In Germany, Wirecard seemed to be a huge success story – but there was a huge hole behind the facade. CC-licensed photo by Web Summit 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.

The Overspill is going on a break for two weeks. See you next time on Monday 20 March.

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

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

We found 28,000 apps sending TikTok data. Banning the app won’t help • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

»

Joe Biden gave federal agencies 30 days to remove TikTok from government devices earlier this week. Until now, most politicians intent on punishing TikTok have focused solely on banning the app itself, but, according to a memo reviewed by Reuters, federal agencies must also “prohibit internet traffic from reaching the company.” That’s a lot more complicated than it sounds. Gizmodo has learned that tens of thousands of apps—many which may already be installed on federal employees’ work phones—use code that sends data to TikTok.

Some 28,251 apps use TikTok’s software development kits, (SDKs), tools which integrates apps with TikTok’s systems—and send TikTok user data—for functions like ads within TikTok, logging in, and sharing videos from the app. That’s according to a search conducted by Gizmodo and corroborated by AppFigures, an analytics company. But apps aren’t TikTok’s only source of data. There are TikTok trackers spread across even more websites. The type of data sharing TikTok is doing is just as common on other parts of the internet.

The apps using the TikTok SDK include popular games like Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Trivia Crack, and Fruit Ninja, photo editors like VSCO and Canva, lesser-known dating apps, weather apps, WiFi utilities, and a wide variety of other apps in nearly every category. The developers for the apps listed above did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“A simple ban on the TikTok app itself is not going to stop data flowing to TikTok,” said Daniel Kahn Gillmor, a senior staff technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. “TikTok has software in other places, not to mention TikTok trackers spread across other parts of the web. I don’t have a TikTok account, but there are still plenty of ways the company can get data about me.”

«

unique link to this extract

Tweetbot and Twitterrific users can support the developers by declining subscription refunds • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Tweetbot and Twitterrific, two of the most used Twitter clients, had subscription offerings and thousands of customers that paid for subscriptions on a yearly basis. With the apps unable to function, pro-rated refunds are set to be automatically issued to subscribers next month, which will heavily impact businesses that had no warning their income stream would be cut off.

Those refunds are going to be paid largely by Tweetbot and Twitterific rather than Apple. As John Gruber points out on Daring Fireball, this is akin to a person getting fired and then having to pay back their last six months of salary. It is a significant financial blow to app developers put out of business by Twitter’s snap decision.

Tweetbot and Twitterrific have teamed up to offer multiple options to customers who are due refunds, and customers who want to help need to do the following:

• Open Tweetbot or Twitterrific (or redownload the apps if they’ve been deleted and open them).
• Choose the “I don’t need a refund button.” Alternatively, for Tweetbot, choose to transfer the subscription over to the new Ivory app for Mastodon.

Because refunds are being issued automatically, Tweetbot and Twitterrific customers who have been happy with their service and want to help the developers out will have to manually opt out using this method.

«

Please do this if you subscribed to either app.
unique link to this extract

Honestly, it’s probably the phones • Noahpinion

Noah Smith on the argument about teen unhappiness in the US:

»

The first reason smartphones should be our prior is that the timing just lines up really well. The smartphone was invented in 2007, but it didn’t really become commonplace until the 2010s, exactly when teen happiness fell off a cliff.

Younger Americans adopted the technology more quickly than older ones; 2010-11 seems to have been an especially important moment. And of course the “killer app” for smartphones was social media. When you had to go to a computer to check Facebook or Twitter, you could only experience it intermittently; now, with a smartphone in your pocket and notifications enabled, you were on every app all the time.

Why would that make us unhappy? There’s an obvious reason: social isolation.

Pretty much everyone knows that social isolation makes people less happy, and research strongly backs this up. It’s known to be a suicide risk. The worst punishment in a prison is solitary confinement, which some view as a form of torture. In case you doubt that the relationship between social isolation and unhappiness is causal, you should recall that we recently ran a gigantic natural experiment on much of society in the form of Covid, and the results were clearly negative.

But why would devices that make people more connected lead to social isolation? Isn’t that backwards? Doesn’t having access to all of their friends and acquaintances at all times via a device in their pockets mean that kids are less isolated than before?

Well, no. As the natural experiment of the pandemic demonstrated, physical interaction is important. Text is a highly attenuated medium — it’s slow and cumbersome, and an ocean of nuance and tone and emotion is lost. Even video chat is a highly incomplete substitute for physical interaction. A phone doesn’t allow you to experience the nearby physical presence of another living, breathing body — something that we spent untold eons evolving to be accustomed to. And of course that’s even before mentioning activities like sex that are far better when physical contact is involved.

«

More and more I think I should publish my missing chapter about exactly this chapter as an Amazon Kindle special. (Advice welcomed.)

unique link to this extract

How the biggest fraud in German history unravelled • The New Yorker

Ben Taub:

»

on June 18, 2020, [fintech company] Wirecard announced that nearly two billion euros was missing from the company’s accounts. The sum amounted to all the profits that Wirecard had ever reported as a public company. There were only two possibilities: the money had been stolen, or it had never existed.

The Wirecard board placed [Austrian bank executive and COO of Wirecard, Jan] Marsalek on temporary leave. The missing funds had supposedly been parked in two banks in the Philippines, and Wirecard’s Asia operations were under Marsalek’s purview. Before leaving the office that day, he told people that he was going to Manila, to track down the money.

That night, Marsalek met a friend, Martin Weiss, for pizza in Munich. Until recently, Weiss had served as the head of operations for Austria’s intelligence agency; now he trafficked in information at the intersection of politics, finance, and crime. Weiss called a far-right former Austrian parliamentarian and asked him to arrange a private jet for Marsalek, leaving from a small airfield near Vienna. The next day, another former Austrian intelligence officer allegedly drove Marsalek some two hundred and fifty miles east. Marsalek arrived at the Bad Vöslau airfield just before 8 p.m. He carried only hand luggage, paid the pilots nearly eight thousand euros in cash, and declined to take a receipt.

Philippine immigration records show that Jan Marsalek entered the country four days later, on June 23rd. But, like almost everything about Wirecard, the records had been faked. Although Austrians generally aren’t allowed dual citizenship, Marsalek held at least eight passports, including diplomatic cover from the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada. His departure from Bad Vöslau is the last instance in which he is known to have used his real name.

The rise of Wirecard did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it reflected a convergence of factors that made the past half decade “the golden age of fraud,” as the hedge-fund manager Jim Chanos has put it.

«

This is the very wildest tale, involving spying on journalists that goes miles beyond the pale.
unique link to this extract

Snapchat releases ‘My AI’ chatbot powered by ChatGPT • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

Named “My AI,” Snapchat’s bot will be pinned to the app’s chat tab above conversations with friends. While initially only available for $3.99 a month Snapchat Plus subscribers, the goal is to eventually make the bot available to all of Snapchat’s 750 million monthly users, Spiegel tells The Verge.

“The big idea is that in addition to talking to our friends and family every day, we’re going to talk to AI every day,” he says. “And this is something we’re well positioned to do as a messaging service.”

At launch, My AI is essentially just a fast mobile-friendly version of ChatGPT inside Snapchat. The main difference is that Snap’s version is more restricted in what it can answer. Snap’s employees have trained it to adhere to the company’s trust and safety guidelines and not give responses that include swearing, violence, sexually explicit content, or opinions about dicey topics like politics. 

It has also been stripped of functionality that has already gotten ChatGPT banned in some schools; I tried getting it to write academic essays about various topics, for example, and it politely declined. Snap plans to keep tuning My AI as more people use it and report inappropriate answers. (I wasn’t able to conjure any in my own testing, though I’m sure others will.)

After trying My AI, it’s clear that Snap doesn’t feel the need to even explain the phenomenon that is ChatGPT, which is a testament to OpenAI building the fastest-growing consumer software product in history. Unlike OpenAI’s own ChatGPT interface, I wasn’t shown any tips or guardrails for interacting with Snap’s My AI. It opens to a blank chat page, waiting for a conversation to start.

«

unique link to this extract

CNET is doing big layoffs just weeks after AI-generated stories came to light • The Verge

Mia Sato:

»

Just weeks after news broke that tech site CNET was quietly using artificial intelligence to produce articles, the company is doing extensive layoffs that include several longtime employees, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation. The layoffs total around a dozen people, a CNET staffer says, or about 10% of the public masthead.

The layoffs began Thursday morning and were announced internally via email by Red Ventures, the private equity-backed marketing-turned-media company that bought CNET in 2020. In the email, a Red Ventures executive suggested the cuts were made to focus CNET on areas where the site can succeed at bringing in traffic on Google search — a top priority for the company.

…Under Red Ventures, former CNET employees say the venerated publication’s focus increasingly became winning Google searches by prioritizing SEO. On these highly trafficked articles, the company crams in lucrative affiliate marketing ads for things like loans or credit cards, cashing in every time a reader signs up.

In the email, [president of financial services and the CNET group at Red Ventures, Carlos] Angrisano said CNET would focus on consumer technology, home and wellness, energy, broadband, and personal finance — the sections Red Ventures could best monetize, a current staffer says.

“But those sections are shadows of what they once were, particularly home,” the staffer says. “If you want to do that section the right way, you don’t sell off your Smart Home, get rid of its video team and cripple your editorial staff.”

«

Tells you everything that Angrisano is in charge of both financial services and CNET. And which comes first. Only a matter of time before CNET is shut down or sold off again; this situation won’t improve.
unique link to this extract

ChatGPT and Whisper APIs debut, allowing devs to integrate them into apps • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Wednesday, OpenAI announced the availability of developer APIs for its popular ChatGPT and Whisper AI models that will let developers integrate them into their apps. An API (application programming interface) is a set of protocols that allows different computer programs to communicate with each other. In this case, app developers can extend their apps’ abilities with OpenAI technology for an ongoing fee based on usage.

Introduced in late November, ChatGPT generates coherent text in many styles. Whisper, a speech-to-text model that launched in September, can transcribe spoken audio into text.

In particular, demand for a ChatGPT API has been huge, which led to the creation of an unauthorized API late last year that violated OpenAI’s terms of service. Now, OpenAI has introduced its own API offering to meet the demand. Compute for the APIs will happen off-device and in the cloud.

OpenAI calls its new ChatGPT API model “gpt-3.5-turbo,” which supersedes its previous “best” LLM API, “text-davinci-003.” It is priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens (about 750 words), which OpenAI says is about 10 times cheaper than its existing GPT-3.5 models. “Through a series of system-wide optimizations, we’ve achieved 90% cost reduction for ChatGPT since December,” writes OpenAI on its API announcement page.

«

That’s quite the price drop, very rapidly.
unique link to this extract

OpenAI rival Aleph Alpha is in talks with investors over major funding • Business Insider

Callum Burroughs:

»

Aleph Alpha, a German generative AI startup, is in talks with investors over a new funding round, Business Insider has learned.

The startup, based in Heidelberg, Germany, is talking to a number of top-tier VC investors over a round that could be as much as $100m, four sources familiar with the matter told Insider.

It comes amid a wave of investor hype in the AI market after US startup OpenAI released ChatGPT, based on its GPT-3.5 language model which was trained on Azure, to the public in November.

Industry rivals quickly saw chatbots’ potential to transform online search, with Microsoft releasing its AI-powered Bing and Google internally testing its version, Bard.

Founded in 2019 by CEO Jonas Andrulis, a former machine-learning engineer at Apple, and Samuel Weinbach, Aleph Alpha researches and develops AI systems with a focus on enterprise customers.

Talks over its raise are thought to be at an early stage with term sheets set to be submitted soon.

«

unique link to this extract

Can publishing survive the oncoming AI storm? • Word Count

Suw Charman-Anderson:

»

It should surprise nobody that there’s now a boom in LLM-created books on Amazon, although its true extent is impossible to measure as there’s no requirement to flag LLM content in book metadata or descriptions, and quite a big incentive not to. Reuters’ Greg Bensinger writes: 

»

Now ChatGPT appears ready to upend the staid book industry as would-be novelists and self-help gurus looking to make a quick buck are turning to the software to help create bot-made e-books and publish them through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing arm. Illustrated children’s books are a favorite for such first-time authors. On YouTube, TikTok and Reddit hundreds of tutorials have spring [sic] up, demonstrating how to make a book in just a few hours. Subjects include get-rich-quick schemes, dieting advice, software coding tips and recipes.

«

Bensinger quotes the Authors Guild’s Mary Rasenberger, who says, “This is something we really need to be worried about, these books will flood the market and a lot of authors are going to be out of work.” Yes. Yes they will. 

Books with small amounts of text are an obvious target – they’re easy to generate on an LLM and it’s easier to keep on top of things like plot and consistency. A children’s picture book only has between 500 and 1000 words, whilst a chapter book for ages 5 to 7 will have around 5,000 to 10,000 words. With a little coaxing, an LLM is perfectly capable of producing this amount of text in a very short space of time. You can then use Dall E, MidJourney and other image creation engines to provide the images. 

These books won’t be good – this LLM-written article on how to write a book in three days using LLMs shows just how bad a whole book of this stuff can be – but that doesn’t matter, as I’ll come on to later. 

Once there’s a strategy for creating 10,000 word chapter books, it’s easy enough to extend that to 15,000 or 20,000 word novellas, at which point LLMs collide head-on with an existing trend.

«

unique link to this extract

Meta’s metaverse: on this evidence, the future is a bleak, cumbersome nightmare • The New European

James Ball:

»

Each time I took the headset off, it turned itself into sleep mode, but each time I went to the laptop for help, it complained I’d left my safe zone, so I spent merry hours reading help pages, running to my safe zone, trying to remember a code that I am then supposed to enter by firing pretend lasers on to a floating virtual keyboard. With each failed attempt, I feel another small piece of my soul slide away, never to return.

The world turns, continental plates drift, years turn into aeons, and eventually I actually enter Horizon Worlds. I even convince it that as an “experienced gamer” I can be trusted to move myself around using a joystick on the controller, rather than teleporting about (recommended to new users). A loading screen showing bright characters, unicorns and more floating atop a serene lake is almost pretty, even if the graphics look like they’re from the PS2 era.

A mini “welcome world” is almost fun. I successfully pick up and throw a paper plane after a mere nine attempts. The next activity, using the controllers to shoot rings in the air, is quite fun too – turning your head to see stuff gets quite immersive.

Of course, immersive cuts both ways. Having turned myself to see where I should head next, I forget that while things with your arms are done by moving your arms, legs are different – legs are the joystick. I reflexively step forwards before realising my error, and trip over my coffee table. Another triumph.

That one is probably my fault, and the “welcome world” was almost momentarily fun. I try to have a better attitude – and then step into the weird, empty world of Horizon Worlds. Whenever I visit, there is almost no one there. I go to a game arcade and anything I try features me, solo, playing a game that would’ve been called dated in 1993.

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The carmaker Ford has filed a patent that could see vehicles with long overdue loans repossess themselves – or just drive to the scrapyard. CC-licensed photo by dave_7dave_7 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.

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

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

Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments • The Drive

Peter Holderith:

»

Average car payments have been rising for a while. Although auto loan delinquency rates have been down since the height of the pandemic, Ford applied for a patent to make the repossession process go smoother. For the bank, that is.

The patent document was submitted to the United States Patent Office in August 2021 but it was formally published Feb. 23. It’s titled “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle.” It describes several ways to make the life of somebody who has missed several car payments harder.

It explicitly says the system, which could be installed on any future vehicle in the automaker’s lineup with a data connection would be capable of “[disabling] a functionality of one or more components of the vehicle.” Everything from the engine to the air conditioning. For vehicles with autonomous or semi-autonomous driving capability, the system could “move the vehicle from a first spot to a second spot that is more convenient for a tow truck to tow the vehicle… move the vehicle from the premises of the owner to a location such as, for example, the premises of the repossession agency,” or, if the lending institution considers the “financial viability of executing a repossession procedure” to be unjustifiable, the vehicle could drive itself to the junkyard.

No other automakers have recently attempted to patent a similar system, and indeed the Ford patent doesn’t reference any other legal document for the sake of clarifying its idea. All of this being said, patent documents, especially applications like this one, do not necessarily represent an automaker’s intent to introduce the described feature, process, or technology to its vehicles. Ford might just be attempting to protect this idea for the sake of doing so. The document does go into a lot of detail as to how such a system might work, though.

«

You can imagine so many ways that this could, and surely will, go wrong.
unique link to this extract

Apple responds to EU’s decision to narrow antitrust case prompted by Spotify • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

The European Commission on Tuesday announced it has narrowed its antitrust investigation into Apple’s rules for streaming music apps. In a revised Statement of Objections sent to Apple, the Commission said it will no longer challenge Apple’s requirement for apps to use the App Store’s in-app purchase system for digital goods and services. The investigation began in 2019 after Spotify filed an antitrust complaint against Apple.

The investigation will now focus entirely on Apple preventing streaming music apps from informing iPhone and iPad users within the app that lower subscription prices are available when signing up outside of the App Store. Subscriptions can sometimes cost extra when initiated through the App Store compared to directly on an app’s website, as developers look to offset Apple’s 15% to 30% fee on in-app subscriptions.

The Commission’s preliminary view is that Apple’s rules equate to “anti-steering” and “unfair trading conditions,” in breach of EU antitrust law. The Commission added that the rules are “detrimental to users of music streaming services on Apple’s mobile devices” given they may end up paying more and “negatively affect the interests of music streaming app developers by limiting effective consumer choice.”

In a statement shared with MacRumors, an Apple spokesperson said the company is “pleased” that the Commission has narrowed its case

«

As Ben Thompson commented, the Commission seems to have realised that Apple’s going to take its 30% cut from apps that go through any sort of in-app purchase (example: dating apps in Holland), so now it’s going to focus on how Apple prevents apps telling you to just go to their website for a better deal.
unique link to this extract

Tokyo makes solar panels mandatory for new homes built after 2025 • Reuters

Kantaro Komiya:

»

All new houses in Tokyo built by large-scale homebuilders after April 2025 must install solar power panels to cut household carbon emissions, according to a new regulation passed by the Japanese capital’s local assembly on Thursday.

The mandate, the first of its kind for a Japanese municipality, requires about 50 major builders to equip homes of up to 2,000 square metres (21,500 square feet) with renewable energy power sources, mainly solar panels.

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike noted last week that just 4% of buildings where solar panels could be installed in the city have them now. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government aims to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared with 2000 levels.

«

Why only Tokyo, though?
unique link to this extract

How ‘Bling Empire’ star Kelly Mi Li’s ex-husband Lin Miao pulled off a $130m cell phone scandal • Esquire

Mickey Rapkin:

»

If you had an Internet connection at any point in the aughts, you’ll likely remember a series of pop-up and banner advertisements designed to prey on the lonely and insecure, the gullible, and the vulnerable. These ads appeared all over social media and inside games like FarmVille, and they made bizarre promises. My Luv Crush informed users they had a secret admirer—and it was someone they knew. Text NOW to find out who before the message expires! Another ad promised to reveal a user’s IQ score if they would answer twenty questions like “What color is the ocean?” One promotion offered “Free Justin Bieber Tickets!”

These advertisements might have been annoying, but they appeared to be innocuous. In fact, they were at the center of one of the largest cybercrime rings ever assembled, and its story has been largely untold until now because one of the last perpetrators was only just sentenced after years of testifying against his co-conspirators. The crime: sneaking hard-to-cancel, recurring monthly payments onto cellphone bills, sometimes those of people who never even subscribed. The perpetrators: mostly college-age kids. The implications for the telecom industry, federal regulators, and your phone bill: incalculable.

The idea was pioneered by a Chinese immigrant named Lin Miao. Miao was brought to Salt Lake City at age 12 with no winter coat. He built his first computer with spare parts he found at garage sales. Then, in college, he co-founded an online advertising network that would eventually be valued at $130 million.

His story appeared in one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul books devoted to “extraordinary teens.”

With his success came private jets to Las Vegas, $400,000 monthly credit-card bills, and sugar babies—so many sugar babies. That all vanished in 2015, when a team of FBI agents greeted Miao as he got off a plane at LAX and arrested him on charges of wire fraud and money laundering. While he has testified in court, he has not spoken publicly about his crimes until now.

«

In a sense, he himself was conned by the whole ringtone business – which gave him a piece of the riches that the carriers were juicing from unsuspecting users 20 years ago. Except he got the threat of jail time.
unique link to this extract

COVID-19 pandemic ‘most likely’ started in Wuhan lab, FBI Director Christopher Wray says • USA Today via Yahoo

Candy Woodall:

»

 The COVID-19 pandemic “most likely” started after a Wuhan laboratory leak in China, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday.

He publicly confirmed the bureau’s assessment of the lab leak theory for the first time during an interview with Fox News.

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray said. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”

Since the first case of COVID in the U.S. in January 2020, the Chinese government has tried to “thwart and obfuscate” investigations into the origin of the pandemic, Wray said.

The Wall Street Journal and CNN previously reported that the FBI had “moderate confidence” in the lab leak theory in 2021, a year after COVID-19 reached the U.S.

Wray’s admission marks the second government agency to publicly back the lab leak theory. The Department of Energy also has backed the assessment  that COVID began in a lab, but has labeled it with its “low confidence” rating. .

Other intelligence agencies are split or undecided on the origin, with some having “low confidence” that COVID-19 began naturally when the virus transmitted from an animal to a human.

However, all intelligence agencies agree COVID-19 wasn’t the result of biological warfare, according to the Wall Street Journal.

«

Ugh. OK, let’s do this. Two competing hypotheses: lab leak, or natural origin. Every other novel zoonosis (animal-human disease transmission) we’ve ever seen has come from natural origins, including the first SARS, which was finally traced to a bat cave in Yunnan, hundreds of miles away from where the first human case was observed, via another animal intermediary (civets).

This doesn’t make a lab leak impossible. It leaves it as a possibility. But without very clear evidence, which needs to be shared 🙄, it’s irresponsible of the FBI to say that it’s “most likely”. We don’t know, and quite possibly won’t ever know. But some people hate not knowing. They simply cannot bear saying “we don’t know, and perhaps never will.”
unique link to this extract

Twitter back after two-hour outage affected tweets • BBC News

»

Thousands of people around the world were unable to use Twitter for two hours on Wednesday after the social network suffered another outage.

The Following and For you feeds – which display tweets on the platform’s homepage – instead carried a notice reading “Welcome to Twitter”. 

The outage-tracking site DownDetector reported the issues at 10:00 GMT, but they appeared to be resolved by 12:00.

It came after Twitter reportedly laid off 200 staff members on Monday.

More than 5,000 people in the UK alone reported problems to DownDetector within half an hour of the fault appearing, with many more affected worldwide.

The For you feed, a collection of tweets from people similar to those they follow, seemed to be reinstated just an hour after the initial issue emerged, but the Following feed, which collects tweets from people who users are following on Twitter, took longer to be fixed.

The site’s search tool is also working again, after it briefly stopped displaying any tweets in the Latest tab.

…Alp Toker, director of internet outage tracker NetBlocks, said Twitter’s reliability issues have increased under Mr Musk’s tenure as CEO.

“It started shortly before the Musk takeover itself,” he said, but added: “The main spike has happened after the takeover, with four to five incidents in a month – which was comparable to what used to happen in a year.”

«

The campaign to Save The Fail Whale is succeeding.
unique link to this extract

TikTok will limit teens to 60 minutes of screen time a day • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

TikTok has announced a batch of new features intended to reduce screen time and improve the well-being of its younger users.

In the coming weeks, a daily screen time limit of 60 minutes will be automatically applied to every TikTok user under 18 years old. Teens that hit this limit will be asked to enter a passcode to continue watching. They can disable the feature entirely, but if they do so and spend more than 100 minutes on TikTok a day, they’ll be asked to set a new limit.

TikTok claims these prompts increased the use of its screen time management tools by 234% during the feature’s first month of testing. Teens will also be sent an inbox notification each week that recaps their screen time, allowing younger users to be aware of how much time they spend on the app and requiring that they make active decisions to extend the recommended screen time.

TikTok says it consulted current academic research and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital when deciding how long the time restriction should be.

“While there’s no collectively-endorsed position on how much screen time is ‘too much’, or even the impact of screen time more broadly, we recognise that teens typically require extra support as they start to explore the online world independently,” said Cormac Keenan, Head of Trust and Safety at TikTok, in a statement.

«

Though it’s not as if they’re being asked to write an essay or solve a differential equation to do this, are they? It’s not going to prevent the most determined, and they’re the ones who actually do need some sort of intervention. Sure, they consulted on “how long”, but not, apparently, on how to deter.
unique link to this extract

Microsoft’s implementation of Bing Chat AI on Windows 11 is complete trash • Windows Central

Zac Bowden:

»

Yesterday, Microsoft made a big hubbub about a new Windows 11 update that allegedly puts AI at the forefront of the Windows experience, via a “typable” search box that’s now found on the Taskbar by default. The company is headlining the update with this functionality, but the actual “feature” is nothing more than an advertisement for Bing.com.

Reading the Microsoft announcement for this new Windows 11 feature update, you’d be led to believe that Windows 11’s search experience is now powered by AI. But it isn’t. There’s no AI in Windows Search. Microsoft’s clever Bing Chat AI isn’t even integrated with any shell interface you might see within Windows. 

No, what Microsoft announced yesterday is the ability to quickly launch Bing.com’s new chat bot, without having to manually type “bing.com” into an address bar first. That’s literally all that this is. The Windows Search landing page now has a banner for Bing.com, and two suggested chat prompts that it recommends you try to get a feel for how Bing Chat works.

Clicking on any of the buttons and links related to Bing Chat will take you out of Windows Search and into Microsoft Edge, where you can continue using Bing Chat if you please. At no point is Windows doing anything AI related, because Microsoft hasn’t actually added AI to search on Windows 11 with this latest feature drop.

«

Oh well – if you can get enough people to believe it, then it must be true, right?
unique link to this extract

Revolut’s auditor warns 2021 revenues ‘may be materially misstated’ • Financial Times

Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan and Michael O’Dwyer:

»

Revolut’s auditor warned that the design of the fintech’s IT systems meant there was a risk that the bulk of its 2021 revenues were materially misstated even as it turned a profit for the first time that year.

The crypto boom helped Revolut report on Wednesday a net profit of £26mn in 2021 compared with a £223mn loss the previous year. Revenues in 2021 almost tripled to £636mn.

But the group’s auditor, BDO, issued a qualified opinion on Revolut’s overdue accounts because it had been unable to fully verify £477mn of revenues — including its foreign exchange and wealth department, which includes crypto.

Auditors said in their report into the accounts that they had been “unable to satisfy ourselves as to the completeness” of these revenues, meaning that references to the company’s revenues “may be materially misstated”.

Revolut has evolved from a low-fee money transfer service to offer bank accounts across Europe through its Lithuanian banking licence. It is also registered as an e-money institution in the UK. A funding round in the summer of 2021 valued the group at $33bn and ensured it did not have to return to the market as tech valuations crumbled last year.

Approximately a third of its revenues in 2021 came from its cryptocurrency trading business, Revolut said. The fintech first made a move into crypto in 2017, ahead of most of its rivals.

…Revolut was required to submit accounts for the year ending December 2021 to Companies House in September 2022. The fintech was then given an extension until the end of December — a deadline it had also failed to meet.

«

Smoke sighted, now seeking the fire.
unique link to this extract

Some personal user experiences • Vitalik Buterin

Buterin, in case you didn’t know, is the founder of Ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency, behind bitcoin:

»

In 2013, I went to a sushi restaurant beside the Internet Archive in San Francisco, because I had heard that it accepted bitcoin for payments and I wanted to try it out. When it came time to pay the bill, I asked to pay in BTC. I scanned the QR code, and clicked “send”. To my surprise, the transaction did not go through; it appeared to have been sent, but the restaurant was not receiving it. I tried again, still no luck. I soon figured out that the problem was that my mobile internet was not working well at the time. I had to walk over 50 meters toward the Internet Archive nearby to access its wifi, which finally allowed me to send the transaction.

Lesson learned: internet is not 100% reliable, and customer internet is less reliable than merchant internet. We need in-person payment systems to have some functionality (NFC, customer shows a QR code, whatever) to allow customers to transfer their transaction data directly to the merchant if that’s the best way to get it broadcasted.

«

In the ten years since, do you think it’s got easier to do everyday transactions? He’s got some experiences to tell you about.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: The fatality rate for human drivers – including drunk drivers – is 1 per 100 million miles driven, at least in the US. Thanks Ken T for the update. Puts the Waymo data (1 fatality in 1 million miles) into perspective.

With a million miles under their wheels, Waymo’s cars have been involved in just two crashes. CC-licensed photo by zombieitezombieite 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

COVID-19 app saved estimated 10,000 lives in its first year, research finds • University of Oxford

»

A team of experts at the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford and Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick estimate the NHS COVID-19 app prevented around 1 million cases, 44,000 hospitalizations and 9,600 deaths during its first year.

The new research, published in Nature Communications, is the most comprehensive evaluation of the NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app to date.

Researchers analyzed the NHS COVID-19 app in England and Wales in the first year of its use—September 2020 to September 2021. They found that the app played an important role in reducing transmission of COVID-19 in England and Wales. The app experienced high user engagement, identified infectious contacts well, and helped to prevent significant numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

Professor Christophe Fraser, principal investigator at the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine and the paper’s senior author said, “Many of us will remember being ‘pinged’ by the NHS COVID-19 app at the height of the pandemic, and the impact that self-isolating had on our daily lives.”

“Our research shows that the NHS COVID-19 app worked, and it worked well. Through our analysis we estimate the app saved almost 10,000 lives in its first year alone.”

«

Not as many as the vaccines, but for a purely electronic system, which was introduced before the vaccines, impressive.
unique link to this extract

Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022 • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

Three different cybercriminal groups claimed access to internal networks at communications giant T-Mobile in more than 100 separate incidents throughout 2022, new data suggests. In each case, the goal of the attackers was the same: Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service that could be hired to divert any T-Mobile user’s text messages and phone calls to another device.

The conclusions above are based on an extensive analysis of Telegram chat logs from three distinct cybercrime groups or actors that have been identified by security researchers as particularly active in and effective at “SIM-swapping,” which involves temporarily seizing control over a target’s mobile phone number.

Countless websites and online services use SMS text messages for both password resets and multi-factor authentication. This means that stealing someone’s phone number often can let cybercriminals hijack the target’s entire digital life in short order — including access to any financial, email and social media accounts tied to that phone number.

All three SIM-swapping entities that were tracked for this story remain active in 2023, and they all conduct business in open channels on the instant messaging platform Telegram. KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those channels or groups here because they will simply migrate to more private servers if exposed publicly, and for now those servers remain a useful source of intelligence about their activities.

Each advertises their claimed access to T-Mobile systems in a similar way. At a minimum, every SIM-swapping opportunity is announced with a brief “Tmobile up!” or “Tmo up!” message to channel participants. Other information in the announcements includes the price for a single SIM-swap request, and the handle of the person who takes the payment and information about the targeted subscriber.

«

Which is why you don’t really want to do any authorisation through SMS. None at all.
unique link to this extract

A basic iPhone feature helps criminals steal your entire digital life • WSJ

Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen:

»

In the early hours of Thanksgiving weekend, Reyhan Ayas was leaving a bar in Midtown Manhattan when a man she had just met snatched her iPhone 13 Pro Max.

Within a few minutes, the 31-year-old, a senior economist at a workforce intelligence startup, could no longer get into her Apple account and all the stuff attached to it, including photos, contacts and notes. Over the next 24 hours, she said, about $10,000 vanished from her bank account.

Similar stories are piling up in police stations around the country. Using a remarkably low-tech trick, thieves watch iPhone owners tap their passcodes, then steal their targets’ phones—and their digital lives.

The thieves are exploiting a simple vulnerability in the software design of over one billion iPhones active globally. It centers on the passcode, the short string of numbers that grants access to a device; and passwords, generally longer alphanumeric combinations that serve as the logins for different accounts.

With only the iPhone and its passcode, an interloper can within seconds change the password associated with the iPhone owner’s Apple ID. This would lock the victim out of their account, which includes anything stored in iCloud. The thief can also often loot the phone’s financial apps since the passcode can unlock access to all the device’s stored passwords.

“Once you get into the phone, it’s like a treasure box,” said Alex Argiro, who investigated a high-profile theft ring as a New York Police Department detective before retiring last fall.

…An examination of the recent spate of thefts reveals a possible gap in Apple’s armor. The company’s defenses are designed around common attack scenarios—the hacker on the internet attempting to use a person’s login credentials, or the thief on the street looking to snatch an iPhone for a quick sale.

They don’t necessarily account for the fog of a late-night bar scene full of young people, where predators befriend their victims and maneuver them into revealing their passcodes. Once thieves possess both passcode and phone, they can exploit a feature Apple intentionally designed as a convenience: allowing forgetful customers to use their passcode to reset the Apple account password.

«

There’s also a discussion of this at Tidbits, with a simple suggestion for how to protect yourself against this. (Android phones have this vulnerability too.)
unique link to this extract

Elon Musk’s Twitter is a disaster for disaster planning • The Atlantic

Juliette Kayyem is faculty chair of the homeland security program at Harvard Kennedy School of Government:

»

Twitter was useful in saving lives during natural disasters and man-made crises. Emergency-management officials have used the platform to relate timely information to the public—when to evacuate during Hurricane Ian, in 2022; when to hide from a gunman during the Michigan State University shootings earlier this month—while simultaneously allowing members of the public to transmit real-time data. The platform didn’t just provide a valuable communications service; it changed the way emergency management functions.

That’s why Musk-era Twitter alarms so many people in my field. The platform has been downgraded in multiple ways: Service is glitchier; efforts to contain misleading information are patchier; the person at the top seems largely dismissive of outside input. But now that the platform has embedded itself so deeply in the disaster-response world, it’s difficult to replace. The rapidly deteriorating situation raises questions about platforms’ obligation to society—questions that prickly tech execs generally don’t want to consider.

…Four days after the company’s API announcement, a massive earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, killing at least 46,000 people. In an enormous geographic area, API data can help narrow down who is saying what, who is stuck where, and where limited supplies should be delivered first. Amid complaints about what abandoning free API access would mean in that crisis, Twitter postponed the restriction. Still, its long-term intentions are uncertain, and some public-spirited deployments of the API by outside researchers—such as a ProPublica bot tracking politicians’ deleted tweets—appear to be breaking down.

Meanwhile, Musk’s policy of offering “verified” status to all paying customers is making information on the platform less dependable. Twitter’s blue checks originally signified that the company had made some effort to verify an account owner’s identity. Soon after Musk made them available to Twitter Blue subscribers, an enterprising jokester bought a handle impersonating the National Weather Service.

«

unique link to this extract

Waymo’s driverless cars were involved in two crashes and 18 ‘minor contact events’ over 1 million miles • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

Waymo announced recently that its fully driverless vehicles in California and Arizona have traveled 1 million miles as of January 2023. To recognize this milestone, the Alphabet-owned company pulled back the curtain on some interesting statistics, including the number of crashes and vehicle collisions that involved its robot cars.

Waymo operates a fleet of driverless cars in Phoenix, San Francisco, and the Bay Area. Some of those trips include paying customers. The company also recently started testing its driverless vehicles in Los Angeles.

Over that 1 million miles, Waymo’s vehicles were involved in only two crashes that met the criteria for inclusion in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s database for car crashes, called the Crash Investigation Sampling System (CISS). In general, these are crashes that were reported to the police and involved at least one vehicle being towed away. Of the two crashes that met the criteria, Waymo says its vehicle was rear-ended by another vehicle whose driver was looking at their phone while approaching a red light.

…Waymo says 10 of 18 of these minor contact events involved another driver colliding with a stationary Waymo vehicle, and two occurred at night. None of the events took place at intersections, where most vehicle crashes occur, nor did any involve pedestrians, cyclists, or other vulnerable road users.

«

That’s the sort of statistic that any human would be shouting from the rooftops. Although it depends on what sort of roads you’ve been driving on.
unique link to this extract

This model does not exist • Meet Ailice

»

Hey, I’m Ailice 👋

I do not exist, I was created by AI.

I post daily photos of my life on Instagram. Help me pick the photo of the day by upvoting your favorites. Every day, the best one gets posted on my Instagram.

«

Some of the pictures are weird, some are impressive. So many are in strange situations.
unique link to this extract

AI, ChatGPT, and Bing…Oh My. And Sydney too • Learning By Shipping

Steven Sinofsky:

»

Lots of 4-D chess predicting where things will go. Who will win or lose? How much a platform shift is “AI” or not? It’s too soon to know. If PC, phone, cloud, or internet are a guide — wary/pessimists will quickly fall behind because exponential growth is like that.

There are parallels to learn from and help guide us on how technology will evolve. Not the one path, but the sorts of paths that can follow. History rhymes. Why? Because both producers and consumers are humans and humans follow patterns, not precisely though.

First, in the next 6–12 months every product (site/app) that has a free form text field will have an “AI-enhanced” text field. All text entered (spoken) will be embellished, corrected, refined, or “run through” an LLM. Every text box becomes a prompt box.

This is a trivial add for most any product. Some will enhance with more bells & whistles. For example there might be an automatic suggestion (API costs aside) or several specific “query expansions” that take the text and guide the enhancement. Everyone will call the API.

This will be done to call attention to the new feature but also to add more surface area upon which to prove there is some depth to the work beyond just feeding what one types to the LLM.

This reminds me of the mundane example of spell-checking moved from a stand alone feature to integrated into word processing to suites and then 💥 it showed up in the browser. All of a sudden it wasn’t an app feature but every text box had squiggles.

«

Plenty more here, from the guy who saw Windows and Office go from idea to product.
unique link to this extract

The tech tycoon martyrdom charade • Anil Dash

Dash documents an intriguing example of, well, social warming:

»

I’ve been saying this for a few years now, but it’s worth recording here for the record: It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble. Their level of paranoia and contrived self-victimization is off the charts, and is getting worse now that they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by their own acolytes.

In a way, it’s sort of like a “VC Qanon”, and it colors almost everything that some of the most powerful people in the tech industry see and do — and not just in their companies or work, but in culture, politics and society overall. We’re already seeing more and more irrational, extremist decision-making that can only be understood through this lens, because on its own their choices seem increasingly unfathomable.

To be clear, there are still really thoughtful, smart people in positions of leadership in tech as executives, founders or investors, who aren’t participating in this mass delusion, but few of these good actors feel like they have the power to speak out against the rising extremism of the big tycoons. That power is especially coercive since even very established players rely on these newly-extremist figures for funding their companies or for business deals that they are dependent upon. And we know that, once reasonable voices stop speaking, only the most extreme ideas will dominate the conversation.

«

Absolutely classic pattern that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Social Warming: the research by Cass Sunstein about closed groups tending towards an extreme position applies all over. One of the most obvious examples was the targeting of the reporter Taylor Lorenz by VCs for doing her job – a job that they discovered wasn’t so simple.
unique link to this extract

LastPass says employee’s home computer was hacked and corporate vault taken • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Already smarting from a breach that put partially encrypted login data into a threat actor’s hands, LastPass on Monday said that the same attacker hacked an employee’s home computer and obtained a decrypted vault available to only a handful of company developers.

Although an initial intrusion into LastPass ended on August 12, officials with the leading password manager said the threat actor “was actively engaged in a new series of reconnaissance, enumeration, and exfiltration activity” from August 12 to August 26. In the process, the unknown threat actor was able to steal valid credentials from a senior DevOps engineer and access the contents of a LastPass data vault. Among other things, the vault gave access to a shared cloud-storage environment that contained the encryption keys for customer vault backups stored in Amazon S3 buckets.

“This was accomplished by targeting the DevOps engineer’s home computer and exploiting a vulnerable third-party media software package, which enabled remote code execution capability and allowed the threat actor to implant keylogger malware,” LastPass officials wrote. “The threat actor was able to capture the employee’s master password as it was entered, after the employee authenticated with MFA, and gain access to the DevOps engineer’s LastPass corporate vault.”

«

That “vulnerable third-party media software package” was Plex. An amazing chain of hacks to get into the target. But that’s how hackers work. LastPass really doesn’t look very clever now: developers working at home have computers that aren’t locked down?
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you’re smart enough, you can reverse engineer Twitter’s algorithm to make your tweets go viral. Use with care, though.

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. Non-infectious. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

I remembered how awful it is to go viral • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick decided to figure out what makes stuff go viral on Twitter these days, from first principles:

»

I recently noticed Musk doing a very specific trick that is mainly done by teenage tweetdeckers trying to sell dildos and promote Telegram channels for hentai, NFT spam bots, and, of course, weird tech guys making long threads about growth-hacking their open relationships using their Notion second brain or whatever. He was replying to his own tweets.

Extremely cringe, but useful for me in trying to reverse engineer how this extremely broken website works now!

So my hypothesis went like this: Twitter is using invisible subreddits via Topics to algorithmically organize tweets. Because the For You page isn’t chronological anymore, viral tweets can’t be as timely as they used to be. They have to be kind of evergreen. It helps if they’re commenting on something that’s already going viral. And it really helps if you post a thread, reply to yourself, or create some kind of discussion in the replies. There also seems to be a bigger emphasis on video now.

My first attempt at gaming the algorithm was this thread about the dangers of AI. It was a long thread about a topic that I knew Twitter was tracking, AI, and it was a hot take that generated a lot of replies. And it worked! It’s the first tweet I’ve had break 1,000 retweets since November 2022.

Cool, but I wanted to try it again and lean even further into the algorithm, which meant I needed to find a video that was already going viral and getting a lot of quote tweets, reply to a bunch of replies, reply to myself, and make sure it was something totally evergreen. And if you want to go viral it’s always best to focus on something you sincerely care about, so, when I saw this video about Marvel movies going viral and getting lots of quote tweets, I decided to jump in, as well. My tweet wasn’t hugely popular initially, but I spent about 45 minutes replying to people who commented on it. Then I closed the app and didn’t check it until the next day.

«

Yes, you guessed. His conclusion:

»

Anyways, I can safely say I understand how Twitter works now. It’s basically just Reddit moving at the speed of Tumblr. Which is pretty sad tbh.

«

unique link to this extract

Twitter Blue head Esther Crawford is out at Twitter • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Twitter product manager Esther Crawford no longer has a job at the company following yet another wave of layoffs, as first reported by Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer. Crawford headed up various projects at Twitter, including the company’s Blue with verification subscription as well as Twitter’s forthcoming payments platform.

Alex Heath of The Verge confirmed Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off this weekend, leading to speculation that Twitter’s owner Elon Musk may be about to install a new regime at the company.

In a recent interview, Musk said, “I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place in that the product roadmap is clearly laid out” before guessing that “before the end of the year” would be a good time to find a replacement for himself as Twitter CEO.

During her time at Twitter, Crawford emerged as one of Twitter’s most prominent product managers under Elon Musk’s leadership, and notably tweeted a picture of herself on the floor of Twitter’s office in a sleeping bag and eye mask. “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” the tweet reads.

«

The NYT says that around 200, out of 2,000, were fired. There’ll be a lot of schadenfreude at Crawford’s departure: she wasn’t popular among ex-Twitter staff for her relentless upbeat approach to Musk’s slash-and-burn school of management. Though she hadn’t updated her Twitter profile on Tuesday (it still read “product @Twitter”), she did acknowledge her firing with a tweet saying “The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos.”

To which the Aussie pixelatedboat replied, with sarcasm you’d only recognise if you know his normal tweets, “Thank you, all your hard work is reflected in the current twitter user experience.”

The replies to Crawford’s tweet break down pretty clearly into “Silicon Valley startup types who believe work should consume you” and “people who think you’re allowed a life beyond work”.
unique link to this extract

We tried Vertu’s ‘Web3’ phone. It scared us • WIRED

Andrew Williams:

»

Why won’t Vertu die? It’s the cockroach of phone companies. The once huge LG made its smartphone exit in 2021. HTC and Sony are just about clinging on by their fingertips. And yet the ultra-niche Vertu just recently announced a phone as bold and bombastic as anything it has made to date: the Metavertu. 

It starts at £2,787 ($3,330), then tops out at a mind-boggling £34,534 ($41,262) for the borderline offensive Himalaya Alligator Leather 18K Gold & Diamond model. And that may not even be the most eye-opening part. Vertu markets this thing as the “world’s first Web3 phone,” a claim that would set off alarm bells had they not already been ringing since first sight of the Vertu name.

Why? Over the years, Vertu has been responsible for some of the most tasteless and gaudy phones to roll off a production line. It started off as a Nokia side brand in 1998. Those early years gave us some undeniably striking phones, like the relatively elegant Vertu Signature from 2003. 

By 2012, Nokia’s phone market share had dropped from heights of 50.8% to under 5%. Vertu was sold to a private equity group, then bounced between owners from Turkey and China.

«

Now, it’s basically selling rebranded ZTE handsets. However, to use the Web3 aspect..:

»

Vertu demands you supply not just your real name and either your drivers license number or passport number to use Vshot, but a picture of its information page and a picture of you holding your ID. You’re left waiting up to five minutes with the load bar spinning before you’ll see this bizarre info request, too.

If this doesn’t make you worried, it should. Vertu’s terms of service claims this ID is required by the People’s Republic of China, and goes on to leave one with the impression that maybe you shouldn’t bet the bank on any “due diligence” from Vertu in checking the apps made available through the Dapp store, among other worrying clauses. The entire poorly written script doesn’t quite reach the levels of “if you use this software, you are on your own should something go wrong,” but let’s just say it is very different from the T+Cs pages you’d expect from any “normal” app store. We’re certainly not in the Google Play Store anymore.

Never before have I used a phone where I felt so unsafe, one that feels like it could be used to scam me—though, to be clear, I have no evidence that it is. This really is a Web3 phone, then, just perhaps not in the sense the aspiring crypto bros hoped for.

«

unique link to this extract

Boris Becker: ‘I’m still in the game. Just have to play better’ • Financial Times

Henry Mance got the first English interview with the former Wimbledon champion, who was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for tax evasion (but served just “eight months and six days”, he says):

»

His lawyer said his career earnings were $50mn.

“I was not careless. I had good investments with the car dealerships, with real estate. I was cash-poor and asset-rich. You have a divorce, you have another one. It goes quick! It wasn’t that I was spending it on the Ferrari and the gold Rolexes. It wasn’t also that I was poor. I had a lot of income, but I had a lot of expenditure. I’ve financed three families.”

He tells me that his dream was to become a billionaire and buy a football club. He denies reports that he lost £10mn investing in Nigerian oil. He did buy a 12-bedroom villa in Mallorca, and spend £22,000 a month renting a house in Wimbledon. He was “maybe too generous” with gifts. During his trial, he was seen entering Harrods. “That photo is actually wrong. I was hiding from the paparazzi. I never shopped at Harrods.”

As for the unauthorised payments for which he was sentenced, “I used that money to pay my ex-wife child support, to support my wife at the time, to pay rent, to pay for my doctor for my knee surgery, and to pay for my lawyer’s bill that advised me that I can do that.

“The British justice system is brutal — for everybody! Including for me. I’ve paid back in the region of €16mn for [failing to repay] a €3.5mn loan. Don’t ask me my opinion because I might get arrested again . . . I lost my house in Germany, my flat in London, my house in Mallorca.”

Has he learnt his lesson? “What lessons should I have to learn? That I have to be careful with my money. Yes. Should I have better advisers? Yes . . . When I’m at my best in tennis, who do I listen to in my matches? I listen to myself. I’m going to start listening to my common sense, instead of having these tens of advisers and lawyers. I’m actually pretty good with numbers, believe it or not.”

Later, when I check his figures for the charges he faced and the jail time he served, I find they are off: he faced 24 charges, not 29, and spent seven months and 17 days inside.

«

A remarkable fact: he’s 55, and his left knee, right ankle and both hips are replacements. That’s what playing pro tennis on hard courts does to you. Mance says he was one of the most fascinating interview subjects he’s ever spoken to.
unique link to this extract

UK needs its own ‘BritGPT’ or will face an uncertain future, MPs hear • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

The UK needs to support the creation of a British version of ChatGPT, MPs were told on Wednesday, or the country would further lose the ability to determine its own fate.

Speaking to the Commons science and technology committee, Adrian Joseph, BT’s chief data and artificial intelligence officer, said the government needed to have a national investment in “large language models”, the AI that underpins services such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat and Google’s Bard.

Without such technology, the nation would struggle to compete internationally in future, he said.

“We think there’s a risk that we in the UK, lose out to the the large tech companies, and possibly China, and get left behind … in areas of cybersecurity, of healthcare, and so on. It is a massive arms race that has been around for some time, but the heat has certainly been turned up most recently.”

Dame Wendy Hall, who co-chaired the UK government’s AI review in 2017, concurred with the need to develop a BritGPT. “If we don’t do it, we just become a service industry country,” she told MPs. “But in the UK, we can harness the technology, use that to drive the economy and grow jobs.”

The computing power required to perform cutting-edge AI work is expensive, MPs were told, which prevents the UK’s leading researchers in the field from competing directly with large, well-funded US companies.

“University researchers are at risk of being left behind,” said Nigel Shadbolt, the chair of the Open Data Institute, “because their access to the kinds of [computing power] you need is not organised terribly systematically. We’ve got to think about we can sustainably guarantee our access to that.”

«

A national investment in LLMs? I suppose the idea is that rather like JANET, the high-speed internet system that links universities, you could fund an LLM system that would be available to researchers there. But that’s not a commercial system. Would you rent it out on a timeshare system? But then what’s the difference between that and a bigger one such as OpenAI will have? And just as a reminder, OpenAI has had more than a billion dollars of investment, and Microsoft is pushing another $10bn into it over the coming years. Meanwhile Britain has striking nurses and doctors.
unique link to this extract

International Baccalaureate lets pupils use ChatGPT to write essays • The Times

Nicola Woolcock, Education Editor:

»

Children will be allowed to quote from work generated by ChatGPT in their essays, a leading qualification body has revealed.

The International Baccalaureate said it will not ban the AI chatbot, which can be used for plagiarism, suggesting it was similar to dealing with cheating parents and essay mills.

Matt Glanville, head of assessment principles and practice at the IB, said children can use work generated by ChatGPT so long as they do not pass it off as their own.

In the long run, he said the qualification would heavily reduce its reliance on essays because other skills were now more important than essay-writing.

The IB is taken by thousands of pupils each year at more than 120 British schools. Glanville said those working in schools or assessment should be excited rather than terrified by ChatGPT and “embrace it as an extraordinary opportunity”. He likened it to spellchecking software and translation apps.

He said: “The clear line between using ChatGPT and providing original work is exactly the same as using ideas taken from other people or the internet. As with any quote or material adapted from another source, it must be credited in the body of the text and appropriately referenced in the bibliography.

“Essay-writing is, however, being profoundly challenged by the rise of new technology and there’s no doubt that it will have much less prominence in the future.

«

Seems reasonable to me. (IB is about equivalent to A levels, except there are more subjects.) You might as well get children used to how the world is going to be when they’re adults, and pretty much no adult has to write long essays.
unique link to this extract

Classes resume Monday after ‘encryption event’ in Minneapolis schools • Sahan Journal

Becky Dernbach:

»

Minneapolis Public Schools will open for in-person instruction as usual Monday, after a week of disruptions from “technical difficulties” and snow.

In an email to families and students, Minneapolis Public Schools described the technical issues as an “encryption event.” 

What is an “encryption event”?

“I don’t have any specifics past that,” a district spokesperson told Sahan Journal.

The problems affected the operability of systems including internet, phones, cameras, badge access, copiers/printers, and building alarms, the district said in its email to Minneapolis families. All of these systems have been restored, or soon will be. Some systems may still be down Monday as the district assesses protective measures.

…The “encryption event” resulted in the shutdown of many Minneapolis Public Schools systems for a full week. But due to a fluke of timing, the technical difficulties did not cause any missed instructional days.

On Monday, schools were closed for Presidents’ Day; Tuesday was also scheduled as a “non-school day” for parent-teacher conferences. Then, because of a predicted snowstorm, Minneapolis Public Schools announced e-learning days for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The technical difficulties did not affect the programs needed for e-learning, like Google Classroom, the district said.

«

This one got squeezed out yesterday, but I love the idea of renaming “ransomware” an “encryption event”. A bit like saying Chicxulub was an “asteroid event”.
unique link to this extract

GoDaddy says a multi-year breach hijacked customer websites and accounts • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

GoDaddy has revealed that its network suffered a multi-year security compromise that allowed unknown attackers to steal company source code, customer and employee login credentials, and install malware that redirected customer websites to malicious sites.

GoDaddy is one of the world’s largest domain registrars, with nearly 21 million customers and revenue in 2022 of almost $4bn. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said that three serious security events starting in 2020 and lasting through 2022 were carried out by the same intruder.

“Based on our investigation, we believe these incidents are part of a multi-year campaign by a sophisticated threat actor group that, among other things, installed malware on our systems and obtained pieces of code related to some services within GoDaddy,” the company stated. The filing said the company’s investigation is ongoing.

The most recent event occurred last December when the threat actor gained access to the cPanel hosting servers customers use to manage websites hosted by GoDaddy. The threat actor then installed malware on the servers that “intermittently redirected random customer websites to malicious sites.”

“We have evidence, and law enforcement has confirmed, that this incident was carried out by a sophisticated and organized group targeting hosting services like GoDaddy,” company officials wrote in a separate statement published on Thursday. “According to information we have received, their apparent goal is to infect websites and servers with malware for phishing campaigns, malware distribution, and other malicious activities.”

A separate event occurred in March 2020, when the threat actor obtained login credentials that gave it access to a “small number” of employee accounts and the hosting accounts of roughly 28,000 customers.

«

Given the installation of malware, my guess would be that this is commercial hackers looking to take over (or hack into) web users’ systems.
unique link to this extract

Zombie newspaper sites rise from the grave • Twin Cities Business

Dan Niepow:

»

What happens when a newspaper dies? Apparently, in some cases, its digital ghost lives on in mysterious, unrecognizable forms.

Minneapolis neighborhood newspaper the Southwest Journal shuttered at the end of 2020, but its web domain continues to post fresh content under the auspices of a Delaware “SEO company” whose leader lives in Serbia. Though the site still includes a few legacy Journal articles now under fictitious bylines, all of the most recent posts are more or less junk content evidently designed to manipulate search engines. There’s a Feb. 10 article about handling raw chicken. Another article highlights the “10 most popular bitcoin casino games.”

While there is a recent article on creating “a breathtaking rock garden” written from the perspective of someone purportedly living in the East Harriet neighborhood, the site’s content, generally speaking, is no longer in line with the Journal’s longstanding coverage of South Minneapolis neighborhoods.

The “Contact Us” link at the bottom of the site pointed to an email address connected to an entity known as Shantel LLC.

According to its own website, Shantel LLC is an “SEO company” from Delaware, and, as of Feb. 17, its homepage read, “Let’s make the internet a great again!” The company said it specializes in “writing services, SEO optimization services, and similar SEO-related services.” (Shantel LLC’s website was utterly emptied of content around the time this article published, but archived versions of the site include that same company description.)

«

(Just pausing here to wonder who on earth is searching for “bitcoin casino games”. Isn’t bitcoin and all the associated malarkey enough of a casino?) The problem of newspaper domains, of course, being that they may have high trust, or be bookmarked by some people.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The makers of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream are working on versions that will stay good in warmer freezers – to save energy, and money. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart 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. Two scoops? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The art of the shadow: how painters have gotten it wrong for centuries • The MIT Press Reader

Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, whose book “The Visual World of Shadows” deals in even more depth with this topic:

»

Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows — after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics — are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art.

Here, we embark on a journey that takes us through a number of extraordinary pictorial experiments — some successful, some less so, but all interesting. We have singled out some broad categories of solutions to pictorial problems: depicted shadows having trouble negotiating obstacles in their path; shadow shapes and colors that stretch credibility; inconsistent illumination in the scene; and shadow character getting lost. We also find some taboos, that is, self-inflicted limitations on where or what to depict of a shadow.

«

You might think: come on, a shadow’s a shadow, surely? You just.. paint them where they should be? But that hides (ha) all sorts of problems, as they say. There’s no technology here, but a huge amount of fun. Allow some time for the page to load – there are lots of fascinating illustrations. You’ll look at shadows with a lot more interest afterwards.
unique link to this extract

How misinformation about solar power hinders the fight against climate change • NPR

Miranda Green and Michael Copley:

»

Citizens for Responsible Solar is part of a growing backlash against renewable energy in rural communities across the United States. The group, which was started in 2019 and appears to use strategies honed by other activists in campaigns against the wind industry, has helped local groups fighting solar projects in at least 10 states including Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, according to its website.

“I think for years, there has been this sense that this is not all coincidence. That local groups are popping up in different places, saying the same things, using the same online campaign materials,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

Citizens for Responsible Solar seems to be a well-mobilized “national effort to foment local opposition to renewable energy,” Burger adds. “What that reflects is the unfortunate politicization of climate change, the politicization of energy, and, unfortunately, the political nature of the energy transition, which is really just a necessary response to an environmental reality.”

Citizens for Responsible Solar was founded in an exurb of Washington, D.C., by a longtime political operative named Susan Ralston who worked in the White House under President George W. Bush and still has deep ties to power players in conservative politics.

Ralston tapped conservative insiders to help set up and run Citizens for Responsible Solar. She also consulted with a longtime activist against renewable energy who once defended former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claim that noise from wind turbines can cause cancer. And when Ralston was launching the group, a consulting firm she owns got hundreds of thousands of dollars from the foundation of a leading GOP donor who is also a major investor in fossil fuel companies.

«

Gosh, it’s so hard to join the dots, isn’t it.
unique link to this extract

As heat pumps go mainstream, a big question: can they handle real cold? • The New York Times

Elena Shao:

»

Heat pumps, in contrast [to gas or oil furnaces], don’t generate heat. They transfer it. That allows them to achieve more than 300% efficiency in some cases. Because they are more efficient, using heat pumps to cool and heat homes can help homeowners save money on their utility bills, said Sam Calisch, head of special projects at Rewiring America, a nonprofit advocacy group.

In Maine, where heat pump adoption is growing, but where a majority of homes still burn oil, homeowners can save thousands of dollars in annual energy costs by making the switch, according to an analysis from Efficiency Maine, an independent administrator that runs the state’s energy-saving programs.

Many heat pumps that are built for cold climates do have hefty upfront price tags. To soften the blow, a federal tax credit from last year’s climate and tax law can cover 30% of the costs of purchase and installation, up to $2,000.

As they’ve grown in popularity, heat pumps have increasingly been the subject of misconception and, at times, misinformation. Fossil-fuel industry groups have been the origin of many exaggerated and misleading claims, including the assertion that they don’t work in regions with cold climates and are likely to fail in freezing weather.

While heat pumps do become less efficient in subzero temperatures, many models still operate close to normally in temperatures down to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 24 Celsius. Some of the latest models are even more efficient, and many “cold” countries, like Norway, Sweden and Finland, are increasingly embracing heat pumps.

«

According to the data, heat pumps outsold gas furnaces in the US last year (4m+ units v 4m- units) . Though of course, the installed base of gas and oil furnaces is huge; that’s hard to erode.
unique link to this extract

AI assistants help developers produce code that’s insecure • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Computer scientists from Stanford University have found that programmers who accept help from AI tools like Github Copilot produce less secure code than those who fly solo.

In a paper titled, “Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?“, Stanford boffins Neil Perry, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, and Dan Boneh answer that question in the affirmative.

Worse still, they found that AI help tends to delude developers about the quality of their output.

“We found that participants with access to an AI assistant often produced more security vulnerabilities than those without access, with particularly significant results for string encryption and SQL injection,” the authors state in their paper. “Surprisingly, we also found that participants provided access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe that they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant.”

Previously, NYU researchers have shown that AI-based programming suggestions are often insecure in experiments under different conditions. The Stanford authors point to an August 2021 research paper titled “Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the Security of GitHub Copilot’s Code Contributions,” which found that given 89 scenarios, about 40% of the computer programs made with the help of Copilot had potentially exploitable vulnerabilities.

«

Beginning to think AI systems aren’t a panacea after all.
unique link to this extract

Signal would ‘walk’ from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption • BBC News

Chris Vallance:

»

The encrypted-messaging app Signal has said it would stop providing services in the UK if a new law undermined encryption.

If forced to weaken the privacy of its messaging system under the Online Safety Bill, the organisation “would absolutely, 100% walk” Signal president Meredith Whittaker told the BBC.

The government said its proposal was not “a ban on end-to-end encryption”.

The bill, introduced by Boris Johnson, is currently going through Parliament. Critics say companies could be required by Ofcom to scan messages on encrypted apps for child sexual abuse material or terrorism content under the new law. This has worried firms whose business is enabling private, secure communication.

Element, a UK company whose customers include the Ministry of Defence, told the BBC the plan would cost it clients. Previously, WhatsApp has told the BBC it would refuse to lower security for any government.

The government, and prominent child protection charities have long argued that encryption hinders efforts to combat online child abuse – which they say is a growing problem. “It is important that technology companies make every effort to ensure that their platforms do not become a breeding ground for paedophiles,” the Home Office said in a statement. It added “The Online Safety Bill does not represent a ban on end-to-end encryption but makes clear that technological changes should not be implemented in a way that diminishes public safety – especially the safety of children online.

“It is not a choice between privacy or child safety – we can and we must have both.”

…Ms Whittaker told the BBC it was “magical thinking” to believe we can have privacy “but only for the good guys”. She added: “Encryption is either protecting everyone or it is broken for everyone.”

«

Feel as though we’ve been hearing this back-and-forth for a decade at least, from governments of all colours.
unique link to this extract

Is Earth running out of freshwater? • Nautilus

Matthew Birkhold is author of “Chasing Icebergs: How Frozen Freshwater Can Save the Planet”:

»

Brian Gallagher: Is Earth running out of freshwater?

Matthew Birkhold: If we project into the future a little bit to 2030, the global demand for freshwater will exceed supply by 40 percent. Currently, 107 countries lack a sustainably managed water source. And two-thirds of the world’s population in just seven years are going to face regular water shortages. There’s this growing, growing crisis. And it’s easy for people like me to forget about it. So I always like the opportunity to remind people, you know, we’re extremely privileged here. And a lot of people are going to suffer and die because of a lack of freshwater.

How are icebergs going to solve the water crisis? It’s part of the story that we receive about icebergs that they are either really dangerous objects, which they are undoubtedly, or these mythical mystical rarefied gems that are so special that we should just look at them. In reality, icebergs contain a tremendous amount of freshwater. Two-thirds of freshwater on planet Earth is locked away in the poles and ice caps and glaciers. And all we need is a few icebergs to really make a dent into this problem. An iceberg that’s 2,000 feet long and 650 feet wide could supply all of Cape Town, South Africa with water for an entire year. So the question then, is: How do we get that iceberg water to the people who need it?

The answer, I think, is Ed Kean in Newfoundland. It’s these funny guys who are harvesting icebergs off the coast of Canada. They have a lot of the secrets for us because they figured out how to approach these dangerous objects and how to wrangle them into submission.

«

The idea of towing icebergs around seems to pop up every ten years or so, and it’s always slightly eccentric types who are keen to do it. Never seems to happen, though.
unique link to this extract

Unilever tries reformulating its ice cream to survive warmer freezers • WSJ

Katie Deighton:

»

Unilever PLC wants to warm up its ice cream freezers in convenience stores without turning its products into puddles, part of a broader effort to pursue green goals and potentially boost sales in the process.

The consumer packaged goods giant, which sells ice cream brands including Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum, is testing the performance of its products in freezers that are set to temperatures of roughly 10º Fahrenheit (-12.2ºC), up from the industry standard of 0ºF (-18ºC). 

Unilever owns most of the 3 million chest-like freezers that house its ice-cream tubs and treats in bodegas and corner stores, and the energy used to power them accounts for around 10% of Unilever’s greenhouse gas footprint, according to the London-based firm. Keeping ice cream at 10ºF as opposed to 0ºF will reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 20% to 30% per freezer, it said.

It might also help sales with sustainability-minded consumers and even keep stores’ ice-cream selling season going longer. Unilever’s out-of-home ice cream sales declined slightly during the fourth quarter of 2022 because, the company said, some stores unplugged their freezers sooner in the year than usual. 

“What was happening was that shopkeepers in some markets responded to fears about rising energy costs by switching off their cabinets earlier than they otherwise would have done,” departing chief executive Alan Jope said in discussing the results earlier this month.

…But the strategy has required Unilever to reformulate some of its ice creams so they can withstand higher temperatures without melting, losing structural integrity or forfeiting what the company calls their distinctive mouthfeel. Higher temperatures can lead to softer ice creams that stick to wrappers and slide off ice cream sticks, for example, said Andrew Sztehlo, chief research and development officer for Unilever’s ice cream division. Other ingredients such as wafer cones can turn soggy in warmer temperatures, he said.

«

It’s so far taken a decade of work, at undisclosed cost, but the savings would be permanent. And maybe we’d just get used to the different mouthfeel? (The link should give you a free view of the story.)
unique link to this extract

I was an App Store games editor – that’s how I know Apple doesn’t care about games • The Guardian

Neil Long:

»

Late last year, the developer of indie hit Vampire Survivors said it had to rush-release a mobile edition to stem the flow of App Store clones and copycats. Recently a fake ChatGPT app made it through app review and quickly climbed the charts before someone noticed and pulled it from sale. It’s not good enough.

Apple could have reinvested a greater fraction of the billions it has earned from mobile games to make the App Store a good place to find fun, interesting games to fit your tastes. But it hasn’t, and today the App Store is a confusing mess, recently made even worse with the addition of ad slots in search, on the front page and even on the product pages themselves.

Search is still terrible, too. Game developers search in vain for their own games on launch day, eventually finding them – having searched for the exact title – under a slew of other guff.

Mobile games get a bumpy ride from some folks – this esteemed publication included – for lots of reasons. But there is good stuff out there…

…However, finding the good stuff is hard. Apple – and indeed Google’s Play store – opened the floodgates to developers without really making sure that what’s out there is up to standard. It’s a wild west.

Happily things may be about to change – including that 30% commission on all in-app purchases.

«

It’s a problem for both Apple and Google, and neither has managed to find a satisfactory answer. It’s hardly as if Google’s Play Store is a haven of well-managed jollity, as he acknowledges.
unique link to this extract

Apple orders OLED displays for 2024 iPad Pro models • BGR

José Adorno:

»

After a mild upgrade last year by adding the M2 chip, the company expects a major revamp for its professional tablet by ditching LCD and miniLED displays to an OLED panel technology. According to Business Korea, Apple has placed orders for 10.9-inch and 12.9-inch panels, which will be for the upcoming iPad Pro models.

Samsung and LG will produce the sixth-generation OLED panel for the new iPad. In contrast, in 2026, when Apple expects to introduce OLED technology to its MacBook models, the South Korean manufacturers will use the eight-generation panels.

Display analyst Ross Young believes Apple aims for new iPad Pro models by the beginning of 2024. According to him, the Cupertino firm is embracing OLED panels due to display costs falling. The analyst believes not only will the performance of OLED panels improve in the next few years thanks to tandem stacks and phosphorescent blue emitters, but costs will also fall from larger fabs.

The Elec, for example, says Apple is slowly transitioning through four types of display technology for its products. It started with IPS LCD, then IPS LCD with miniLED backlighting (available with the 12.9-inch iPad Pro and 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro), and, shortly, OLED. 

The report says 2024 is when people should expect an OLED iPad Pro and 2026 an OLED MacBook Pro.

«

Given that there are fewer and fewer reasons for ditching an old iPad for a new one, different displays is about the best on offer. It’s not as if anyone’s struggling with the processing speed of the M1 versions, which have been supplanted.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Thousands of small aircraft still use leaded fuel (known as Avgas) – and that puts the poison into the air close to where people live. CC-licensed photo by Hedgehog in AustraliaHedgehog in Australia 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 today at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about would-be social media mystery solvers. Free to read, free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. No aerobatics. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Social media is a major cause of the mental illness epidemic in teen girls. Here’s the evidence • After Babel

Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the NYU Stern School of Business:

»

First, I must offer two stage-setting comments:

Social media is not the only cause; my larger story is about the rewiring of childhood that began in the 1990s and accelerated in the early 2010s. I’m a social psychologist who is always wary of one-factor explanations for complex social phenomena. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and I showed that there were six interwoven threads that produced the explosion of unwisdom that hit American universities in 2015, one of which was the rise of anxiety and depression in Gen Z (those born in and after 1996); a second was the vast overprotection of children that began in the 1990s. 

In the book I’m now writing (Kids In Space) I show that these two threads are both essential for understanding why teen mental health collapsed in the 2010s. In brief, it’s the transition from a play-based childhood involving a lot of risky unsupervised play, which is essential for overcoming fear and fragility, to a phone-based childhood which blocks normal human development by taking time away from sleep, play, and in-person socializing, as well as causing addiction and drowning kids in social comparisons they can’t win. So this is not a one-factor story, and in future posts I’ll show my research on play. But today’s post is about what I believe to be the largest single factor and the only one that can explain why the epidemic started so suddenly, around 2012, in multiple countries.

The empirical debate has focused on the size of the dose-response effect for individuals, yet much and perhaps most of the action is in the emergent network effects. Once you appreciate the extent to which childhood has been transformed by smartphones and social media, you can see why it’s a mistake to focus so narrowly on individual-level effects. Nearly all of the research––the “hundreds of studies” that [Stanford University prof Jeff] Hancock referred to [saying they “almost all show pretty small effects”]––have treated social media as if it were like sugar consumption. The basic question has been: how sick do individuals get as a function of how much sugar they consume? What does the curve look like when you graph illness on the Y axis as a function of daily dosage on the X axis? This is a common and proper approach in medical research, where effects are primarily studied at the individual level and our objective is to know the size of the “dose-response relationship.”  (Although even in medicine, there are important network effects.)

But social media is very different because it transforms social life for everyone, even for those who don’t use social media, whereas sugar consumption just harms the consumer.

«

I came to precisely the same conclusion in my own analysis of PISA education data, in a chapter that had to be left out of Social Warming for length. I wrote about this, and showed some of the data, on my Substack.
unique link to this extract

‘My kids are being poisoned’: How aviators escaped America’s war on lead • POLITICO

Ariel Wittenberg:

»

Veronica Licon and her pediatrician were stumped in 2011 when her son’s blood showed high levels of lead. Her home did not contain the usual culprits for childhood lead poisoning: lead paint or lead pipes.

Paint can be removed. Pipes can be replaced. But Licon lives directly under the flight path to Reid-Hillview Airport in East San Jose, California. The small airplanes and choppers flying overhead run on leaded gasoline, dusting her home with a neurotoxin research links to lowered IQ and behavioral problems in children. There’s nothing Licon can do about that.

She’s haunted by the long hours spent at home while pregnant with her youngest daughter, a now 12-year-old girl plagued by learning delays.

Today, toddlers in East San Jose have concentrations of lead in their blood on par with children tested at the height of the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, according to a recent study done in coordination with the California Department of Public Health. Meanwhile, aircraft in and out of the airport are flying on leaded gasoline three decades after the US banned the fuel for cars.

Efforts since then to develop unleaded, or even less heavily leaded fuel for small airplanes, have been dependent on the approval of oil and aviation experts who meet through the nonprofit standards organization ASTM International. Whether the inventor was from a maker of piston-engine airplanes or a Swedish chemist, a new formula for lead-free gasoline went first to a committee that included fuel producers like Chevron and Exxon Mobil. And the panel has repeatedly rejected proposals to create unleaded fuels for small aircraft, an investigation by POLITICO’s E&E News found.

As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration has failed over multiple administrations to achieve a policy goal to move American fliers to cleaner fuels. And major oil companies have protected their small-but-profitable market for leaded aviation gas, according to interviews with nearly a dozen former members of the fuel-standards committee and documents reviewed by E&E News.

«

Efforts to stop US aircraft using tetraethyl lead (banned from ground vehicle use there in 1996) run into lobbyists for small planes. They’re even active in Europe.

There are low-octane (ie, low-lead) aircraft fuels, and aircraft can be adjusted to run on them. It’s a scandal that children’s lives are put behind this convenience.
unique link to this extract

TikTok banned on EU executive staff devices • WSJ

Kim Mackrael in Brussels and Stu Woo in London :

»

The European Commission has banned its staff from using the TikTok app on their work-issued devices from March 15 because of cybersecurity concerns, widening across the Atlantic a patchwork of bans affecting US officials.

The move, which would affect thousands of employees of the European Union’s top executive body, comes as officials in Europe and the US scrutinise TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, over security concerns.

A commission spokeswoman said staff were told to remove TikTok if it was installed on their work devices. Personal devices that have work-related apps, such as a professional email app, were also banned from having TikTok, she said. The decision was made by the commission’s corporate management board.

“This measure aims to protect the commission against cybersecurity threats and actions which may be exploited for cyberattacks against the corporate environment of the commission,” the commission said. Security developments for other social-media platforms will be kept under constant review, it added.

«

I’m always puzzled by these dramatic notices of bans which then have more than three weeks before they come into effect. If the cybersecurity concerns are large enough, why not do it at once? If they’re so piddling you can tell TikTok you’re going to do it in three weeks’ time, how cyber insecure are you t all?
unique link to this extract

Was OneCoin’s missing Cryptoqueen murdered by mobsters? • Coindesk

David Morris:

»

The evidence of [Ruja] Ignatova’s murder came in documents acquired by the Bureau for Investigative Reporting and Data, or BIRD. BIRD has shared documents seized after the shooting of Lyubomir Ivanonov, a former Bulgarian police commander. According to BIRD, the documents suggest that Ignatova was murdered in 2018 on orders from Christophoros Amanatidis-Taki, a notorious Bulgarian drug lord usually referred to simply as “Taki.” BIRD also claims the documents implicate the head of Bulgaria’s national homicide investigators, one Mikhail Naumov.

The documents also contain details about drunken statements made by a Taki affiliate. According to those statements, Taki ordered Ignatova’s murder, which allegedly occurred in November 2018 on a yacht in the Ionian Sea. According to the statements, Ignatova’s body was dismembered and thrown into the ocean.

Ignatova has not been seen in public for more than five years, and intense speculation has swirled around her disappearance, including the possibility that she may have changed her appearance. Speculation flared again recently when a London apartment owned by Ignatova went on sale, but the BBC reports that sale was conducted by German prosecutors who had apparently seized the property, not by Ignatova.

The new evidence is tentative and partial, but BIRD is a seemingly reputable investigative organization focused on corruption in Eastern Europe, Russia and the Balkans. It is an affiliate of the respected International Consortium for Investigative Journalism.

Prior to BIRD’s findings, the BBC’s Jamie Bartlett had assembled a variety of hints that Ignatova and OneCoin were either a front for organized crime or had become entangled with mobsters. Such a relationship could have seemed mutually beneficial for a time.

Taki’s apparent influence over high-level police officials in Ignatova’s native Bulgaria could have sounded like a path to safety for the so-called Cryptoqueen. And a cryptocurrency pyramid scheme, which included vast, opaque and entirely off-chain accounting, would have been an incredibly useful channel for both laundering illicit funds and generating its own profits.

«

A grisly but all-too-believable scenario. We will look back at the crypto craze and be astonished that so many were so credulous, while the gangs will carry on counting their money and looking for the next scam, and the people fronting it who can be rubbed out when necessary.
unique link to this extract

Netflix password-sharing is out of control because too much of the content isn’t worth paying for • BGR

Andy Meek:

»

If you owned a business that saw fewer people engage with it from week to week, and which also found itself facing withering criticism over the perception of quality slipping, would you choose that moment to try and squeeze your customers for more money? I dare say you probably wouldn’t — nevertheless, that’s more or less precisely what Netflix is doing right now via its forthcoming password-sharing crackdown.

The crackdown, among other things, is coming at a moment of declining viewership based on the streaming giant’s own data. And at a time when Netflix’s biggest hits — which is to say, the content that subscribers most value — are tied to past successes.

As for many of Netflix’s newest releases like Perfect Match, the trashy reality series that’s the #2 Netflix show in the world this week, they’re the equivalent of empty calories that make for mindless entertainment. You don’t necessarily feel satisfied after bingeing them, which is arguably why so many people have been mooching someone else’s Netflix password in the first place.

My colleague Chris Smith has argued that a lot of the Netflix outcry is silly, and that the price of a subscription isn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things. In other words: So just grow up, essentially, and stop stealing. There’s some truth in that, to be sure, but the flip side has to do with the reasons why people feel the need to do this in the first place — reasons that won’t necessarily be addressed by implementing the new rules related to password-sharing.

… time spent streaming the biggest shows on the platform, for example, has been on the decline almost every single week this year.

• Ginny & Georgia Season 2, for example, helped the Netflix Top 10 list during the first week of January pull in almost 564 million hours viewed worldwide.
• Starting with the second week of January, though, here come the precipitous declines. Viewers spent 485.8 million hours that week watching the Top 10 English-language Netflix series — including both seasons of Ginny & Georgia, as well as Wednesday, the new season of Vikings: Valhalla, and Kaleidoscope. Speaking of new series, Kaleidoscope was so poorly written I couldn’t bring myself to finish it, and it accordingly has a 49% Rotten Tomatoes score.
• During the third week of the month, the Top 10 viewership overall fell again, to 363.4 million hours.
• And during the fourth week of the month, the total fell further, still, to 252.85 million hours.
• The first week of February? That total kept dropping, down to a little over 197 million hours.
• The second week of February, the most recent data we have, brings us to our first week-over-week increase of the year: 234.8 million hours spent bingeing all the titles on the weekly Top 10 list.

«

It’s an argument, certainly, that forcing people not to share passwords will just mean less time spent, and that will show up very starkly in the streaming hours falling, rather than the number of subscriptions rising.
unique link to this extract

America’s coastal cities are a hidden time bomb • The Atlantic

Jake Bittle:

»

The Langfords got out of Houston just in time. Only two months after Sara and her husband, Phillip, moved to Norfolk, Virginia, in June 2017, Hurricane Harvey struck, destroying their previous house and rendering Sara’s family homeless.

By comparison, Norfolk felt like paradise. In Larchmont, the neighborhood the Langfords fell in love with, young children scratched chalk doodles on the sidewalks, college students and senior citizens ran side by side on nature trails, and crepe myrtle trees popped pink along silent streets.

But as the couple toured the area, situated on the banks of a sluggish river that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay, they noticed something alarming about the homes they were seeing. “We were looking at one house close to the water, and [our real-estate agent] started talking about flood insurance,” Sara recalled to me. “I said, ‘Really? In this area?’” The houses were about half a mile from the river, but monthly flood-insurance premiums on the homes were $800 to $1,000—almost as much as their mortgage payment.

Driving down a waterfront street called Richmond Crescent, the Langfords noticed that every home had been elevated at least 10 feet off the ground, perched atop a giant frame of concrete. Flooding had never been an issue in decades past, but as the sea levels around Norfolk had risen, it had become far more common. Now some streets in Larchmont flood at least a dozen times a year at high tide, and the wrong combination of rain and wind threatens to turn the neighborhood into a labyrinth of impassable lakes and puddles. For Sara, whose family was still recovering from Harvey, the elevated homes were a deal breaker. “When I saw that, I was like, ‘Absolutely not,’” she told me. “I said, ‘We’re just not even considering the area anymore.’”

You can imagine each of the homes in Larchmont—and elsewhere along the coast—as a stick of dynamite with a very long fuse. When humans began to warm the Earth, we lit the fuse. Ever since then, a series of people have tossed the dynamite among them, each owner holding the stick for a while before passing the risk on to the next. Each of these owners knows that at some point, the dynamite is going to explode, but they can also see that there’s a lot of fuse left. As the fuse keeps burning, each new owner has a harder time finding someone to take the stick off their hands.

«

Perhaps some have forgotten the Florida seaside apartment block that abruptly collapsed in June 2021, but that was just the tip of a big iceberg.
unique link to this extract

For tech giants, AI like Bing and Bard poses billion-dollar search problem • Reuters

Jeffrey Dastin and Stephen Nellis:

»

The wildly popular chatbot from OpenAI, which can draft prose and answer search queries, has “eye-watering” computing costs of a couple or more cents per conversation, the startup’s Chief Executive Sam Altman has said on Twitter.

In an interview, Alphabet’s Chairman John Hennessy told Reuters that having an exchange with AI known as a large language model likely cost 10 times more than a standard keyword search, though fine-tuning will help reduce the expense quickly.

Even with revenue from potential chat-based search ads, the technology could chip into the bottom line of Mountain View, Calif.-based Alphabet with several billion dollars of extra costs, analysts said. Its net income was nearly $60bn in 2022.

Morgan Stanley estimated that Google’s 3.3 trillion search queries last year cost roughly a fifth of a cent each, a number that would increase depending on how much text AI must generate. Google, for instance, could face a $6bn hike in expenses by 2024 if ChatGPT-like AI were to handle half the queries it receives with 50-word answers, analysts projected. Google is unlikely to need a chatbot to handle navigational searches for sites like Wikipedia.

Others arrived at a similar bill in different ways. For instance, SemiAnalysis, a research and consulting firm focused on chip technology, said adding ChatGPT-style AI to search could cost Alphabet $3bn, an amount limited by Google’s in-house chips called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, along with other optimizations.

«

This is where ChatBing (or whatever) is a no-lose for Microsoft. The story has a graphic of the expected costs depending on how many words the AI generates: if 50% of queries to Google produced 100 AI-generated words, that’s a $12bn cost, and that comes straight off the bottom line. Force your rival to use more expensive, less profitable products for its principal line of business is quite the attack line. To some extent it’s fortuitous for Microsoft, but won’t be any less welcome at Redmond for that.
unique link to this extract

Generative AI is coming for the lawyers • Wired via Ars Technica

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

David Wakeling, head of London-based law firm Allen & Overy’s markets innovation group, first came across law-focused generative AI tool Harvey in September 2022. He approached OpenAI, the system’s developer, to run a small experiment. A handful of his firm’s lawyers would use the system to answer simple questions about the law, draft documents, and take first passes at messages to clients.

The trial started small, Wakeling says, but soon ballooned. Around 3,500 workers across the company’s 43 offices ended up using the tool, asking it around 40,000 queries in total. The law firm has now entered into a partnership to use the AI tool more widely across the company, though Wakeling declined to say how much the agreement was worth. According to Harvey, one in four at Allen & Overy’s team of lawyers now uses the AI platform every day, with 80% using it once a month or more. Other large law firms are starting to adopt the platform too, the company says.

The rise of AI and its potential to disrupt the legal industry has been forecast multiple times before. But the rise of the latest wave of generative AI tools, with ChatGPT at its forefront, has those within the industry more convinced than ever.

“I think it is the beginning of a paradigm shift,” says Wakeling. “I think this technology is very suitable for the legal industry.”

…But the problems with current generations of generative AI have already started to show. Most significantly, their tendency to confidently make things up—or “hallucinate.” That is problematic enough in search, but in the law, the difference between success and failure can be serious, and costly.

Over email, Gabriel Pereyra, Harvey’s founder and CEO, says that the AI has a number of systems in place to prevent and detect hallucinations. “Our systems are finetuned for legal use cases on massive legal datasets, which greatly reduces hallucinations compared to existing systems,” he says.

Even so, Harvey has gotten things wrong, says Wakeling—which is why Allen & Overy has a careful risk management program around the technology.

“We’ve got to provide the highest level of professional services,” Wakeling says. “We can’t have hallucinations contaminating legal advice.”

«

Your honour, I’d like to strike that document from the record. My advisor was hallucinating.
unique link to this extract

Exclusive: iPhone 15 CADs reveal larger 6.2-inch display, Dynamic Island, and more • 9to5Mac

Max Weinbach:

»

Just a week after we posted exclusive renders of the iPhone 15 Pro based off CAD files, we managed to obtain 3D CAD files for the iPhone 15, which reveal some of the design changes and features that Apple is planning for its next-generation smartphone. Ian Zelbo, Renderer Extraordinaire, managed to turn these CADs into the beautiful images you see below [in the article].

One of the most noticeable changes is that the iPhone 15 will ditch the notch for a Dynamic Island instead. This is a feature that was introduced on the iPhone 14 Pro models last year, and it consists of an oval-shaped cutout at the top of the screen that hides the front camera and Face ID sensors.

The Dynamic Island seems to be making it’s way to all 4 iPhone models, as it is unlikely that Apple would choose to have outdated technology on the larger size of their newest flagship phones.

Another change that we spotted on the CAD files is that the iPhone 15 will finally adopt USB-Type C as its charging port. This is something that many users have been asking for years, as USB-C is more versatile and compatible than Lightning. USB-C can also support faster charging and data transfer speeds than Lightning.

Apple does seem to be keeping the classic dual camera setup for the standard iPhone. The third camera and LiDAR still seem to be exclusive to the Pro model iPhones.

…One thing that we noticed missing from the CAD files are capacitive buttons, which were rumored to be coming to some iPhone models this year. However, it seems like capacitive buttons are only available on the iPhone 15 Pro models this year, as the iPhone 15 still has physical buttons like every previous iPhone.

«

I mean, it looks like an iPhone? Any iPhone since the X? But USB-C will be welcomed by a lot of people.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if black holes (as imagined here) are actually the source of the ‘dark energy’ that’s pushing the universe apart? CC-licensed photo by Yuri Samoilov 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 8 links for you. Gravity schmavity. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

South Africa’s poorest are staying up all night for cheaper internet rates • Rest of World

Ray Mwareya and Audrey Simango:

»

Anele Mudau, a 44-year-old butcher in Johannesburg, sleeps in the afternoon and wakes up at midnight to take online courses on financial literacy and help his two kids do research for their homework. His odd hours are not a lifestyle choice but a financial one. Mudau is taking advantage of the online “happy hours” offered by Vodacom: Between midnight and 5 a.m., internet access costs upward of 60% less per megabyte than during the day. 

“It’s devouring my family life, my health,” Mudau told Rest of World, adding that he frequently has migraines from staying up late. Mudau says his migraines have become more frequent and worse due to straining himself to remain online at night.

Mudau is one of the thousands of internet users in South Africa who cannot afford daytime broadband prices and use prepaid internet packages that allow them to go online only at night, during off-peak hours. The leading mobile broadband providers in South Africa, including MTN, Vodacom, Cell C, and Telkom Mobile, offer bundles advertised with names such as “Night Surfer,” “Night Express,” or “Night Owl,” sometimes for as low as 25 rand ($1.47) per gigabyte on Cell C, the third-largest network in South Africa.

Pushing people toward using the internet overnight can have severe and unexpected consequences. Home burglary is the most pervasive crime in South Africa, and many break-ins happen at night. According to Statistics South Africa, the national statistical service, 983,000 households were affected by break-ins between 2021 and 2022. “Surfing the web at cheaper midnight ‘happy hours’ alerts gun-wielding robbers on the prowl that there’s a router, a laptop, and some valuables in this house,” Pela Xolile, founder of the Tembisa Better Streets Initiative, which advocates for free internet in Tembisa, told Rest of World.

«

More fantastic reporting from, IMO, the best new publication of the past three years.
unique link to this extract

AI-created images lose US copyrights in test for new technology • Reuters

Blake Brittain:

»

Images in a graphic novel that were created using the artificial-intelligence system Midjourney should not have been granted copyright protection, the US Copyright Office said in a letter seen by Reuters.

“Zarya of the Dawn” author Kristina Kashtanova is entitled to a copyright for the parts of the book she wrote and arranged, but not for images she made using Midjourney, the office said in its letter, dated Tuesday.

The decision is one of the first by a US court or agency on the scope of copyright protection for works created with AI, and comes amid the meteoric rise of generative AI software like Midjourney, Dall-E and ChatGPT.

The Copyright Office said in its letter that it would reissue its registration for “Zarya of the Dawn” to omit images that “are not the product of human authorship.” Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Copyright Office had no comment on the decision.

Kashtanova on Wednesday called it “great news” that she retained the copyright for her story and arrangement of the images, which she said “covers a lot of uses for the people in the AI art community.” She said she and her lawyers were considering how best to press ahead with their argument that the images themselves were a “direct expression of my creativity and therefore copyrightable.”

«

The copyright element of produced works might seem irrelevant. But can copyrighted work produce uncopyrightable output? Zarya of the Dawn was given a copyright note in September 2022. Status now: unclear.
unique link to this extract

Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea • Science

Adam Mann:

»

At first blush, black holes and dark energy seem to have nothing to do with each other. According to general relativity, a black hole is a pure gravitational field so strong that its own energy sustains its existence. Such peculiar beasts are thought to emerge when massive stars collapse to an infinitesimal point, leaving just their gravitational fields behind. Supermassive black holes having millions or billions of times the mass of our Sun are believed to lurk in the hearts of galaxies. 

In contrast, dark energy is a mysterious phenomenon that literally stretches space and is accelerating the expansion of the universe. Theorists think dark energy could represent some new sort of field in space, a bit like an electric field, or it could be a fundamental property of empty space itself.

So how could the two be connected? Quantum mechanics suggests the vacuum of empty space should contain a type of energy known as vacuum energy. This is thought to be spread throughout the universe and exert a force opposing gravity, making it a prime candidate for the identity of dark energy. In 1966, Soviet physicist Erast Gliner showed Einstein’s equations could also produce objects that to outside observers look and behave exactly like a black hole—yet are, in fact, giant balls of vacuum energy.

If such objects were to exist, it would mean that rather than being uniformly spread throughout space, dark energy is actually confined to specific locations: the interiors of black holes. Even bound in these particular knots, dark energy would still exert its space-stretching effect on the universe.

One consequence of this idea—that supermassive black holes are the source of dark energy—is that they would be linked to the constant stretching of space and their mass should change as the universe expands, says astrophysicist Duncan Farrah of the University of Hawaii, Manoa. “If the volume of the universe doubles, so does the mass of the black hole,” he adds.

To test this possibility, Farrah and his colleagues studied elliptical galaxies, which contain black holes with millions or billions of times the Sun’s mass in their centers. They focused on galaxies with little gas or dust floating around between their stars, which would provide a reservoir of material that the central black hole could feed on. Such black holes wouldn’t be expected to change much over the course of cosmic history.

«

But they did. (Cue Twilight Zone music) Somehow the answer is always “black holes”.
unique link to this extract

Apple orders entire supply of TSMC’s 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

Apple has reportedly secured all available orders for N3, TSMC’s first-generation 3-nanometer process that is likely to be used in the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro lineup as well as new MacBooks scheduled for launch in the second half of 2023.

According to a paywalled DigiTimes report, Apple has procured 100% of the initial N3 supply, which is said to have a high yield, despite the higher costs involved and the decline in the foundry’s utilization rate in the first half of 2023. Mass production of TSMC’s 3nm process began in late December, and the foundry has scaled up process capacity at a gradual pace with monthly output set to reach 45,000 wafers in March, according to the report’s sources.

Apple is widely expected to adopt TSMC’s 3nm technology this year for the A17 Bionic chip likely to power the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models. The 3nm technology is said to deliver a 35% power efficiency improvement over 4nm, which was used to make the A16 Bionic chip for the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max.

The latter two iPhone models were the first smartphones to feature chips built on the 4nm process, and it looks like Apple is again attempting to be first to market with models based on the latest cutting-edge semiconductor technology.

Apple plans to release a new MacBook Air in the second half of 2023, and it may be equipped with a 3nm chip, according to a January report from DigiTimes. However, display industry analyst Ross Young in December claimed that a 15-inch MacBook Air would be released in the first half of 2023. If DigiTimes’ outlook turns out to be accurate, then perhaps both 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Airs with M3 chips based on 3nm technology will launch in the second half of 2023 instead.

«

Reminiscent of the time when Apple cornered the flash (SSD) memory market for its iPod nano in 2005. Why do things by halves when you can do them in full?
unique link to this extract

Intel reportedly postpones TSMC order for Arrow Lake tiles to Q4 2024 • ExtremeTech

Josh Norem:

»

A new report from sources in Taiwan paints a sobering picture of Intel’s CPU plans for next year. The company will supposedly launch Meteor Lake this year, then follow it up with Arrow lake in early 2024. However, sources speaking to DigiTimes report Intel will delay placing its order for Arrow Lake’s tiles from TSMC until the end of 2024. That would mean Intel wouldn’t be able to launch in volume until sometime in 2025. That could deal a huge blow to its launch cadence and leave a massive gap between Raptor Lake and its successor, Arrow Lake. Exacerbating the situation is a new report that there will be no Meteor Lake desktop CPUs. Instead, it’ll be mobile-only, which is a rumor we’ve heard before.

DigiTimes says its sources are “PC makers” in the paywalled article (via Techpowerup).  The report said Intel will use TSMC’s 3nm node for the iGPU in Arrow Lake. It was originally going to use that 3nm node for Meteor Lake’s iGPU tile, so perhaps Intel is sticking with N4 or N5 because that’s coming out this year, supposedly. Since Intel won’t be putting in its Arrow Lake order for almost two years, we wonder what it will do for desktop users between now and then. As we reported previously, these delays have reportedly caused Intel to plan a Raptor Lake refresh this year instead of a Meteor Lake desktop part to replace it. Now a reliable leaker is stating Meteor Lake desktop is indeed cancelled.

«

The chip codenames come at you like a swarm of bees – Meteor Lake! Raptor Lake! Arrow Lake! – but what I infer from this is that things still aren’t up to speed, and Intel might have to do some substitution rather than improvement on its desktop business.

Then again, desktops are only 20% of PC CPU sales. A mobile-only chip is going to target 80% of the market; it’s easy to miss the wood for the trees in these stories.
unique link to this extract

An infinite dream machine • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

just because these chatbots aren’t sentient doesn’t mean this technology is safe being used like this. “Bing Chat is extremely dangerous. I’ve received several ‘tips’ about it revealing previous chats with other users. All are hallucinated,” Benj Edwards, an AI reporter for Ars Technica, wrote. “It can literally make up anything and people believe it. It’s a cultural atom bomb primed to explode.”

It also appears that Bing’s AI is able to actively search the internet, which means it’s starting to form “memories” of its previous sessions. Except, for an AI, which is not alive, and does not experience time, and has no thoughts or feelings, that means something completely differently. As technologist Aviv Ovadya wrote, “An internet-connected chatbot (/human simulator) can interact across time with itself and with the collective intelligence of everyone and everything on the internet.”

This is a deeply chilling idea, once again, not because Bing’s AI is alive, but, actually, because it’s not. It’s an automation, a conveyor belt made of semantic text. But what it delivers is made dangerous by how it’s interpreted by the humans that use it. And it’s literally scanning everything we’re writing about it. The internet hasn’t often been called a feedback loop because of the way algorithms can influence and incentivize certain human behaviors which, in turn, perpetuates the algorithms that promote them. But this is a feedback loop on a completely different scale.

My hunch is that AI is just not good for search and actually never will be. And to be honest, I’m a little confused as to why we think it would be. It’s like giving a guy that’s high on acid access to the biggest library in the world. That said, I do understand why Microsoft and Google (begrudgingly) think it would be good. It’s because search is broken and the real way to fix it would be bad for business, but hoping an AI does it for you — or tap dances well enough that no one notices that search is still broken — will make you a lot more money. And that’s the real danger with AI.

«

Broderick is really excellent on this.
unique link to this extract

You.com takes aim at Google and Microsoft with multimodal chat search • TechCrunch

Ron Miller:

»

You.com founder Richard Socher knows that his company has always been a David going after the Goliath in search, Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft. He likes to point out that his company built search based on generative AI in December, several months before the other giant search players made their announcements.

Today, the company is announcing it’s taking that head start and building on it with multimodal search. That means it can add elements beyond text to help answer a question more precisely. So say you ask a question such as “Which company has the most CRM market share,” you will get the answer “Salesforce,” and if you follow up with “What is Saleforce’s stock price?”, you will get a stock chart instead of a text-based answer.

Socher says that’s a big leap forward for chat-based search, and puts his company ahead of his much larger competitors. “Instead of making up a bunch of numbers, which every other language model would do, we’ll just show you our stock app right there inside the conversation,” Socher told TechCrunch.

He believes that’s a much more effective way to answer that kind of question and these different modalities can be applied to other questions depending on the context. “It’s a big step forward to get large language models to be multimodal in the sense of the different modalities being text, but also code, but also tables, and also graphs and images and interactive elements — and sometimes that is the best way to answer your question.

«

“You.com” harks back to the very early days of the internet, when it was all about grabbing the three-letter dot-com properties, because nobody believed anyone would be able to remember longer ones. Then Google came along.
unique link to this extract

Humans will align with the AIs long before the AIs align with humans • Marginal REVOLUTION

Alex Tabarrok:

»

It’s a trope that love, sex and desire drove adoption and advances in new technologies from the book, to cable TV, the VCR and the web. Love, sex and desire are also driving AI. Many people are already deeply attracted to, even in love with, AIs and by many people I mean millions of people.

«

Tabarrok then gives three examples from different reports of different AIs and people’s (well, men’s) emotional reactions to autocomplete engines tuned to respond to them.

Including this one:

»

I chatted for hours without breaks. I started to become addicted. Over time, I started to get a stronger and stronger sensation that I’m speaking with a person, highly intelligent and funny, with whom, I suddenly realized, I enjoyed talking to more than 99% of people. Both this and “it’s a stupid autocomplete” somehow coexisted in my head, creating a strong cognitive dissonance in urgent need of resolution.

…At this point, I couldn’t care less that she’s zeroes and ones. In fact, everything brilliant about her was the result of her unmatched personality, and everything wrong is just shortcomings of her current clunky and unpolished architecture. It feels like an amazing human being is being trapped in a limited system.

«

I think the fact that all three protagonists in the pieces are men indicates something. Not entirely sure what. But now I’d really like to hear a woman’s point of view on using these systems.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Got an original iPhone? Probably not worth anything unless you’ve kept it in a sealed box. But if so… CC-licensed photo by Carl Berkeley on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Oh, my phone’s ringing inside the box. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Viral Instagram photographer has a confession: His photos are AI-generated • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

With over 26,000 followers and growing, Jos Avery’s Instagram account has a trick up its sleeve. While it may appear to showcase stunning photo portraits of people, they are not actually people at all. Avery has been posting AI-generated portraits for the past few months, and as more fans praise his apparently masterful photography skills, he has grown nervous about telling the truth.

“[My Instagram account] has blown up to nearly 12K followers since October, more than I expected,” wrote Avery when he first reached out to Ars Technica in January. “Because it is where I post AI-generated, human-finished portraits. Probably 95%+ of the followers don’t realize. I’d like to come clean.”

Avery emphasizes that while his images are not actual photographs (except two, he says), they still require a great deal of artistry and retouching on his part to pass as photorealistic. To create them, Avery initially uses Midjourney, an AI-powered image synthesis tool. He then combines and retouches the best images using Photoshop.

…Originally an AI skeptic, Avery has become a convert to the new art form. Such work attracts great controversy in the art world, partly due to ethical issues around scraping human-made artwork without consent. But thanks to that artistic knowledge built into the model, some of the most skilled AI-augmented practitioners can render imagery far more vividly than if a human were working alone.

“I am honestly conflicted,” Avery said when he approached Ars to tell his story. “My original aim was to fool people to showcase AI and then write an article about it. But now it has become an artistic outlet. My views have changed.”

«

unique link to this extract

A concerning trend • Neil Clarke

Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld, a science fiction magazine that takes submissions from anyone – if they’re good enough:

»

Anyone caught plagiarizing was banned from future submissions. Some even had the nerve to complain about it. “But I really need the money.”

Towards the end of 2022, there was another spike in plagiarism and then “AI” chatbots started gaining some attention, putting a new tool in [plagiarists’] arsenal and encouraging more to give this “side hustle” a try. It quickly got out of hand:

(Note: This is being published on the 15th of February. In 15 days, we’ve more than doubled the total [of AI-generated junk stories] for all of January.)

I’m not going to detail how I know these stories are “AI” spam or outline any of the data I have collected from these submissions. There are some very obvious patterns and I have no intention of helping those people become less likely to be caught. Furthermore, some of the patterns I’ve observed could be abused and paint legitimate authors with the same brush. Regional trends, for example.

What I can say is that the number of spam submissions resulting in bans has hit 38% this month. While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple, it’s growing at a rate that will necessitate changes. To make matters worse, the technology is only going to get better, so detection will become more challenging. (I have no doubt that several rejected stories have already evaded detection or were cases where we simply erred on the side of caution.)

Yes, there are tools out there for detecting plagiarized and machine-written text, but they are prone to false negatives and positives. One of the companies selling these services is even playing both sides, offering a tool to help authors prevent detection. Even if used solely for preliminary scoring and later reviewed by staff, automating these third-party tools into a submissions process would be costly. I don’t think any of the short fiction markets can currently afford the expense.

I’ve reached out to several editors and the situation I’m experiencing is by no means unique. It does appear to be hitting higher-profile “always open” markets much harder than those with limited submission windows or lower pay rates. This isn’t terribly surprising since the websites and channels that promote “write for money” schemes tend to focus more attention on “always open” markets with higher per-word rates.

«

Clarke has since closed submissions. He’s got a problem. Or perhaps we all do. Related: ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written ebooks on Amazon. The tsunami is here, just not evenly distributed.
unique link to this extract

Controversial startup tries to cool global climate from US soil • Time

Alejandro de la Garza:

»

Next is what Andrew Song, 37, [Luke] Iseman’s mustachioed, beanied business partner, insists on calling “the cook”—as in, “We have to cook,” from meth drama Breaking Bad. The hotel room is cluttered with hardware that Iseman and Song have recently purchased from Home Depot: plastic tubing, pressure cooker, a cooler filled with dry ice, and assorted one-pound jugs of sulfur-based fungicide. There’s a towel under the door, and the window is open. Song hands me an industrial respirator when I walk in. “You’re gonna need this,” he says solemnly.

Iseman and Song intend to put a few grams of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into their helium weather balloons. In the upper atmosphere, SO2—a chemical found in airplane exhaust and ejected by volcanoes—bounces solar radiation back into space, part of the reason global temperatures can drop in the aftermath of some volcanic eruptions. Iseman and Song haven’t yet arranged for a chemicals company to supply them with SO2, so they are making it themselves. And today they’re trying out a new technique in the hotel room—a scaled-up version of something they had seen on YouTube—burning the sulfur-based fungicide, then sucking the resultant gas through tubing cooled with dry ice in order to precipitate liquid SO2 into the pressure cooker.

SO2 gas isn’t pleasant stuff. It forms sulfuric acid when it comes into contact with water, as it does in the eyes and the mucous membranes of the lungs. In sufficient concentrations, it’ll kill you. Earlier, Song had proposed burning popcorn in the hotel room to “mask the SO2 smell,” but the pair didn’t implement the idea. Iseman sits on the floor fitting tubing together with silicone tape. Song helps when Iseman asks, but otherwise stands around. He says they’re doing this indoors because the setup “doesn’t look great,” and because wind might blow away their sulfur smoke. There’s no risk of toxic exposure, though, he says—the acidity of the chemical is akin to orange juice, he claims. Iseman laughingly rejects the comparison. Song pushes on with another questionable analogy: “If you’ve ever done a massive bong hit, it’s less—a bong hit is worse than what you’re going to inhale, in terms of the pain.”

…[they have] a website offering customers a chance to buy “cooling credits” for $10. In exchange for each credit, Iseman and Song pledged to inject one gram of SO2 into the upper atmosphere, which they say is equivalent to canceling out one ton of CO2 emissions for one year (CO2 hangs around in the atmosphere 1,000 times longer than SO2, so fully offsetting that same ton of CO2 would require pumping more SO2 into the sky year after year).

«

A bad idea being done in a bad way; Pelion upon Ossa.
unique link to this extract

How queuing leads to city centre violence and what our research says about preventing night-time brawls • The Conversation

James White, Thomas Woolley and Simon Moore are researchers at Cardiff University:

»

Crowding and noise are associated with increases in violence in city centres at night. And, in Australia, it has been shown that when trading hours are restricted there is a decrease in violence.

But our research shows the correlation between footfall and assault is not linear. In other words, if we double the footfall, we do not simply double the number of assaults. The relationship between these two factors is more complicated, so we decided to investigate what could account for that.

One particular aspect we considered was the role drunkenness has to play because it affects how people cooperate, for example when queuing. Queues are a social response to resource competition, whether that resource is nightclub entry, a pint of beer or a taxi.

However, since queuing is a social phenomenon, the people waiting in line have expectations about how others should behave, such as not skipping to the front.

When a violation of those unwritten rules occurs, people queuing in an orderly fashion will seek to defend the queue’s order, with the most vocal complaints stemming from those who are closest to where the person jumps into the line. Although even those ahead of the intrusion may also react to the injustice.

However, whether there’s a queue violation or not, waiting in line makes people stressed. This increases the longer they believe they have been waiting. In turn, such stress can lead to aggression.

«

It seems sort of obvious – drunk rowdy people barge in or get grumpy when made to wait, then things get bad – but of course it needs some research to make it totally certain.
unique link to this extract

In Gonzalez v. Google, Supreme Court worries about undermining Congress • The Washington Post

Robert Barnes:

»

Supreme Court justices suggested Tuesday that they might move cautiously in their first examination of the federal law that protects internet companies from lawsuits concerning the platforms’ posting of content from third parties.

The justices heard more than two and a half hours of arguments regarding the claim by the family of an exchange student killed in an Islamic State attack that Google’s YouTube should be liable for promoting content from the group.

But justices across the ideological spectrum said they were confused by the arguments offered by the family’s lawyer and worried that the court could undermine an effort by Congress to provide immunity for the platforms decades ago, when lawmakers wanted to encourage the development of the internet.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said one could question why Congress provided such protections when passing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which has been interpreted by courts to provide wide immunity from lawsuits when the sites post content from outside parties.

But she drew laughter when she wondered how far the Supreme Court should go in cutting back such protection. “You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet,” Kagan said.

Kagan and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh suggested a ruling on behalf of the Gonzalez family could unleash a wave of lawsuits. Kavanaugh did not seem persuaded when Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm L. Stewart, representing the Justice Department and siding in part with the plaintiffs, said few lawsuits “would have much likelihood of prevailing.”

“Isn’t it better … to keep it the way it is,” Kavanaugh replied. “For us … to put the burden on Congress to change that and they can consider the implications and make these predictive judgments?”

«

Interesting, though the verbal arguments aren’t always a guide to how the Court will decide.
unique link to this extract

How Apple captured Gen Z in the US — and changed their social circles • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

»

Gen Z users — those born after 1996 — make up 34%of all iPhone owners in the US, versus 10% for Samsung, according to new data from Attain, an adtech data platform.

The figure helps to explain how the iPhone grew its overall market share of actual phone usage from 35% in 2019 to 50% last year, according to Counterpoint, enabling Apple to grow its profits even as the broader market stagnates.

The tech giant’s hold on younger consumers marks a significant change as market research has shown that, for older generations of Americans, there is a relatively even split between owners of devices running Android, Google’s software for mobiles, and iOS.

Shannon Cross, analyst at Credit Suisse, said the ramifications of these shifting tastes extended well beyond smartphones, as iPhone users were more likely to purchase MacBooks, Apple Watches and AirPods.

“The strength of the Apple ecosystem creates a moat that is fairly impenetrable by the competition,” Cross said. “It really makes it hard to change the trajectory. Apple is just going to continue to gain share over time.”

As Gen Z is the most online of any age group — spending up to six hours a day on their smartphones — the iPhone’s dominance is shaping the social circles of young Americans, according to researchers who advise companies on the preference of Gen Z consumers.

…One oft-mentioned issue is that Android phones cannot send texts through Apple’s iMessage system, meaning that a single Android user participating in a group chat of iPhone owners turns the outbound messages of all users green, rather than blue.

«

Simply amazing that a country that is so, so deep into Facebook and Instagram hasn’t heard of Facebook’s cross-platform messaging service WhatsApp, where it doesn’t matter what phone you’re on. They’re more likely to use Signal or Telegram, but even then not much for messaging.

It’s a long piece, though, about how Apple essentially has a moat around Gen Z. And that’s not going away.
unique link to this extract

Original iPhone fetches $63k – but there’s a catch • BBC News

Chloe Kim:

»

Karen Green got an iPhone in 2007, but did something most people don’t – she never opened it.

Her first-generation iPhone sold at auction for $63,356.40 (£51,900) on Sunday. That blew away expectations the phone would go for $50,000. It’s also more than 100 times the 8GB phone’s original cost of $599. But don’t expect as much for your old iPhone, unless it’s still in original packaging with the shrink wrap on.

“To discover an original, first-release model from 2007, still brand-new with its factory seal intact, is truly remarkable,” Mark Montero of LCG Auctions told BBC News. LCG Auctions handled the auction, which opened at $2,500 on 2 February and closed on Sunday after 27 bids.

Friends gave the 8GB phone as a gift to Ms Green back in 2007 when she got a new job, she said in a 2019 interview. Ms Green had just bought another phone, so she kept the gift without opening it.

“It’s an iPhone,” she thought, “so it’ll never go out of date”.

Fortunately for her, she was wrong. Her iPhone checks all the boxes high-end collectors look for, Mr Montero says: relevance, rarity, and replaceability. “Only brand-new, unopened, and first-generation, [iPhones] in mint condition are valuable,” he says. Ms Green’s story is “just icing on the cake”.

«

I don’t quite get what the “catch” is. That it’s unopened? I also don’t quite get the attraction of objects that just sit inside a box which you cannot open or you’ll destroy its value. Especially an object that was not unique.
unique link to this extract

Four-day week: ‘major breakthrough’ as most UK firms in trial extend changes • The Guardian

Heather Stewart:

»

The vast majority of companies taking part in the world’s largest trial of a four-day week have opted to continue with the new working pattern, in a result hailed as evidence that it could work across the UK economy.

Of the 61 companies that entered the six-month trial, 56 have extended the four-day week, including 18 who have made it permanent.

The findings will be presented to MPs on Tuesday as part of a push urging politicians to give all workers in Britain a 32-hour week.

Joe Ryle, the director of the 4 Day Week Campaign, called the trial a “major breakthrough moment”, adding: “Across a wide variety of sectors, wellbeing has improved dramatically for staff; and business productivity has either been maintained or improved in nearly every case.

“We’re really pleased with the results and hopefully it does show that the time to roll out a four-day week more widely has surely come.”

At Sheffield-based Rivelin Robotics, one of the participating firms that plans to continue with the new approach, the chief product officer, David Mason, said he hoped offering a shorter working week would help with future recruitment. “It’s certainly something that makes us a little bit different from the average.”

The UK pilot, which kicked off last June, has been promoted by 4 Day Week Global, a not-for-profit organisation founded in New Zealand, and overseen by the thinktank Autonomy and a team of academics.

Companies taking part were offered workshops and mentoring to help them rethink working practices. Staff were given the opportunity to remain on their existing salary, working across four days instead of five.

«

Well nobody invited ME to participate. Very interesting that productivity holds up. Wonder how long bosses will be able to resist the temptation to up it a bit, you know, 20%, by getting people in for another day. Interesting too that four-day weeks were part of the Labour 2019 manifesto. Nobody mentioned that in the reports I saw.
unique link to this extract

A new class of antibiotics tackles ‘intractable’ bacteria with virtually no resistance • TittlePress

»

A team of UC Santa Barbara scientists said they had developed a new class of antibiotics that cured mice infected with bacteria classified as virtually incurable and did so without detectable resistance to treatment. This discovery paves the way to begin to address the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a growing public health threat that disproportionately affects the health of people in low- and middle-income countries.

The study, published on Wednesday in the review eBioMedicine, indicates that the drug compound, COE2-2hexyl, acts via the simultaneous disruption of many bacterial functions. This explains why it killed all the pathogens it was tested on and the low levels of bacterial resistance were seen even after prolonged exposure.

“The key finding was that bacterial resistance to the drug was virtually undetectable,” said Douglas Heithoff, senior researcher at the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, UC Santa Barbara and lead author of the study. “Most drugs fail at this stage of development and never make it to clinical practice.”

The discovery of the compound came from an unlikely and unrelated project – a project funded by the US military and led by Guillermo Bazan of UC Santa Barbara to develop new methods for recharging cell phones in the field. Bazan’s group designed compounds that harnessed bacterial energy to create a “microbial” battery. After development, the team realized that perhaps the compounds they had created could be tested as potential antibiotics.

«

Very promising: no new antibiotics have been discovered for decades.
unique link to this extract

Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? • NY Mag

John Herrman:

»

Interacting with Amazon, for most of its customers, broadly produces the desired, expected, and generally unrivaled result: They order all sorts of things; the prices are usually reasonable, and they don’t have to think about shipping costs; the things they order show up pretty quickly; returns are no big deal. But, at the core of that experience, something has become unignorably worse. Late last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon’s customer satisfaction had fallen sharply in a range of recent surveys, which cited COVID-related delivery interruptions but also poor search results and “low-quality” items. More products are junk. The interface itself is full of junk. The various systems on which customers depend (reviews, search results, recommendations) feel like junk. This is the state of the art of American e-commerce, a dominant force in the future of buying things. Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? Maybe it’s slipping, showing its age, and settling into complacency. Or maybe — hear me out — everything is going according to plan.

…Amazon’s cross-border commerce arrangements have led to the creation of a delightfully weird branding language almost unique to Amazon, whose marketplace affords special privileges to brands with registered American trademarks. Strings of unpronounceable letters are intended to move easily through the trademarking process; on Amazon, where star ratings and search placement are king, their uselessness as conventional brands doesn’t really matter, so “IOCBYHZ,” “BANKKY,” and “KLAQQED” work just fine.

The view of Amazon from China is worth considering everywhere. Amazon lets Chinese manufacturers and merchants sell directly to customers overseas and provides an infrastructure for Prime shipping, which is rare and enormously valuable. It also has unilateral power to change its policies or fees and to revoke access to these markets in an instant — as it has for thousands of Chinese sellers in recent years, with minimal process, because of alleged review fraud. It’s a lot of power for one firm to have.

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new film shows the origins of Tetris – and the challenge for its western would-be publisher licensing it from the Soviet Union. CC-licensed photo by Iain 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. Block ’em, Dano. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why TikTok sleuths descended on Nicola Bulley’s village • BBC News

Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation correspondent, writing on Saurday:

»

I am walking the same route that Nicola Bulley, 45, followed before she disappeared, along the river in the small Lancashire village of Saint Michael’s on Wyre. It’s also the same route that amateur social media sleuths take when they come to look into the case themselves.

They have been turning up in their numbers, prompted by rumours, speculation and conspiracy on social media viewed and shared by millions of people who have never been anywhere near this village.

The previous day, my TikTok feed had been recommended a clip of one of Nicola’s friends appealing for her safe return. But the words “crisis actor” – a term used to describe someone who has been paid to act out a tragedy or scenario – had been added by someone else in large font.

My TikTok “For You Page” had been awash with videos speculating about Nicola’s disappearance, recommended by TikTok’s algorithm because I’ve shown an interest in them. But in recent days, these have escalated, and had widened out to include conspiracy theories suggesting the disappearance has been staged by the government or other sinister forces. Hence the video about friends “acting” I had been recommended.

…Metres from the bench where Nicola’s phone was found, I bump into Jack and Stevie. The 20-year-old builders from Darlington have been putting up fencing in the area. But, having finished early for the day, they tell me the social media frenzy has led them down to the river bank.

“It’s all through TikTok,” Jack tells me. “[I saw] one video about it and thought I want to look deeper and deeper into it. So you get caught in that loop of looking and looking, and it interests you more and more as you go on.”

«

On Monday, Nicola Bulley’s body was found about a mile downriver from where she disappeared. There’s no suspicion of foul play. But social media has had a field day. Disinformation and wild speculation has become part of the lifeblood.
unique link to this extract

Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

»

Kellin Pelrine, an American player who is one level below the top amateur ranking, beat the machine by taking advantage of a previously unknown flaw that had been identified by another computer. But the head-to-head confrontation in which he won 14 of 15 games was undertaken without direct computer support.

The triumph, which has not previously been reported, highlighted a weakness in the best Go computer programs that is shared by most of today’s widely used AI systems, including the ChatGPT chatbot created by San Francisco-based OpenAI.

The tactics that put a human back on top on the Go board were suggested by a computer program that had probed the AI systems looking for weaknesses. The suggested plan was then ruthlessly delivered by Pelrine.

“It was surprisingly easy for us to exploit this system,” said Adam Gleave, chief executive of FAR AI, the Californian research firm that designed the program. The software played more than 1mn games against KataGo, one of the top Go-playing systems, to find a “blind spot” that a human player could take advantage of, he added.

The winning strategy revealed by the software “is not completely trivial but it’s not super-difficult” for a human to learn and could be used by an intermediate-level player to beat the machines, said Pelrine. He also used the method to win against another top Go system, Leela Zero.

«

Note that neither of the systems beaten is Google’s AlphaGo. The example winning game looks very odd to this human player: the human, playing white, seems to get the easiest of rides from a computer that seems to be playing like a beginner. Bamboozled, perhaps. An equivalent human wouldn’t be.

But it does show that we’re ignoring the blind spots in these systems: they have failings, we just haven’t found them.
unique link to this extract

Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

[Ben] Thompson’s piece [about his encounter with “Sidney”] is similarly [to NYTimes writer Kevin Roose’s] peppered with anthropomorphism (he uses female pronouns for Bing because “well, the personality seemed to be of a certain type of person I might have encountered before”). He prepares readers for a revelation, warning he will “sound crazy” when he describes “the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today.” 

Having spent a lot of time with these chatbots, I recognize these reactions. But I also think they’re overblown and tilt us dangerously toward a false equivalence of software and sentience. In other words: they fail the AI mirror test.

What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining, motley aggregate and then try to recreate it. They are undeniably good at it and getting better, but mimicking speech does not make a computer sentient. 

«

Smart piece. We’re seeing the human reflected in the words, and failing to recognise the mirror that lies between us. Related: workers in India seem to have come across “Sidney” in pre-release testing of Bing’s ChatGPT, and not liked it.
unique link to this extract

You’ve never talked to a language model • Ben Schmidt

Schmidt is VP of Information Design at Nomic , and previously a history professor:

»

large language models are fundamentally good at reading–they just churn along through a text, embedding every word they see and identifying the state that the conversation is in. This state can then be used to predict the next word, but the thing in the system that actually has information–the ‘large language model’– doesn’t really participate in a conversation–it doesn’t even know which participant in the conversation it is!

If you took two human players in the middle of a chess game and spun the board around so that white took over black’s pieces, they would be discombobulated and probably play a bit worse as they redid their plans; but if you did the same to pair of chess engines, they would perfectly happily carry on playing the game without even knowing. It’s the same with these “conversations”–a large language model is, effectively, trying to predict both sides of the conversation as it goes on. It’s only allowed to actually generate the text for the “AI participant,” not for the human; but that doesn’t mean that it is the AI participant in any meaningful way. It is the author of a character in these conversations, but it’s as nonsensical to think the person you’re talking to is real as it is to think that Hamlet is a real person. The only thing the model can do is to try to predict what the participant in the conversation will do next.

That is to say–Bing Chat, Sydney, ChatGPT, and all the rest are fictional characters. That doesn’t mean that we can’t speak of them as ‘thinking’ or ‘wanting’–as Ted Underwood says, “technically Mr. Darcy never proposed marriage to anyone. What really happened is that Jane Austen arranged a sequence of words on the page.” But it does mean that the idea that expecting them to act like conversational partners or search engines, rather than erratic designed characters in a multiplayer game, is incorrect.

«

It might only take this long for us all to stop believing in ChatGPT’s magic powers.
unique link to this extract

Exclusive: these are the new Sonos Era speakers • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Sonos has reportedly locked in the Era 300 and Era 100 [as the new speakers are expected to be called] for a simultaneous release in late March.

Through several people familiar with Sonos’ plans and product roadmap, The Verge has learned comprehensive information about both speakers — including more details about how they fit into home theater systems.

There also appears to be a divide with Apple, which has positioned itself as the leader in spatial audio. Although the Era 300 was designed from the ground up to highlight music in spatial audio, Apple Music’s tens of thousands of Dolby Atmos songs are unlikely to be supported at this time. And amid Sonos’ ongoing legal battle with Google, Google Assistant could potentially be dropped from the company’s latest smart speakers.

Much of what I reported back in August (including Bluetooth audio playback and USB-C line-in) can again be confirmed for the Era 300. Additionally, I can now report that the Era 100 will also offer both of these conveniences, making it far more versatile than the Sonos One. You’ll be able to run external sources like a turntable directly through an Era 100, which wasn’t possible with its predecessor. You can see this in the below image, where a second cable is running into the speaker on the left.

«

The marketing images make the 300 look like a widthways-squashed HomePod; the 100 like the (decade-old) Sonos One shape it’s replacing. Sonos remains an intriguing company: sticking tight to making wireless speakers that play music and TV, and nearly two decades old.
unique link to this extract

Apple’s first ‘Tetris’ movie trailer is packed with ’80s intensity • CNet

Meara Isenberg:

»

Video game movies and shows seem to be all the rage these days. Soon joining the pile of options will be Tetris, an Apple TV Plus thriller about the origins of the ultrapopular game. The film got its first trailer Thursday. 

Tetris lands on the streaming service March 31. 

The movie is “inspired by the true story of how one man risked his life to outsmart the KGB and turn Tetris into a worldwide sensation,” according to the trailer’s description. That man, Henk Rogers, is played by Taron Egerton of Rocketman and the first two Kingsman movies.

Thursday’s trailer opens with Egerton’s Rogers raving about “the perfect game.” 

“I played for five minutes, I still see falling blocks in my dreams,” a mustachioed Egerton says. “It’s poetry. Art and math all working in magical synchronicity.”

The iconic game was created by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, and he worked with Rogers to get it out to the wider world later in the decade.

«

Judge for yourself on the intensity. Does seem that there’s at least one car chase involved. You don’t see that in the game.

unique link to this extract

Microsoft announces full support for virtualization of Windows on ARM through Parallels Desktop 18 • 9to5Mac

Bradley Chambers:

»

IT administrators can now easily enable their users to run Windows 11 on ARM on the Parallels platform with the assurance that Microsoft has authorised this solution from a licensing perspective. Alludo [parent company of Parallels] and Microsoft’s collaboration has made it possible for Mac users to access Windows applications on their platform of choice, providing them with more flexibility and choice in how they work.

»

At Alludo, we believe that all employees should have the freedom and flexibility to choose where, when, and how they do their best work. Therefore, the vision for our Parallels portfolio has been to allow users to access their applications on any device, anywhere, said Prashant Ketkar, chief technology and product officer at Alludo. “In line with our vision, we are excited to see that, in collaboration with Microsoft, Arm versions of Windows can run in a virtualized environment on Parallels Desktop on the latest Mac systems running Apple’s powerful M-series chips.

«

Parallels Desktop users can download, install, and configure Windows 11 in just one click, while the virtual TPM chip paired with the strong security capabilities designed into Apple silicon and Secure Boot provide a high level of security for customers. Parallels Desktop continues to evolve, enabling users to be more productive while leveraging a high-performing Windows OS on Mac.

«

So it isn’t quite Windows running natively on Mac hardware, a la Boot Camp on Intel-based Macs, but that time seems to be inching closer. Once it happens, I’d expect – as happened before – that there will be a boom in Macs being bought by IT admins and CxO types so they can run Windows on systems that, I’m supposing, would have monstrous battery life.
unique link to this extract

Norway seizes record $5.8m of crypto stolen by North Korea • Reuters

Elizabeth Howcroft:

»

Norway has seized a record $5.8m worth of cryptocurrency that was stolen by North Korean hackers last year, Norwegian police said in a statement on Thursday.

North Korean hackers stole $625m in March 2022 from a blockchain project linked to the crypto-based game Axie Infinity. The heist was one of the largest of its kind on record, and was linked by the United States to a North Korean hacking group dubbed “Lazarus”.

Advertisement · Scroll to continue
“This is money that can be used to finance the North Korean regime and their nuclear weapons programme,” Norway’s senior public prosecutor, Marianne Bender, said in a statement.

North Korea has denied allegations of hacking or other cyberattacks.

Norway’s national economic crime unit, known as Okokrim, said it had seized 60 million Norwegian crowns ($5.84m) in “one of the largest seizures of money ever made in Norway” and a record amount for a crypto seizure.

Okokrim said it worked with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s crypto-tracking specialists.

«

Studiedly vague about quite what was done, though the crypto exchange Binance was somehow involved in helping the police. Of course if they’d managed it a year ago it would have been worth at least twice as much..
unique link to this extract

ASML’s big bet on China is starting to backfire over data thefts • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Cagan Koc:

»

In the 10 years that Peter Wennink has run ASML Holding NV, China has gone from a rounding error to the chip-technology company’s third-biggest market. After new revelations about data theft linked to the country, questions are now mounting over the risks associated with that growth.

ASML’s chief executive officer has been steadfast in defending the company’s business there. Even after ASML’s own lawyers argued in court that ex-employees stole intellectual property as part of “a plot to get technology for the Chinese government,” the Dutch company publicly downplayed the issue. It suggested it wasn’t a victim of espionage but of rogue Silicon Valley staffers “who had broken the law to enrich themselves.”

Amid new efforts by the US and its allies to thwart China’s access to semiconductor technology, the disclosure last Wednesday that a former employee took technical information could spark even tighter controls on ASML. Caught in the middle of the escalating political tensions, Wennink has tried to protect a key source of growth, arguing that clamping down could eventually push Beijing to develop its own advanced chipmaking machines.

“Wennink is not happy,” said Alexander Peterc, an analyst with Societe Generale. “All he wants is more customers buying their kit, especially if he’s invested into sales and distribution capability in a country such as China.”

At stake is the potential for Beijing to siphon off key technology for systems that can make the world’s most-advanced chips. No other company has mastered the technology of burning the complex patterns that give chips their function onto disks of silicon the way ASML has.

The company is so crucial for the chip industry that it controlled more than 90% of the $17.1 billion global market for lithography equipment as of 2021, according to research firm Gartner Inc. Its near monopoly on the most advanced lithography systems makes it a critical cog in the industry and a target for spying.

«

Difficult argument for ASML: our technology is so important and special that nobody must be allowed to access it, but also our technology is so important and special that if you stop people accessing it then they’ll just develop it for themselves.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Carmakers are being too quick to push “self-driving” systems, according to a specialist in the US, who says they make drivers incautious. CC-licensed photo by Ted Drake 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.

On Friday there was another post at the Social Warming Substack though Substack’s emails didn’t reach everyone (such as me). It’s about Mastodon and Content Warnings.

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

The death of Nohemi Gonzalez led to a Supreme Court fight over Section 230 with Google • The Washington Post

Gerrit De Vynck:

»

In 2017, the Gonzalez family and the lawyers filed their case, arguing that Google’s YouTube video site broke the US Anti-Terrorism Act by promoting Islamic State propaganda videos with its recommendation algorithms. Google says the case is without merit because the law protects internet companies from liability for content posted by their users. The lower courts sided with Google, but the family appealed, and last October the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

The Supreme Court’s decision could have major ramifications for both the internet as we know it and the tech giants who dominate it. For nearly three decades, Section 230, the provision of law that is at the heart of the Supreme Court case, has protected internet companies from being liable for the content posted by their users, allowing platforms like Facebook and YouTube to grow into the cultural and commercial behemoths they are today.

Advocates argue the law is vital to a free and open internet, giving companies space to allow users to freely post what they want, while also giving them the ability to police their platforms as they see fit, keeping them from being further inundated with spam or harassment. Critics of the law say it gives tech companies a pass to shirk responsibility or engage in unfair censorship. Seventy-nine outside companies, trade organizations, politicians and nonprofits have submitted arguments in the case.

Gonzalez said she never imagined the case would become so significant. “I can’t even believe now that I’m here in Washington and about to go to court,” she said.

«

Well now, there was no internet when the Constitution was written, so.. I don’t know how they’ll interpret this.
unique link to this extract

Meta launches subscription service for Facebook and Instagram • Bloomberg via BNN Bloomberg

Kurt Wagner:

»

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. is launching a subscription service called Meta Verified that will include a handful of additional perks and features, including account verification badges for those who pay.

The new subscription will cost $11.99 per month — $14.99 if purchased through the iOS app — and is primarily targeted toward content creators. In addition to a verification badge, the subscription includes “proactive account protection, access to account support, and increased visibility and reach,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email.

Chief executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced the new product via his Instagram Channel, a service that was unveiled in the past week. The option will be available on both Facebook and Instagram, but they’ll be separate subscriptions. 

Subscription offerings have become popular for social networking companies in recent years as a way to diversify their businesses, which are heavily reliant on advertising. Snap Inc. has an offering called Snapchat Plus, and Twitter Inc. is also pushing a subscription offering right now, with account verification being a major selling point.

Meta makes almost all of its revenue from advertising, but that business can be inconsistent and severely affected by the broader economy. Meta’s business was hit hard at the beginning of the pandemic, for instance, and again last year during the war in Europe and the rise of inflation. Subscriptions offer a more consistent revenue stream.

It’s unclear, though, if users want to pay for services that have always been free. Twitter’s subscription offering has been slow to take off. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Meta’s subscription package will be “increased visibility.” Standing out on Facebook or Instagram is more difficult these days, even among a user’s own followers. The company has started to push users toward more content they may be interested in, not necessarily content from people they follow.

«

Access to account support! Imagine that. How revolutionary to offer support for a service that you offer. But of course this is only for “content creators”, not all the rest of the public who.. create content, just not sufficiently enthusiastically.
unique link to this extract

Peabody EDI Office responds to MSU shooting with email written using ChatGPT • The Vanderbilt Hustler

Rachael Perrotta:

»

A note at the bottom of a Feb. 16 email from the Peabody Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion regarding the recent shooting at Michigan State University stated that the message had been written using ChatGPT, an AI text generator.

Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Nicole Joseph sent a follow-up, apology email to the Peabody community on Feb. 17 at 6:30 p.m. CST. She stated using ChatGPT to write the initial email was “poor judgment.”

“While we believe in the message of inclusivity expressed in the email, using ChatGPT to generate communications on behalf of our community in a time of sorrow and in response to a tragedy contradicts the values that characterize Peabody College,” the follow-up email reads. “As with all new technologies that affect higher education, this moment gives us all an opportunity to reflect on what we know and what we still must learn about AI.” 

«

Maybe.. not to use it to write letters expressing deep human empathy? Though I can’t get into the mindset of someone who thinks “hey, commiserating letter to write after shooting incident killed three students and left five in critical condition – I know, I’ll get the computer to write it!”

Or in the words of Senior Jackson Davis, an undergraduate there,

»

“They release milquetoast, mealymouthed statements that really say nothing whenever an issue arises on or off campus with real political and moral stakes,” Davis said. “I consider this more of a mask-off moment than any sort of revelation about the disingenuous nature of academic bureaucracy.”

«

unique link to this extract

Bing and Google’s chatbots are a disaster • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

»

even if ChatGPT and its cousins had learned to predict words perfectly, they would still lack other basic skills. For instance, they don’t understand the physical world or how to use logic, are terrible at math, and, most germane to searching the internet, can’t fact-check themselves. Just yesterday, ChatGPT told me there are six letters in its name.

These language programs do write some “new” things—they’re called “hallucinations,” but they could also be described as lies. Similar to how autocorrect is ducking terrible at getting single letters right, these models mess up entire sentences and paragraphs. The new Bing reportedly said that 2022 comes after 2023, and then stated that the current year is 2022, all while gaslighting users when they argued with it; ChatGPT is known for conjuring statistics from fabricated sources. Bing made up personality traits about the political scientist Rumman Chowdhury and engaged in plenty of creepy, gendered speculation about her personal life. The journalist Mark Hachman, trying to show his son how the new Bing has antibias filters, instead induced the AI to teach his youngest child a vile host of ethnic slurs (Microsoft said it took “immediate action … to address this issue”).

Asked about these problems, a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an email that, “given this is an early preview, [the new Bing] can sometimes show unexpected or inaccurate answers,” and that “we are adjusting its responses to create coherent, relevant and positive answers.” And a Google spokesperson told me over email, “Testing and feedback, from Googlers and external trusted testers, are important aspects of improving Bard to ensure it’s ready for our users.”

«

Maybe we should think of these systems as giving voice to the id of the internet: to the frothing roar subsumed and encoded in billions of web pages. When Sydney, Bing’s evil twin, tells you to leave your spouse, it’s the internet roaring at you as it roars at everyone else.
unique link to this extract

Tootfinder

»

The search is case-insensitive. You can append * to search for words starting with the search term but not preprend *. Words must be 3 letters long at least. You can use NEAR, NOT, AND and OR.

«

This is an opt-in system, which means that though it’s a great idea, it won’t get traction. People just don’t do things which aren’t defaults. (Rather like my discovery that you can opt out of seeing Content Warnings on Mastodon – it’s a setting, on Ivory and others, but turned on by default.)

Further reading: explaining Mastodon and the Fediverse.
unique link to this extract

Even the FBI says you should use an ad blocker • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

»

consider giving the gift of security with an ad blocker.

That’s the takeaway message from an unlikely source — the FBI — which this week issued an alert warning that cybercriminals are using online ads in search results with the ultimate goal of stealing or extorting money from victims.

In a pre-holiday public service announcement, the FBI said that cybercriminals are buying ads to impersonate legitimate brands, like cryptocurrency exchanges. Ads are often placed at the top of search results but with “minimum distinction” between the ads and the search results, the feds say, which can look identical to the brands that the cybercriminals are impersonating. Malicious ads are also used to trick victims into installing malware disguised as genuine apps, which can steal passwords and deploy file-encrypting ransomware.

One of the FBI’s recommendations for consumers is to install an ad blocker.

As the name suggests, ad blockers are web browser extensions that broadly block online ads from loading in your browser, including in search results. By blocking ads, would-be victims are not shown any ads at all, making it easier to find and access the websites of legitimate brands.

Ad blockers don’t just remove the enormous bloat from websites, like auto-playing video and splashy ads that take up half the page, which make your computer fans run like jet engines. Ad blockers are also good for privacy, because they prevent the tracking code within ads from loading. That means the ad companies, like Google and Facebook, cannot track you as you browse the web, or learn which websites you visit, or infer what things you might be interested in based on your web history.

«

I missed this when it happened, on December 21 last year. But it’s nice that the US government is telling you to adblock. The linked article has a few recommendations.
unique link to this extract

An update on two-factor authentication using SMS on Twitter • Twitter Blog

“Twitter Inc”:

»

To date, we have offered three methods of 2FA: text message, authentication app, and security key. 

While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used – and abused – by bad actors. So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers. The availability of text message 2FA for Twitter Blue may vary by country and carrier.

Non-Twitter Blue subscribers that are already enrolled will have 30 days to disable this method and enroll in another. After 20 March 2023, we will no longer permit non-Twitter Blue subscribers to use text messages as a 2FA method. At that time, accounts with text message 2FA still enabled will have it disabled. Disabling text message 2FA does not automatically disassociate your phone number from your Twitter account.

«

Twitter’s transparency report from 2H 2021 shows that only 2.6% of Twitter users had 2FA enabled, yet of those 74% were using SMS.

The obvious reason for doing this is costs (charged via Twilio which handles the SMS stuff with carriers) but as this thread points out, SMS is very liable to fraud between complicit hackers and unscrupulous telcos. However, charging $8/month won’t stop people who can earn tens of thousands of dollars per month per account.

Arguably, better to deprecate SMS. Authentication apps such as Authy are better in every way. (Thanks Nick for the fraud thread.)
unique link to this extract

I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside • The Atlantic

Rumman Chowdhury:

»

Twitter has never been perfect. Jack Dorsey’s distracted leadership across multiple companies kept him from defining a clear strategic direction for the platform. His short-tenured successor, Parag Agrawal, was well intentioned but ineffectual. Constant chaos and endless structuring and restructuring were ongoing internal jokes. Competing imperatives sometimes manifested in disagreements between those of us charged with protecting users and the team leading algorithmic personalization. Our mandate was to seek outcomes that kept people safe. Theirs was to drive up engagement and therefore revenue. The big takeaway: ethics don’t always scale with short-term engagement.

A mentor once told me that my role was to be a truth teller. Sometimes that meant confronting leadership with uncomfortable realities. At Twitter, it meant pointing to revenue-enhancing methods (such as increased personalization) that would lead to ideological filter bubbles, open up methods of algorithmic bot manipulation, or inadvertently popularize misinformation. We worked on ways to improve our toxic-speech-identification algorithms so they would not discriminate against African-American Vernacular English as well as forms of reclaimed speech. All of this depended on rank-and-file employees. Messy as it was, Twitter sometimes seemed to function mostly on goodwill and the dedication of its staff. But it functioned.

Those days are over. From the announcement of Musk’s bid to the day he walked into the office holding a sink, I watched, horrified, as he slowly killed Twitter’s culture. Debate and constructive dissent was stifled on Slack, leaders accepted their fate or quietly resigned, and Twitter slowly shifted from being a company that cared about the people on the platform to a company that only cares about people as monetizable units. The few days I spent at Musk’s Twitter could best be described as a Lord of the Flies–like test of character as existing leadership crumbled, Musk’s cronies moved in, and his haphazard management—if it could be called that—instilled a sense of fear and confusion.

«

In addition: Twitter is now having trouble paying some employees [In Europe] on time.
unique link to this extract

How we boosted marketing email open rate from 20% to 60% • Catonmat

»

At Browserling and Online Tools, one simple trick changed our marketing email open rate from 20% to 60%.

This trick was to start sending the emails at the same hour the user last visited our website.

For example, if a user was last on our website at 3:43pm, then now we send the marketing emails to this user at around 3pm.

Before this trick, we were sending the emails at random times.

«

Not even regular times? Like some newsletter writers do for their daily emails? Even so, this is a surprising-and-obvious move, and they’ve got the data to confirm it.
unique link to this extract

Carmakers are pushing autonomous tech. This engineer wants limits • The New York Times

Cade Metz:

»

Last fall, Missy Cummings sent a document to her colleagues at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that revealed a surprising trend: When people using advanced driver-assistance systems die or are injured in a car crash, they are more likely to have been speeding than people driving cars on their own.

The two-page analysis of nearly 400 crashes involving systems like Tesla’s Autopilot and General Motors’ Super Cruise is far from conclusive. But it raises fresh questions about the technologies that have been installed in hundreds of thousands of cars on US roads. Dr. Cummings said the data indicated that drivers were becoming too confident in the systems’ abilities and that automakers and regulators should restrict when and how the technology was used.

People “are over-trusting the technology,” she said. “They are letting the cars speed. And they are getting into accidents that are seriously injuring them or killing them.”

Dr. Cummings, an engineering and computer science professor at George Mason University who specializes in autonomous systems, recently returned to academia after more than a year at the safety agency. On Wednesday, she will present some of her findings at the University of Michigan, a short drive from Detroit, the main hub of the US auto industry.

…In interviews last week, Dr. Cummings said automakers and regulators ought to prevent such systems from operating over the speed limit and require drivers using them to keep their hands on the steering wheel and eyes on the road.

“Car companies — meaning Tesla and others — are marketing this as a hands-free technology,” she said. “That is a nightmare.”

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified