doing it to stop everyone else doing the same. If they find something, that information will be distributed to colleagues who will then work to patch it up. Then the cycle starts all over again.

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It’s not hugely detailed, but it does indicate that protecting against hacking is something they’re very serious about.
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China’s Transsion, world’s fifth largest smartphone maker, keeps ascending • Nikkei Asia

Takashi Kawakami:

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China’s Transsion Holdings, one of the world’s top five smartphone makers, continues to grow globally, with its market share approaching that of major Chinese manufacturer Oppo, on the back of a strong showing in Africa and South Asia.

Transsion’s shipments rose 35%, year-on-year, to 26 million units in the three months ended September, with its global market share reaching 8.6%, maintaining the No. 5 position it earned in the April to June period and narrowing the gap with Oppo, at 8.9%, according to U.S. research specialist IDC.

Transsion is benefiting from a sharp recovery in smartphone demand after declines in sales and profit for the year through December 2022, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the nine months through September this year, its sales rose 20%, year-on-year, to 43 billion yuan ($5.8 billion) and its net profit jumped 70% to 3.8 billion yuan.

At a Belt and Road Initiative event in Beijing last month, Transsion’s President and Chairman Zhu Zhaojiang, said the company will “uncover the driving force behind Africa’s economic growth.”

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The biggest smartphone company you’ve never heard of (or whose products maybe you’ve never seen). Though it’s not just content in the low-end space: it’s going to launch a foldable later this year.
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The renewable energy disaster far more deadly than Chernobyl • RealClearScience

Ross Pomeroy:

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Decades ago, a single energy disaster left three million acres of land uninhabitable to humans and killed between 85,600 and 240,000 people. A casual student of history might assume these shocking statistics refer to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but that would be incorrect. No, this catastrophic specter was the fault of the Banqiao Dam collapse in Henan, China. By comparison, Chernobyl killed fifteen times fewer people and desolated an area of land one-sixth as large.

Though sharply different in magnitude, the Banqiao and Chernobyl disasters occurred under similar circumstances. Constructed by the Chinese Communist party during the Great Leap Forward, with guidance from the Soviet Union, the dam was poorly designed and hastily constructed – just like the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Moreover, party officials wanted it to retain as much water as possible because it would be “more revolutionary.” Hydrologist Chen Xing, Chief Engineer of dam projects, warned against that superficial goal and advocated for additional safety features. He was overruled and later reassigned.

Chen Xing’s warnings proved prescient in early August 1975 when Typhoon Nina battered Banqiao and dumped a meter of water in three days. The dam didn’t stand a chance. As it began to disintegrate under heavy strain, one of the workers struggling to save the dam reportedly shouted “Chu Jiaozi!” The river dragon has come…

Six hundred million cubic meters of water would eventually pour through the remains of the ruptured dam, forming a wall of water six meters high and twelve kilometers wide moving up to fifty kilometers per hour.

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An inland, human-made tsunami. The 1970s feel like a time of hubris: errors in nuclear engineering, in dam building, and so on.
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Brazil’s mysterious tunnels made by giant sloths • BBC Travel

Sarah Brown:

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In 2009, a farmer was driving through his corn field in the south of Brazil when he suddenly felt his tractor sink and lurch to one side, making the vehicle shudder to a halt. He jumped out and saw the wheel had sunk deep into the dry soil.

Much to the farmer’s shock, the tractor had broken through what looked like top of an underground cavity. Hearing about this unusual find, researchers came to investigate and were surprised to find a tunnel nearly 2m high by almost 2m wide and about 15m long running across the field and right under the farmer’s house. Deep claw marks embedded into the walls indicated its past occupant was not human.

The farmer had stumbled upon a puzzling subject in palaeontology that is still unfolding today. He’d uncovered a megafauna paleoburrow, a prehistoric tunnel dug through rock by what Luiz Carlos Weinschutz, a geologist and one of the scientists who visited the farmer’s property, concluded was the work of a giant ground sloth or giant armadillo from at least 10,000 years ago.

These giant ground sloths, described in one paper as “a hamster the size of an elephant”, were far removed from today’s unhurried, tree-dwelling ones. They grew up to 4m long and walked on all fours, although research suggests some could stand and move bipedally. Almost 100 different species of sloths roamed the Americas between 15 million to 10,000 years ago alongside car-sized giant armadillos that also dug long tunnels through rocks in Brazil.

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I think you need to see the picture of the Very Large Sloths. It’s there at the article if you click the link.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The smartphone headphone jack has become an endangered species since Apple killed its own with the iPhone 7: CC-licensed photo by Ivan Radic 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. Plug and play. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

After 151 years, Popular Science will no longer offer a magazine • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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PopSci, which covers a whole range of stories related to the fields of science, technology, and nature, published its first issue in 1872. Things have changed a lot over the years, with the magazine switching to a quarterly publication schedule in 2018 and doing away with the physical copies altogether after 2020.

In a post on LinkedIn, former PopSci editor Purbita Saha commented on the magazine’s discontinuation, stating she’s “frustrated, incensed, and appalled that the owners shut down a pioneering publication that’s adapted to 151 years worth of changes in the space of a five-minute Zoom call.” Layoffs have impacted journalists on the science beat particularly hard in recent weeks. National Geographic cut the remainder of the magazine’s editorial staff in June, followed by Gizmodo laying off its last climate reporter, and CNBC shuttering its climate desk last week.

“PopSci is a phenomenal brand, and as consumer trends shift it’s important we prioritize investment in new formats,” [PopSci owner Recurrent Ventures flack Cathy] Herbert tells The Verge. “We believe that the content strategy has to evolve beyond the digital magazine product. A combination of its news team, along with commerce, video, and other initiatives, will produce content that naturally aligns with PopSci’s mission.”

PopSci laid off several employees earlier this month, leaving around five editorial staff members
In addition to dropping its magazine format, PopSci laid off several employees earlier this month, leaving around five editorial staff members and “a few” workers on the publication’s commerce team, according to Axios. The digital media group Recurrent Ventures acquired PopSci in 2021 and named its third CEO in three years just one week before the layoffs hit.

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Paper-based magazines are dropping like leaves in autumn. Though the job cuts in digital media doesn’t make for easy reading either.
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Meta designed platforms to get children addicted, court documents allege • The Guardian

Kari Paul and agencies:

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Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta purposefully engineered its platforms to addict children and knowingly allowed underage users to hold accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint.

The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew – but never disclosed – it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. The large number of underage users was an “open secret” at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents.

In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl’s four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl’s mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that “the accounts were ignored” in part because representatives of Meta “couldn’t tell for sure the user was underage”.

The complaint said that in 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of under-13 users on Instagram but that 164,000 – far fewer than half of the reported accounts – were “disabled for potentially being under the age of 13” that year. The complaint noted that at times Meta has a backlog of up to 2.5m accounts of younger children awaiting action.

The complaint alleges this and other incidents violate the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, which requires that social media companies provide notice and get parental consent before collecting data from children.

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Sports Illustrated published articles by fake, ai-generated writers • Futurism

Maggie Harrison:

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There was nothing in Drew Ortiz’s author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human. “Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature,” it read. “Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn’t out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents’ farm.”

The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn’t seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he’s described as “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.”

Ortiz isn’t the only AI-generated author published by Sports Illustrated, according to a person involved with the creation of the content who asked to be kept anonymous to protect them from professional repercussions. “There’s a lot,” they told us of the fake authors. “I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This person does not exist.”

“At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person and some fake description of them like, ‘oh, John lives in Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog, Sam.’ Stuff like that,” they continued. “It’s just crazy.”

The AI authors’ writing often sounds like it was written by an alien; one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball “can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.”

According to a second person involved in the creation of the Sports Illustrated content who also asked to be kept anonymous, that’s because it’s not just the authors’ headshots that are AI-generated. At least some of the articles themselves, they said, were churned out using AI as well. “The content is absolutely AI-generated,” the second source said, “no matter how much they say that it’s not.”

After we reached out with questions to the magazine’s publisher, The Arena Group, all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated’s site without explanation. Our questions received no response.

«

Such a sad fall for a once-iconic magazine that was home to some of the greatest sports writers.
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Auto emissions could have dropped by 30%, if it weren’t for SUVs: report • Electrek

Jennifer Mossalgue:

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A new report gives us a glimpse of what our world could look like if there weren’t so many big, hulking SUVs cruising around. Because of the rise in electric vehicles, carbon emissions from automobiles could have dropped by more than 30% over the past 10 years, except they haven’t – and that’s because of our global appetite for jumbo cars, the report authors say.

From 2010 to 2022, if vehicles had stayed the same size and the bloated SUV trend had never happened, carbon emissions could have been reduced by more than 30%, according to a report from the Global Fuel Economy Initiative (GFEI). Instead, automotive emissions only dropped 4.2%, essentially undoing all the good benefits of electric vehicles.

SUVs represent 51% of the new car market, and the average light-duty vehicle weight has bulked up to an all-time high of more than 1.5 tonnes. The size of SUVs is growing, with a footprint averaging around 4.2 square meters (about 45 square feet). Plus, automakers make a huge profit from SUVs, which are sold at premium prices but have a proportionally lower manufacturing cost, so they are eager to market them to consumers.

Electric vehicles, which represent 15% of global new car sales in 2022, use three to six times less energy than ICE vehicles to travel the same distance. Markets with strong growth in the EV sector, including China and Europe, saw the largest annual energy efficiency improvements of close to 6%. North America, which has a lower market uptake of EVs, recorded a yearly improvement rate of 1.6%.

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Groan. Can America ever do the right thing?
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Is it time to concede Apple was right to eliminate the headphone jack? • Perfect Rec

Wally Nowinski on the iPhone 7 decision, seven years ago:

»

A 3.5mm headphone jack isn’t enormous, but every cubic millimeter of space counts. In 2017, Razer’s CEO, Min-Liang Tan, claimed that dropping the headphone jack allowed Razer to increase battery capacity by about 500 mAh, or 12.5%.

This seems like it is probably an upper bound estimate and it’s possible that the compact form factor of Razer phones was more impacted by layout restrictions imposed by a headphone jack than a more traditional phone design.

We can also estimate the approximate space saved for additional battery capacity. A 3.5mm headphone jack is about 200 cubic millimeters including the port and external components. The battery pack on the base model iPhone 15 is about 20,300 cubic millimeters. By that measure, not having a headphone jack enables Apple to make the battery pack about 1% larger. It’s also worth noting that the iPhone 15 is about 24% larger than the iPhone 7, so the initial space saving was even more significant back in 2016.

200 cubic millimeters might not sound like a lot, but space inside a phone is so valuable that manufacturers are constantly looking for more ways to save it. The recent move by phone manufacturers from the traditional SIM card reader to the eSIM was also a space saving move. But even the eSIM takes up about 20 cubic millimeters. The upcoming iSIM will be integrated as part of the SoC instead of its own small chip, taking up almost no space. This underlines that manufacturers are willing to make fairly tough changes in order to get 1/10 the space savings as removing the headphone jack.

«

And, as he also points out, other manufacturers – Google, Samsung, Razer – followed suit. The phone headphone jack is an endangered species.
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Israel tells Elon Musk Starlink can only operate in Gaza with its approval • FT

Chloe Cornish:

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The world’s richest man declared late last month that his satellite internet service Starlink would “support connectivity to internationally recognised aid organisations in Gaza”, which has suffered lengthy blackouts under Israel’s bombardment.

But on Monday, Israeli communications minister Shlomo Karhi posted on X that the entrepreneur had “reach[ed] a principle understanding” with the ministry. “Starlink satellite units can only be operated in Israel with the approval of the Israeli Ministry of Communications, including the Gaza Strip,” Karhi said.

Musk has not yet publicly confirmed any deal.

The SpaceX and Tesla chief executive is visiting the Jewish state for the first time since Hamas’s October 7 assault on southern Israel, which killed 1,200 people and triggered a war between Israel and the militant group.

Israel’s ferocious retaliatory bombardment and siege of the strip has created a humanitarian crisis, killed more than 13,300 people and led to prolonged blackouts. These have obstructed rescue efforts, notably by preventing ambulances from locating wounded people.

Musk’s visit to Israel coincides with the last day of a four-day pause in hostilities, and comes as advertisers pile pressure on X over a rise in antisemitism on the platform.

«

You’re thinking: how could Israel control a satellite-based phone system?

»

The Starlink signal is received through small satellite dishes called terminals. But Musk said in October that no terminals had actually attempted to connect from besieged Gaza, and Israel controls the movement of goods into the coastal enclave.

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Perhaps there would also be pressure on Tesla, perhaps. And Starlink itself if it wanted to sell in Israel. Plus perhaps Starlink can refuse connections from specific geographic locations.
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This high-tech shirt helps deaf and hard-of-hearing patrons feel music • Smithsonian Magazine

Julia Binswanger:

»

Chicago’s Lyric Opera is aiming to make its performances more accessible via the SoundShirt, a garment that vibrates to match the music.

In October, the Lyric became the first opera company to offer the shirts to audience members who are deaf or hard of hearing. The device comes from a London-based wearable tech brand called CuteCircuit. Each shirt costs about $1,900, but interested guests can reserve one for special performances at $20 a ticket, according to Axios’ Carrie Shepherd.

“I am proud that Lyric Opera of Chicago will be the first opera company in the world to bring this new technology to its live audiences,” says Anthony Freud, the Lyric’s general director, in a statement. “The SoundShirt reinforces Lyric’s commitment to accessibility and to broadening the impact of our live performances on all audience members.”

The SoundShirt is worn like a lightweight jacket and features 16 small motors throughout. Microphones are placed around the orchestra on stage to record specific instruments and send a live signal to activate vibrations in the shoulders, forearms and upper and lower back.

Rachel Arfa, commissioner of Chicago’s Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, recently tested the SoundShirt at a production of West Side Story. “When Lyric approached me with this shirt, I was highly skeptical,” she tells the Washington Post’s Michael Andor Brodeur. “There are often technical solutions designed by people without disabilities for people with disabilities that do not solve barriers that we have.”

The technology certainly isn’t for everyone. The Chicago Sun-Times’ Stefano Esposito says wearing a SoundShirt feels like “your torso has become home to an entire hive of non-stinging bees.”

“It’s not an unpleasant sensation,” he writes, “just odd, very odd.”

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Clever. (Though I think the correct phrase to cover all those people who could benefit from displacing the sound is “hearing-impaired”.)
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Global pay TV penetration to fall for the first time in 2024 • Ampere Analysis

Rory Gooderick:

»

Global pay TV penetration (the number of pay TV subscriptions relative to the number of households) is set to decline for the first time ever in 2024 following a peak penetration of 60.3% in Q4 2023. This decline will continue into the forecast period, with a drop of almost 4 percentage points by the end of 2028, according to Ampere’s latest forecasts, which cover 96 markets.

This decline in pay TV penetration has been driven primarily by the Americas, and in particular North America which has seen its pay TV penetration almost halve from a high of 84% in 2009 to 45% in 2023. In the case of North America, this drop has been caused by a combination of high costs (currently over $90 per month) and competition from a mature SVoD market which is driving customers increasingly to cut the cord.

However, the recent distribution deal between Disney and Charter in the US, which saw select Disney streaming products bundled into Charter’s TV packages, demonstrates that cable operators in the region remain a powerful force as distribution partners, giving streamers the ability to reach a larger and potentially untapped audience base. In addition to North America, Latin America has also shown large declines in pay TV penetration, with a drop of around 10 percentage points since its peak of 42% in 2016.

On the contrary, the APAC and Europe have shown the highest penetration growth in recent years, with large gains coming from China, especially after China Mobile acquired an IPTV license in 2018.

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So easy to forget China, the iceberg of content consumption and production.
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X has become a ‘global sewer,’ mayor of Paris says • NY Times

Liz Alderman:

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In a lengthy post, Ms. [Anne] Hidalgo said that X had veered from its original incarnation as a platform for making information freely available into one whose algorithms exacerbated attacks on people seeking peaceful political debate. “Facts are irrelevant,” she said. She further cited a report released by X that ranked France the No. 1 country in Europe for postings of “violent and illegal content.”

​​A spokesman for X did not reply to a request for comment. A query sent to Twitter’s press office generated an automated response: “Busy now, please check back later.”

Ms. Hidalgo, a Socialist mayor who has made the environment the hallmark of her nearly 10 years in office, has herself faced a torrent of negative comments on X for policies that have included closing major streets to car traffic in order to make way for bikes and plans to limit speeds on the freeways circling Paris. She said that proponents of fossil fuels had flooded X with misinformation about the need for an ecological transformation.

Ms. Hidalgo faced a stream of scrutiny on X this month after a visit to Tahiti, a French territory, where the surfing competition will take place in the 2024 Olympic Games hosted by France. After extending her stay there to include a vacation, which she paid for, a slew of criticism flooded her X feed, including calls for her to step down.

“We need more than ever to keep real democracy alive,” she wrote in her announcement Monday. “Twitter hinders debate, the quest for truth, and the serene and constructive dialogue needed between human beings. I refuse to endorse this evil scheme.”

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As if to prove it, many of the replies to her tweet came from angry paid-for-verification users, and weren’t complimentary.
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Net zero risks wiping $3 trillion from oil and gas companies worth • Daily Telegraph

Jonathan Leake:

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The oil and gas industry faces losses of more than $3 trillion (£2.4 trillion) because of net zero, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned.

The IEA said companies will become increasingly risky investments, potentially losing half their overall valuation, as the world moves to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.

It has accused the global oil and gas industry of failing to understand or respond to the deepening global climate crisis and warned that the result could be a catastrophic loss of value for investors unless companies change course.

Pension and investment funds that rely on oil and gas companies for large chunks of their investment returns could face disastrous declines over the next two decades as a result, the IEA warned.

The Paris-based organisation said the value of the private oil and gas industry, which stands at $6 trillion, will fall by a quarter if all current climate goals set by governments around the world are met.

If targets are toughened up to put the world on course to limit global warming to 1.5ºC, as leaders committed to do under the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, then as much as 60% of the industry’s worth could be wiped out, the IEA said. This would mean companies collectively lose more than $3 trillion of value.

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Note the faint undertone in this story, which appeared in the Daily Telegraph, favourite of the Tory-voting stock-owning (ancient) generation: “net zero” will do these things to companies’ valuations, and therefore net zero is bad. Rather than these companies are contributing to wrecking the planet, and are therefore bad and deserve to fall in value concomitant to the damage they’re causing.
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