A bizarre turn of events means South Korea’s Legoland project has created a full-blown government bond crisis. CC-licensed photo by Fido on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Working from home. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Twitter’s moderation system is in tatters • WIRED

Condé Nast:

»

After Elon Musk bought the company and laid off 7,500 full time employees, disinformation researchers and activists say, the team that took down toxic and fake content vanished. Now, after years of developing relationships within those teams, researchers say no one is responding to their reports of disinformation on the site, even as data suggests Twitter is becoming more toxic.

The issue is particularly acute in Brazil, where a runoff presidential election between right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took place just days after Musk’s takeover. Observers and activists had warned for months that Bolsonaro’s supporters might not accept the results of the election should he lose, and could resort to violence. When Bolsonaro supporters began questioning the election results online, researchers found that Twitter had apparently fired all the people who should be monitoring the platform.

“At this moment, we have nobody to reach out to,” says Nina Santos, a researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology in Digital Democracy. “All the people that we were talking with are no longer there.” Santos says that until Musk’s takeover, Twitter had been “quite responsive” in taking down rule-breaking content that could undermine trust in the election or spread disinformation, compared to Meta and Google. The entirety of Twitter’s Brazil team was included in the 7,500 people laid off earlier this month.

Although Lula was declared the winner of the election, Santos says she still sees tweets questioning the result or calling for mobilization against the government. All of these, she says, are dangerous. Twitter’s current policy states that the company will “label or remove false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process.” Christopher Bouzy, founder and CEO of Bot Sentinel, a project to fight disinformation and harassment on Twitter, was also monitoring the Brazilian elections, as well as the US midterms. Like Santos, he noticed that tweets claiming the Brazilian election was stolen remained up on Twitter.

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Meanwhile, at Futurism: “Panicked Elon Musk reportedly begging engineers not to leave“:

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Employees had until 5 pm on Thursday to click “yes” and be part of Twitter moving forward or take the money and part ways. The problem for Musk? According to former Uber engineer Gergely Orosz, who has had a close ear to Twitter’s recent inner turmoil, “far fewer than expected [developers] hit ‘yes.'”

So many employees called Musk’s bluff, Orosz says, that Musk is now “having meetings with top engineers to convince them to stay,” in an embarrassing reversal of his public-facing bravado earlier this week.

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Inside a boot camp for Chinese TikTok sellers bringing live e-commerce to the US • Rest of World

Yvaine Ye, Viola Zhou and Meaghan Tobin:

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As livestreaming has ballooned into a $400bn industry in China, its success has convinced Chinese entrepreneurs — and TikTok itself — that it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world begins to shop this way. Chinese suppliers, livestreamers, and talent agents have become the earliest proponents of TikTok live shopping for Western audiences, hoping sales tactics honed on Douyin and affordable goods will help them get consumers around the world hooked on China’s favorite way to shop online.

“There’s no offline store that can sell millions of a single product through a single storefront in one day,” Bian Shiqi, who attended the bootcamp in Guangzhou, told Rest of World. After working in international trade for a few years, the 35-year-old investor said she became convinced that TikTok could be the future of cross border e-commerce while watching a prolific seller on Douyin. 

Despite its global popularity, TikTok has yet to transform into a shopping destination. TikTok has tested a function called TikTok Shop — where shoppers can buy directly in the app — in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the U.K., but in most other places, shoppers have to undertake an additional step and navigate to the streamer’s website to actually purchase something they saw on TikTok. Although shoppers aren’t tuning into TikTok livestreams by the millions the way they are on Douyin, livestreamers and talent agents believe live shopping can become as popular as TikTok itself.

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Imagine that: TikTok’s present incarnation might be its least successful form.
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Meta employees, security guards fired for hijacking user accounts • WSJ

Kirsten Grind and Robert McMillan:

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Meta Platforms has fired or disciplined more than two dozen employees and contractors over the last year whom it accused of improperly taking over user accounts, in some cases allegedly for bribes, according to people familiar with the matter and documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Some of those fired were contractors who worked as security guards stationed at Meta facilities and were given access to the Facebook parent’s internal mechanism for employees to help users having trouble with their accounts, according to the documents and people familiar with the matter.

The mechanism, known internally as “Oops,” has existed since Facebook’s early years as a means for employees to help users they know who have forgotten their passwords or emails, or had their accounts taken over by hackers.

As part of the alleged abuse of the system, Meta says that in some cases workers accepted thousands of dollars in bribes from outside hackers to access user accounts, the people and documents say.

…in part because the Oops system is off limits to the vast majority of Facebook users, a cottage industry of intermediaries has developed who charge users money to regain control of their accounts. In interviews with the Journal, some of those third parties claim to have access to Meta employees to help reset accounts.

“When you take someone’s Instagram account down that they’ve spent years building up, you’re taking away their whole means of generating an income,” says Nick McCandless, whose company McCandless Group operates a platform for content creators. McCandless says he charges his clients to reset accounts, sometimes through a contact he declined to name at Meta.

“You really have to have someone on the inside who will actually do it,” he said.

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Inevitably, God mode gets abused. But you have to have it: hacker takeover (from outside) and other problems make it essential.
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Elon Musk’s politically polarizing effect • Morning Consult

Jordan Marlatt:

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Elon Musk has turned Twitter’s fan base upside down in the past few weeks. Democrats are increasingly viewing the platform with antipathy and distrust as Republicans move in the opposite direction. Morning Consult Brand Intelligence data also suggests it’s fair to question whether Musk’s stewardship of the social media giant runs the risk of collateral damage to his other well-known properties. 

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has dominated major news cycles for months, with each new revelation throwing the company’s fate into question. Since the takeover became official on Oct. 27, Musk has laid off thousands of Twitter employees and contractors, fired many of Twitter’s top executives or seen them exit, released an ill-fated revamp of the platform’s verification system and threatened to “thermonuclear name & shame” companies that pull their advertisements from the site. 

This has caused Twitter to experience the most significant month-over-month shift in opinion among Democrats since Morning Consult began tracking the brand in January 2017.

… Net favorability of Tesla is down around 20 points among Democrats since last month and up around 4 points among Republicans. Net favourability of SpaceX is also down among Democrats, but the decline has been more muted so far.

For Tesla and SpaceX, the partisan spillover effects could have profound implications. If the Tesla brand becomes increasingly right-leaning, that could put it out of alignment with core electric vehicle purchasing profiles, which lean more liberal.

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So not just Twitter and his own reputation getting ruined. But can other companies take advantage of that reduced favourability? Or does it just translate into reduced sales? (Plus, what a mismatch between Tesla buyers and the company’s chief, eh.)
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UVA shooting highlights Twitter’s power in a crisis • Time

Megan McCluskey:

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ate on Sunday, reports of an active shooter at large at the University of Virginia began circulating on social media. As is often the case in emergency situations, many people, including students, parents, and local residents, turned to Twitter in search of up-to-date and accurate news about the incident. However, it quickly became clear that Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover of the site had made Twitter less reliable as a trusted source of information–especially in a time of crisis.

Experts fear Musk’s policy changes have greatly reduced people’s ability to assess the trustworthiness of the information that they’re being exposed to on the platform.

“There was a shooting at UVA in Charlottesville about an hour ago,” tweeted one user on Sunday night. “Looking for more information, I scroll Twitter. But with no reliable verified checkmark I have no clue which reports to believe & which are fake. That’s what verification is for.”

A less-reliable Twitter would mean losing “vital infrastructure,” says Caroline Orr, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security. “It’s become such a huge part of how we learn about crises and how they get reported out to the public,” she says.

Concerns over trolls and impersonators spreading misinformation about the shooting proved to be justified. One verified account impersonating Sen. Ted Cruz shared a tweet in response to the incident that received thousands of likes before it was taken down. Meanwhile, other users were struggling to discern the facts of the situation while the search for the suspect was still ongoing.

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Shows how far we’ve come that people think Twitter is the place to go to find this stuff out. That all really became embedded with the shootings in Ferguson in August 2014, when Twitter was alive with eyewitness reports, while Facebook was amplifying ice bucket posts.
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A theme park crisis threatens South Korea’s economy • Foreign Policy

S. Nathan Park:

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To construct Legoland Korea, the Gangwon provincial government established a special purpose entity called Gangwon Jungdo Development Corp. (GJC), owned 44% by the province and 22.5% by Merlin Entertainments, the British company that owns the rights to Legoland. To fund the construction, GJC, through a subsidiary, issued bonds worth 205bn won (about $150m). The bonds were backed by the GJC-owned real estate for the theme park and its surrounding area, as well as a guarantee from the Gangwon provincial government, then led by liberal Gov. Choi Moon-soon. Korea Investors Service, the South Korean affiliate of Moody’s, gave the GJC bonds an A1 rating, the highest rating available for corporate bonds.

But Legoland Korea struggled out of the gate, too far from Seoul and too expensive for what was on offer, and it did not generate enough revenue to honor the bonds. Also, as South Korea’s real estate market softened, the value of the real estate backing the bonds began falling below the amount of the debt. As the first due date for the bonds was approaching on Sept. 29, GJC was in talks to extend the deadline with BNK Securities, the underwriter for the bonds. Negotiating for such an extension is a tense affair but a relatively common one. GJC was close to buying itself a three- or four-month reprieve, by prepaying BNK four months’ worth of interest that it would additionally owe by extending the due date.

Then came the disaster. Out of the blue, on Sept. 28, Gangwon’s newly elected conservative governor, Kim Jin-tae, announced that he would not honour the government’s guarantee. Instead, GJC would enter into bankruptcy, meaning that creditors would receive pennies on the dollar. BNK Securities declared a default on the GJC bonds and sought assurances that Gangwon would pay back the 205 billion won, but the government gave only a vague promise that it would honor the guarantee without giving a specific date. By mid-October, the GJC bonds were downgraded to junk status.

Kim’s declaration was brutally unnecessary. He claimed that he was trying to reduce the debt left behind by his liberal predecessor who, according to Kim, irresponsibly embarked on a white elephant project in Legoland Korea. But Gangwon’s decade-long pursuit of building a Legoland had always been a bipartisan affair, linked more to a hope of revitalizing the province than to any political faction. As a legislator representing Chuncheon, Kim was a vocal advocate for the theme park, claiming in 2014 that he would “jump into the Soyang River” along the city if South Korea’s Cultural Heritage Administration blocked the project because of the ancient artifacts discovered at the construction site. Nor was the bond amount anything excessive. Gangwon’s annual budget is over 17.7trn won (about $13bn), in which a debt of 205bn won is but a line item. Nor was the provincial government being asked to pay the entire 205bn won in one shot; it only had to assist GJC in paying the extra interest it would have incurred for extending the bonds’ due date.

By itself, extending the due date for the bonds would have cost Gangwon a bit, but it would have stayed contained. Kim’s move, however, has shattered trust in government bonds.

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And now the country faces a huge credit crunch. It’s like the tiny block to giant block meme.
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Meta’s layoffs make it official: Facebook is ready to part ways with the news • Nieman Journalism Lab

Sarah Scire:

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Among the mass layoffs at the company formerly known as Facebook last week are several roles that have served as a bridge between the news industry and the sprawling tech company.

The Meta Journalism Project Accelerator’s David Grant, a program manager, and Dorrine Mendoza, who led local news partnerships for the platform, were both laid off. Other journalism-adjacent positions eliminated include the head of news partnerships for South East Asia, a program manager for news, two program managers for news integrity, and multiple news communications jobs.

Meta declined to comment on the layoffs or confirm how many of the 11,000 positions eliminated were jobs relating to the news business. It’s unclear what impact the job losses will have on all of Facebook’s various news-related efforts, including the Meta Journalism Project itself. (Meta spokespeople and Campbell Brown, Meta’s vice president of global media partnerships, did not respond to requests for comment on the future of the Meta Journalism Project.)

The layoffs are another step in Meta’s journey to get the heck away from news. Meta, which promised $300m in support of local journalism back in 2019 when it was still Facebook, has shifted resources away from its News tab, shuttered the Bulletin newsletter program, ended support for Instant Articles, eliminated human-curation in favor of algorithms, and stopped paying US publishers to use their news content.

Instead, the company is focused on competing with rising platforms like TikTok and trying to build a metaverse that people actually want to spend time in.

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Kuo: only iPhone 15 Pro models will support higher-speed data transfers with USB-C upgrade • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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The iPhone 15 Pro models that are planned for next year will support higher wired transfer speeds thanks to the transition to USB-C, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

While all iPhone 15 models are going to feature USB-C ports instead of Lightning ports, the faster transfer speeds will be limited to the iPhone 15 Pro models. Standard iPhone 15 models will continue to feature USB 2.0 speeds, the same as Lightning.

Kuo says that transfer speeds will likely “improve markedly” on the iPhone 15 Pro models, with support for “at least” USB 3.2 or Thunderbolt 3. With the upgrade, iPhone 15 Pro models will be able to transfer video files and other file types at quicker speeds, with Kuo predicting a significantly improved user experience.

USB 2.0 transfer speeds are limited to 480Mb/s, while USB 3.2 supports speeds up to 20Gb/s. Thunderbolt 3 supports data transfer speeds up to 40Gb/s, so if Kuo is correct, there will be a major difference in wired data transfer speeds between Pro and non-Pro iPhone 15 models.

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That would make sense: keep the high speed transfer (useful for high quality video transfer, which presently is too slow for the amount of video you can capture) for the Pro models. Natural upsell.
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PR emails: I said yes to every single one for a day. Oof • Slate

Dan Kois:

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Over the past year, I’ve received press releases about all those stories and more from Lawn Love, and I’m certain many other journalists have too. Every day I get dozens of emails from publicists around the country, and around the world, informing me about new products, pitching story ideas, and always assuring me that the publicist would be happy to connect me to this pool safety startup CEO or that divorce attorney to talk about their very important topic. As I delete these emails, I often wonder: Who are all these people who want to talk to a reporter, any reporter, so badly that they will pay a publicist to email every journalist they can think of—including me, a guy who doesn’t write about pool safety or divorce or witches at all? Who actually opens these emails, let alone responds to them? Do they ever work? And what would happen if I tried?

Well, on Wednesday, Oct. 26, I decided to find out. I declared Oct. 26 my Publicist Pitch Day of Yes. I would respond to every single pitch email that asked me to talk to a client, replying, Yes! Yes, I would like to talk to this handbag entrepreneur, this life coach, this writer and social activist on a mission to empower women of color. Yes, I am available on the phone, or over Zoom, at their convenience. Yes, I will ask them about their revolutionary clitoral sonogram, their terrible opinions about cops and COVID vaccines, their advice for how to cope during the holiday season—a challenging time, as you know, for those who struggle with body image.

Ask most journalists if they would ever reply to one of these emails, not to mention write a story based on it, and you will invite an instinctive, chilling scowl. But on that day and in the week after, as I spoke to hopeful client after hopeful client, I was surprised to find that I enjoyed every single conversation, in one way or another. I certainly learned something each time. Could it be possible that the publicists are on to something? Is the daily flood of hopeless pitches actually a secret window into American ingenuity, optimism, and desperation—not to mention a very interesting line of scientifically tested sex toys?

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Long, and proof that deleting those emails (and not answering the phone) is a good idea.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Can you imagine what every NIMBY speech sounds like? Don’t worry, we’ve got it written down. CC-licensed photo by Stephen Woods 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. Very secure. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘500 jobs at risk’ as Chinese firm told to reduce stake in UK microchip factory over security concern • MSN

Sarah Taaffe-Maguire:

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A Chinese-owned tech company has been told to sell the majority of its stake in a UK silicon chip factory due to security concerns.

The government has said Nexperia must reduce its stake in Newport Wafer Fab by 86%, back to its previous holding of just 14% when it took over the firm in 2021, in an effort to “mitigate the risk to national security”.

Nexperia responded to the announcement with shock and frustration, saying it does not accept the state’s rationale and 500 jobs are now at risk.

“The far-reaching remedies which Nexperia offered to fully address the government’s concerns have been entirely ignored,” the company said in a statement.

“The UK government chose not to enter into a meaningful dialogue with Nexperia or even visit the Newport site.

“More than 500 employees in Newport also raised their own significant concerns about such a divestment – the government has chosen not to listen to them and instead taken this decision which puts the livelihoods of them and their families, as well as more than £100m of taxpayers’ money, completely unnecessarily at risk.”

The company said it will challenge the order in an effort to keep the factory and jobs.

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Long-running saga. First came to notice back in July 2021 when Nexperia acquired it, which led to questions being raised. At least we have a government that takes a little notice of national security.
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FBI is ‘extremely concerned’ about TikTok operating in US • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Chris Strohm and Daniel Flatley:

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“Under Chinese law, Chinese companies are required to essentially — and I’m going to shorthand here — basically do whatever the Chinese government wants them to do in terms of sharing information or serving as a tool of the Chinese government,” [FBI director Christopher] Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee. “That’s plenty of reason by itself to be extremely concerned.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has passed along its concerns to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the government body that’s reviewing the deal.

“As Director Wray specified in his remarks, the FBI’s input is being considered as part of our ongoing negotiations with the US Government,” said TikTok spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter. “While we can’t comment on the specifics of those confidential discussions, we are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable US national security concerns.”

The popular video-streaming app, which has millions of users in the US, has emerged at the center of a long-running national security debate. At the same time, it’s become key to reaching young voters, who are increasingly eschewing social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

The Biden administration is weighing a proposal to allow TikTok to continue to operate in the US under the ownership of Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd. The arrangement would include routing US user traffic through servers maintained by Oracle Corp., with the US-based database giant auditing the app’s algorithms.

However the effort has stalled over concerns the app would remain a threat, with China hawks on the Hill expected to criticize any agreement that stops short of an outright ban, or the sale of the platform to a US company. Congress is weighing legislation that would officially ban TikTok from all government phones.

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They haven’t banned it from government phones yet? Feels like the time has passed for that one.
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US chipmakers reel from sharp boom to bust • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

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If Wall Street had any doubts about the speed with which the chip industry’s boom has turned to bust, unexpectedly gloomy financial forecasts from companies like mobile chipmaker Qualcomm should have put them to rest.

“It’s kind of an unprecedented change over a short period of time,” Akash Palkhiwala, the company’s chief financial officer told analysts this month. “We went from a period of supply shortages to demand declines.”

Qualcomm has sliced 25% from its revenue guidance for the current quarter as weaker consumer spending hit smartphone sales. The forecast came as some of the leading chipmakers issued surprisingly weak sales and profit projections and signalled a round of job cuts ahead.

Among those to take an axe to their forecasts, AMD warned that sales of processors for PCs this quarter would be down 40% from last year, with profit margins also surprisingly weak. Intel, which cut revenue forecasts again after a big reduction the previous quarter, signalled thousands of job layoffs ahead with a plan to cut as much as $10bn from its costs by 2025.

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The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed • The Verge

Mia Sato:

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what worked in 2015 is a far cry from what works in 2022. On Monday, BuzzFeed reported earnings for the fourth time as a public company, recording $103.7m in revenue for the latest quarter, above its own projections. But the rest of the news was dire: BuzzFeed lost $27m, and the time audiences spent with its content plunged 32% from a year ago — its fourth straight quarterly decline. The company expects revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022 to dip compared to last year as well.

BuzzFeed’s ability to reflect, amplify, and create massive cultural moments by giving a staff of hundreds free rein to invent new formats led to a $1.7bn valuation in 2016. It built a Pulitzer-winning newsroom with BuzzFeed News, popularized a genre of simple and stylized cooking content with Tasty, and launched a slate of beloved shows like BuzzFeed Unsolved and Another Round.

Today, BuzzFeed’s high-profile hosts have moved on, its news division has been gutted, and its core website pays contractors flat rates starting around $100 per post to chase trending topics. The company’s valuation is down to just $237m, and dozens of current and former employees are suing BuzzFeed for losing out on millions, saying they weren’t able to sell their shares during the brief financial bright spot after the company went public last year. They now watch from the outside as the company’s value plummets and newer, more ruthless competitors native to the platforms themselves generate viral chum faster and more cheaply. 

As social platforms continue to limit its reach, BuzzFeed needs to generate one more neat trick to reinvent digital media — and save itself in the process.

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Not clear that there are any neat tricks left. But then, we thought that before Buzzfeed came along and turned “writing up viral things” into money. But between Protocol and Vox Media, this isn’t encouraging about media.
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Musk issues ultimatum to staff: commit to ‘hardcore’ Twitter or leave • The Washington Post

Faiz Siddiqui and Jeremy Merrill:

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Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to Twitter employees Wednesday morning: Commit to a new “hardcore” Twitter or leave the company with severance pay.

Twitter is shifting to an engineer-driven operation — one that “will need to be extremely hardcore” going forward, according to the midnight email, which was obtained by The Washington Post. Employees were asked to click an icon and respond by Thursday if they wanted to stay.

“This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

By mid-Wednesday, members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team — who are responsible for keeping hate speech and misinformation off the site — were discussing a mass resignation, according to three current employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The email came just a few hours after Musk tweeted he was tabling Twitter’s Blue Verified, his first major product since taking over last month as Twitter’s owner and chief executive, while the company sorts out issues with the feature following a botched rollout. Inside Twitter, staffers are using the additional time to conduct a postmortem on the launch, trying to understand why impersonations of high-profile individuals and brands spiralled out of control, according to a person with knowledge of the internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

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“Fear of retribution” is going to be quite the thing at Twitter from now on. And while Trust and Safety is very much an engineer thing, it’s also a human thing, about understanding how people are going to behave. Musk was told on his first day that opening up Twitter Blue could lead to impersonation problems. I’d be amazed if the post-mortem took longer than is required to brew a cup of coffee.
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Interview with Elon Musk biographer Ashlee Vance • Vox

Peter Kafka:

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what’s different about Twitter than the rest of Musk’s history as a businessman — or is there any difference at all?

To find out, I asked a man who’s spent years paying close attention to Musk: Ashlee Vance, the veteran Bloomberg reporter who talked to Musk and hundreds of people in his orbit for his 2015 book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. In Vance’s telling, you can see a lot of the elements of the Musk on display today: ambitious, stubborn, and willing to make bets that seem like terrible ideas to any normal human. But Vance, whose portrait of Musk was a generally admiring one, says he thinks Musk has changed in recent years, and not necessarily for the better. You can listen to our entire conversation in a special edition of my Recode Media podcast; the following interview has been excerpted from that conversation.

Vance: …I think the chaos that we see unfolding at Twitter, I don’t think that really frightens Elon. Tesla and SpaceX have been on the verge of bankruptcy, they’ve been in sort of life-and-death struggles most of their existence. And that’s kind of like where he seems to exist.

Every time those companies got to a stable point, he would just immediately go all-in and risk the entire company on the next new venture. I’ve always thought of him as the biggest gambler, the highest risk-taker you can find.

I think Twitter is a different and unique challenge. This is not something where you’re building a rocket or a car and you can marshal tons of troops to push toward this goal. There’s part of this that takes a sense of consumers’ tastes, of society’s tastes. If this company is really going to make more money, it has to get bigger and it has to have another hit. We’ve seen the hit, which is that it’s this place where everybody gathers to chat. But that hasn’t paid enough of the bills.

So this is where you start getting into kind of a territory where we just don’t know. There’s not a lot of evidence that Elon’s necessarily good at reading these kinds of signals.

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Vance is the right person in the right time to explain this.
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Scientists are uncovering ominous waters under Antarctic ice • WIRED

Matt Simon:

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Researchers just found that, at the base of Antarctica’s ice, an area the size of Germany and France combined is feeding meltwater into a super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river running to the sea. “Thirty years ago, we thought the whole of the ice pretty much was frozen to the bed,” says Imperial College London glaciologist Martin Siegert, coauthor of a new paper in Nature Geoscience describing the finding. “Now we’re in a position that we’ve just never been in before, to understand the whole of the Antarctic ice sheet.”

Antarctica’s ice is divided into two main components: the ice sheet that sits on land, and the ice shelf that extends off the coast, floating on seawater. Where the two meet—where the ice lifts off the bed and starts touching the ocean—is known as the grounding line. 

But the underside of all that ice is obscured. To find out what’s going on below, some scientists have hiked across glaciers while dragging ground-penetrating radar units on sleds—the pings travel through thousands of feet of ice and bounce off the underlying seawater, so the researchers can build detailed maps of what used to be hidden. Others are setting off explosions, then analysing the seismic waves that come back to the surface to indicate whether there’s land or water below. Still others are lowering torpedo-shaped robots through boreholes to get unprecedented imagery of the underside of the floating ice shelf. Up in the sky, satellites can measure minute changes in surface elevation, which indicates the features below—a swell, for instance, might betray a subglacial lake.

…It’s not a tremendous amount of melt per square foot. But over an area that’s the size of two large European countries, that scales up. “What we concluded is the melting is really small—it’s like a millimetre per year,” says Siegert. “But the catchment is enormous, so you don’t need much melting. That all funnels together into this river, which is several hundred kilometres long, and it’s three times the rate of flow of the river Thames in London.”

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Crypto trading and Bitcoin prices: evidence from a new database of retail adoption • Bank for International Settlements

Raphael Auer, Giulio Cornelli, Sebastian Doerr, Jon Frost and Leonardo Gambacorta:

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To investigate the drivers of crypto adoption, we assemble a novel database (made available with this paper) on retail use of crypto exchange apps at daily frequency for 95 countries over 2015–22. We show that a rising Bitcoin price is followed by the entry of new users.

About 40% of these new users are men under 35, commonly identified as the most “risk-seeking” segment of the population. To establish a causal effect of prices on adoption, we exploit two exogenous shocks: the crackdown of Chinese authorities on crypto mining in mid-2021 and the social unrest in Kazakhstan in early 2022.

During both episodes price changes have a significant effect on the entry of new users. Results from a PVAR model corroborate these findings.

Overall, back of the envelope calculations suggest that around three-quarters of users have lost money on their Bitcoin investments.

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Those men tend to come in when there’s a big price swing. And bet wrong. The paper makes a fascinating read, though it tends to confirm what you thought already.
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Every NIMBY’s speech at a public hearing • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Chas Gillespie captures the moment:

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I am grateful for the opportunity to speak tonight, and I look forward to contributing to our robust debate by making claims that are floating in an ether of confusion, prejudice, and unearned authority. But for those of you who may not know me, let me introduce myself. I’m a retired professional who rose through the ranks because competition in my field was minimized due to systemic discrimination against women and people of colour.

My job was well paid, did not punish me for my lack of soft skills, and convinced me that I know what’s best for other people, even if it seems like what’s worst for other people. I grew up here and, after leaving for a time to go to college and start my career, returned to this town, my true home, in order to raise a family and stop time from progressing. I’ve lived in the same house in the Elm Heights neighborhood for the past twenty years, and I just love everything about this town except for the problems that my politics have directly created.

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Everything about this is perfect. No, no, don’t change it!
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Facebook fact-checkers will stop checking Trump after presidential bid announcement • CNN Politics

Donie O’Sullivan:

»

The carve-out is not exclusive to Trump and applies to all politicians, but given the rate fact-checkers find themselves dealing with claims made by the former president, a manager on Meta’s “news integrity partnership” team emailed fact-checkers on Tuesday ahead of Trump’s announcement.

“Some of you have reached out seeking guidance regarding fact-checking political speech in anticipation of a potential candidacy announcement from former President Trump,” the Meta staffer wrote in the memo.

The company has long had an exception to its fact-checking policy for politicians.

“It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak,” Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former politician, said in 2019, defending the exemption.

The Meta memo sent to fact-checkers made clear that if Trump announced a 2024 presidential bid Tuesday night, he could no longer be fact-checked on the platform.

The memo noted that “political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign.”

Meta’s policy doesn’t stipulate that a candidate formally register with the Federal Election Commission. “We define a ‘politician’ as candidates running for office, current office holders – and, by extension, many of their cabinet appointees – along with political parties and their leaders,” the memo stated.

«

So who’s it left to? News organisations. Unexplained: why political speech should be ineligible for fact-checking. Clegg (a former politician, lest we forget) said in 2019 that Facebook doesn’t believe “that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.” But why should politicians be exempt from the direct scrutiny that any other statement posted to Facebook gets? Let’s all declare ourselves politicians. Sure, I’m running for office; just very, very, very slowly.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Induction ovens can demand huge amounts of electricity in a burst – but what if you installed a big battery in the oven to meet the demand? CC-licensed photo by GilgongoGilgongo 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. Not Elongated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

It’s Mukesh Ambani’s world — and we’re just living in it • Rest of World

The Rest of World staff:

»

Imagine if everything in your home came from just one company. Or, to be more precise, from companies that are ultimately led by one individual: a single person whose brands sell you the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the fuel you fill your car with, and even the internet you’re reading this with.

That’s the reality for many Indians, who rely on products, food, and services from the vast array of companies controlled by or partnered with Mukesh Ambani. He’s not just among India’s richest men, according to Forbes; with a net worth of $90.7 billion, he’s also been in the top 10 of its Billionaires List for the past three years.

Ambani’s wealth comes from the enormous Reliance Industries conglomerate. Since taking over from his father, Ambani has turned Reliance — once known for textiles and petrochemicals — into a digital powerhouse. He’s grown the company’s reach through acquisitions and partnerships to reach retail, telecommunications, media, and so much more, creating an empire with unimaginable reach.

Don’t believe us? We’ll show you. Scroll down and join us for an illustrated journey through the lives of ordinary Indians — and the many, many ways in which Ambani touches their world.

«

Phones, financial news, search engine, delivery logistics, multiple video streaming services, an all-in-one app, an AI platform for business, a shopping platforms, translation software, AI-based edtech, cloud storage, polyester fibres, home furniture, cleaning products, shoes and shoe stores, online pharmacies, fibre broadband, music streaming, jewellery, lingerie, cosmetics, prayer products (?), grocery brands, fizzy drinks, OK I ran out of time. This makes the dystopian stories of the big company or big guy owning everything seem all too real.
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Twitter alternative: how Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral” • UX Collective

Clive Thompson:

»

Back in 2017 I wrote a short column for Wired about “antiviral” design.

I’d recently been using some fun, experimental web services, like Rob Beschizza’s txt.fyi. These sites all allowed you to post stuff online, much as Facebook or Twitter did. But they had no social mechanisms for promoting posts: No “like” buttons, no share buttons, no feed showing which posts were the most popular. Txt.fyi even had a no-robots tag on each post, telling search engines not to index them. The only way someone would see what you’d posted on txt.fyi is if you somehow actively shared the URL with them.

The reason for these curious, un-Twitter-like features?

As Beschizza told me, it was encourage people to communicate and be creative — without constantly thinking about “will I get a huge audience for this”? Beschizza (and the other folks making these similarly antiviral sites) all believed that the design of the big social sites had deformed people’s behavior. Twitter and Instagram and Facebook etc. had coaxed people to constantly try to hack the attentional marketplace. It created a world of people incessantly making posts designed to be operatically theatrical, or to enrage — or to elicit some sort of high-voltage reaction.

As Beschizza said: “I wanted something where people could publish their thoughts without any false game of social manipulation, one-upmanship, and favor-trading.” It was, as I called it, “antiviral design”.

I’ve been thinking more and more about how this applies to Mastodon. I’ve been using Mastodon on and off for several years now. But the influx of newcomers has me using it a lot recently, so I’m noticing more and more how people behave on that network — or, more importantly, how they’re encouraged to behave.

And I’ve realized that Mastodon is a superb example of antiviral design.

«

Subtracting the various things that make virality easy on Twitter – single-press retweets, dunk-tweeting (OK quote tweets) – inevitably makes for a quieter network. (Still haven’t joined Mastodon.)
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How we geolocated a photo of a Russian missile programming team • Bellingcat

Aric Toler:

»

While conducting research for his latest Bellingcat investigation, Christo Grozev received a group photograph of the missile guidance team that were purported to be behind programming many of the cruise missiles that have hit Ukraine in recent months. As detailed in the article:

“Another team member, whose identity is not known as they contacted reporters via a burner email account that was provided by Bellingcat and The Insider to all contacted members, shared two group photos of the GVC team and two photos of their commander, Lt. Col. Bagnyuk, wearing his many medals.”

The team member who provided this 2013 photograph said it was taken at the Main Computation Centre of the General Staff (GVC) in Moscow, but we needed to independently verify this ourselves. During the course of our investigation, we had already discovered the GVC was located at Znamenka 19 – the headquarters of the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD). This fact was gleaned by looking for the names of engineers we had identified as working for the GVC in leaked Russian databases (including those that contain information about addresses used to register cars or sign up to online delivery apps). Some had registered addresses at Znamenka 19.

As such, the next challenge was to use geolocation techniques to confirm conclusively where the image was taken so that we could include it in our findings about the missile team. 

This brief article provides a walkthrough on how we geolocated this photograph, eventually verifying that it was indeed taken at the Russian MoD’s Znamenka 19 facility, one of the locations that hosts the GVC.

«

You might remember the amazing example from May 2021 where Bellingcat geolocated a photo taken from an FBI child exploitation case, based on just a poolside picture.
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Meta Quest Pro review: get me out of here • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

»

While Meta has described the Quest as a VR Nintendo Switch, it’s tailoring the Quest Pro to an audience that can buy a more expensive headset, starting with its looks and fit. The Quest Pro is an intimidatingly polished-looking piece of black plastic. Instead of the Quest 2’s cloth straps, it features a black plastic halo, which sits around your head and tightens with a wheel at the back, a bit like the original PlayStation VR. The headset is heavier than the Quest 2 at 722 grams compared to 503 grams, but it’s redistributed its weight to be less front-heavy, shifting its battery to the back.

I loved this design after a Quest Pro demo session, and I think it’s still got strong points. The headset fits more securely than the default Quest 2 strap system, which sometimes felt on the verge of slipping off. There’s no velcro for my long hair to get caught in.

But since that first demo, using the Quest Pro has become uniquely tortuous. Its ring puts practically all its substantial weight on my upper forehead, sometimes leaving a numb and tingling strip along my hairline. It feels a little better if I keep the fit loose, but that makes the headset less stable during games and other high-intensity activities. It’s a worse experience than the Quest 2 with its optional Elite Strap, which includes an over-the-head strap for balance and still leaves the Quest 2 about 100 grams lighter than the Quest Pro.

The battery doesn’t last as long as the Quest 2, but I had trouble using the Quest Pro long enough to wear it out
Meta has made some other hardware tradeoffs. The headset’s face mask is shallower than the Quest 2’s, for instance, so it gives you a peripheral view of the real world outside your headset. If you want to block out more light, you can snap on a pair of included magnetic silicone wings that act like blinders or a separate $49 mask that shuts out practically all light. That’s a nice bit of flexibility, except that the headset in its default state made me consistently nauseated, likely thanks to the constant visual clash of real and virtual worlds. (My colleague and boss Nilay Patel, a frequent Quest 2 user, experienced the same problems.) I had no trouble once I put the blinders on, but I’m guessing some people won’t reach that point; they’ll simply feel motion-sick and conclude VR isn’t for them.

«

Battery life of about two hours. But even that sounds like more than people want to spend wearing it.
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Induction cooking heats up with a $20m cash injection for Impulse • TechCrunch

Haje Jan Kamps:

»

All electric, everywhere, all of the time; that’s one of the many climate mantras. Induction stovetops take a lot of power, however — they can pull 40 amps at 240 volts. That’s the same as an at-home Level 2 EV charger. Needless to say, a lot of older houses aren’t wired to plug in a Tesla in your kitchen, which means it could get expensive to upgrade to an induction range. Impulse to the rescue — the company’s stoves include a battery solution, which means that it doesn’t pull the full 40 amps when it’s operating, and you could find yourself cooking with induction without having to upgrade your panel. Clever!

“I’d been thinking about how to supercharge home appliances for a while and the deeper I dug into the space, the clearer it became that there was a larger story bringing together whole-home electrification and added energy storage in alignment with new policy tailwinds and distributed energy resource incentives,” said Sam D’Amico, CEO at Impulse. “Integrating batteries not only unlocks really impressive performance improvements, it also removes a lot of common barriers around power or panel limitations with installing induction stoves while also adding energy storage to the grid.”

«

A neat enough idea – the battery can trickle charge while you’re not cooking. Your electricity bills are going to be fun, of course: gas is still cheaper, per kWh, than electricity.
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Protocol, the tech-news focused website, will shutter and lay off its entire staff • CNN Business

Oliver Darcy:

»

Staffers were told at an all-hands meeting Tuesday that the news organization will cease publishing on its website Thursday. The outlet’s flagship newsletter, Source Code, will continue publishing for several more weeks, but all other newsletters will stop after Tuesday.

The shuttering of the news organization will impact approximately 60 staffers, people familiar with the matter said. They will remain active employees through Friday, December 16, and then be eligible for eight weeks of severance, the people added.

Allbritton announced the launch of Protocol in late 2019 to much buzz. The Washington media mogul told Vanity Fair at the time that he wanted to replicate Politico’s successful model for the technology industry.

“I would love for this to be as big as, if not larger than, Politico is right now,” Allbritton told Vanity Fair in 2019.

But Protocol never had much luck. Shortly after launching, the global pandemic unleashed brutal economic headwinds on the media industry, resulting in some cuts to staff. Finally, when it seemed that the outlet might catch its footing as the pandemic’s grip on the economy lifted, German publishing giant Axel Springer closed a deal to purchase Politico. That acquisition resulted in Protocol, which had operated independently, being folded into Politico Media Group.

Goli Sheikholeslami, the chief executive of Political Media Group, has for months been working with Axel Springer to conduct a long-term strategy planning process to best position the company. The plan, people familiar with the matter said, is to double the size of the company by 2027.

But it comes as Big Tech firms have faced particularly challenging economic conditions, making it especially challenging for Protocol to generate revenue from advertising sales to the sector, people familiar with the matter said.

«

This is a pity: Protocol did lots of good stories. Linked here beginning in February 2020 with “Tech’s strangest job listings: future edition“, and to another 39 of their stories. Hope the stories at least will survive. But ad-funded things aren’t looking too wonderful just now./
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CVC, Group Black partner on bid for Vox Media • Axios

Sara Fischer:

»

CVC Capital Partners and Group Black are pursuing a joint bid to buy Vox Media, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The bid comes as the media sector is grappling with a tough economic climate and as CVC, the European private equity giant, is eyeing a consolidation move into more media assets across the U.S.

Last week, CVC and Group Black, a media collective, sent Vox a term sheet outlining details for a potential deal, sources tell Axios.

Despite industry challenges, Vox remains a top digital media company, housing popular sites like Eater and SB Nation, plus Thrillist and Seeker which it owns after its Group Nine Media deal last year.
Vox was valued at around $1bn after a $200m funding round in 2015.

Vox is not looking to sell the business at the moment, according to one source who spoke with Axios. The company declined to comment.

«

Also worth noting that Vox Media owns The Verge. If private equity gets hold of that (and the other Vox properties), expect all sorts of things to be squeezed for money. Techcrunch has been through a gentler version of that loop a couple of times, and it’s never a good outcome.
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How North Korea became a mastermind of crypto cyber crime • Financial Times

Christian Davies and Schott Chipolina:

»

Western security agencies and cyber security companies treat [North Korea] as one of the world’s four principal nation state-based cyber threats, alongside China, Russia, and Iran.

According to a UN panel of experts monitoring the implementation of international sanctions, money raised by North Korea’s criminal cyber operations are helping to fund the country’s illicit ballistic missile and nuclear programmes. Anne Neuberger, US deputy national security adviser for cyber security, said in July that North Korea “uses cyber to gain, we estimate, up to a third of their funds for their missile programme”.

Crypto analysis firm Chainalysis estimates that North Korea stole approximately $1bn in the first nine months of 2022 from decentralised crypto exchanges alone.

The rapid collapse last week of FTX, one of the biggest exchanges, has highlighted the opacity, erratic regulation and speculative frenzies that have been the central features of the market for digital assets. North Korea’s growing use of crypto heists has also served to demonstrate the absence of meaningful international regulation of the same markets.

Analysts say the scale and sophistication of the Axie Infinity hack [in which $620m of Ether was taken] exposed just how powerless the US and allied countries appear to be to prevent large-scale North Korean crypto theft.

Only about $30m of the crypto loot has since been recovered. That was after an alliance of law enforcement agencies and crypto analysis companies traced some of the stolen funds through a series of decentralised exchanges and so-called “crypto mixers”, software tools that can shuffle the crypto holdings of different users so as to obfuscate their origins.

«

As the article points out, it was Kim Jong Un who, on taking power leader in 2011, identified cyber capabilities as crucial to the country’s future success. How very right he was.
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Internal documents show how close the FBI came to deploying spyware • The New York Times

Mark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman:

»

During a closed-door session with lawmakers last December, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, was asked whether the bureau had ever purchased and used Pegasus, the hacking tool that penetrates mobile phones and extracts their contents.

Mr. Wray acknowledged that the FBI had bought a license for Pegasus, but only for research and development. “To be able to figure out how bad guys could use it, for example,” he told Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, according to a transcript of the hearing that was recently declassified.

But dozens of internal FBI documents and court records tell a different story. The documents, produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by The New York Times against the bureau, show that FBI officials made a push in late 2020 and the first half of 2021 to deploy the hacking tools — made by the Israeli spyware firm NSO — in its own criminal investigations. The officials developed advanced plans to brief the bureau’s leadership, and drew up guidelines for federal prosecutors about how the FBI’s use of hacking tools would need to be disclosed during criminal proceedings.

It is unclear how the bureau was contemplating using Pegasus, and whether it was considering hacking the phones of American citizens, foreigners or both. In January, The Times revealed that FBI officials had also tested the NSO tool Phantom, a version of Pegasus capable of hacking phones with US numbers.
The FBI eventually decided not to deploy Pegasus in criminal investigations in July 2021, amid a flurry of stories about how the hacking tool had been abused by governments across the globe. But the documents offer a glimpse at how the US government — over two presidential administrations — wrestled with the promise and peril of a powerful cyberweapon.

«

Pegasus is the subject of a fascinating forthcoming book (which I’m reviewing for The Guardian). It really is the neutron bomb of the smartphone age: almost too dangerous to deploy. But not quite.
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Twitter is Going Great!

Volunteers from the Today in Tabs Discord:

»

Twitter is Going Great!

… and definitely does not develop features primarily to stroke Elon Musk’s delicate ego

«

Inspired by Molly White’s “Web3 Is Going Great” (“…and is definitely not an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smouldering planet”), and doing much the same in showing howTwitter is gradually getting screwed up.

Web3IsGoingGreat is, by the way, keeping a tally of all the lenders and asset managers who are discovering that, whoopsie, they had lots of funds tied up in FTX which has of course gone insolvent/bankrupt/bad/south.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Attending the World Cup in Qatar might mean installing privacy-invading government apps. Would you? CC-licensed photo by Tsutomu Takasu 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.

Coming up Friday: another post, due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. Not an RPC. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Going to the World Cup? Get ready to have your privacy invaded • TechRadar

Will McCurdy:

»

Several cybersecurity experts have highlighted potential data security issues ahead for attendees of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.

The Norwegian government’s Head of Security Øyvind Vasaasen told NRK (opens in new tab): “It’s not my job to give travel advice, but personally I would never bring my mobile phone on a visit to Qatar”, likening the scope of official apps to giving someone the keys to your house. 

Those wanting to make a trip to the Middle East to experience the tournament live will need to install a Covid-19 tracker dubbed “Ehteraz” on their smartphones, alongside “Hayya”, a compulsory ticketing and transport app.

Vasaasen alleged that Ehteraz claims access “to several rights on your mobile, like access to read, delete or change all content on the phone, as well as access to connect to WiFi and Bluetooth, override other apps, and prevent the phone from switching off to sleep mode”.

Naomi Lintvedt, a research fellow at the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Law, opined that if she were an employer, she wouldn’t allow employees to work from their phones in Qatar.

In addition, France’s data protection authority CNIL suggested in Politico to “travel with a blank smartphone … or an old phone that has been reset” and that “special care should be taken with photos, videos, or digital works that could place you in difficulty with respect to the legislation of the country visited”.

«

Cop27 one day, Qatar’s World Cup the next.
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Exclusive: Russian software disguised as American finds its way into US Army, CDC apps • Reuters

James PEarson and Marisa Taylor:

»

Thousands of smartphone applications in Apple and Google’s online stores contain computer code developed by a technology company, Pushwoosh, that presents itself as based in the United States, but is actually Russian, Reuters has found.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United States’ main agency for fighting major health threats, said it had been deceived into believing Pushwoosh was based in the US capital. After learning about its Russian roots from Reuters, it removed Pushwoosh software from seven public-facing apps, citing security concerns.

The US Army said it had removed an app containing Pushwoosh code in March because of the same concerns. That app was used by soldiers at one of the country’s main combat training bases.

According to company documents publicly filed in Russia and reviewed by Reuters, Pushwoosh is headquartered in the Siberian town of Novosibirsk, where it is registered as a software company that also carries out data processing. It employs around 40 people and reported revenue of 143,270,000 rubles ($2.4m) last year. Pushwoosh is registered with the Russian government to pay taxes in Russia.

On social media and in US regulatory filings, however, it presents itself as a US company, based at various times in California, Maryland and Washington DC, Reuters found.

Pushwoosh provides code and data processing support for software developers, enabling them to profile the online activity of smartphone app users and send tailor-made push notifications from Pushwoosh servers.

On its website, Pushwoosh says it does not collect sensitive information, and Reuters found no evidence Pushwoosh mishandled user data. Russian authorities, however, have compelled local companies to hand over user data to domestic security agencies.

Pushwoosh’s founder, Max Konev, told Reuters in a September email that the company had not tried to mask its Russian origins. “I am proud to be Russian and I would never hide this.”

…Pushwoosh code has been embedded into almost 8,000 apps in the Google and Apple app stores, according to Appfigures, an app intelligence website. Pushwoosh’s website says it has more than 2.3 billion devices listed in its database.

«

Never hide it, no, sure, not much. The classic problem of embedded frameworks.
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The big idea: stopping climate change isn’t enough – we need to reverse it • The Guardian

Zeke Hausfather is director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute:

»

We have a saying in the climate science world – that CO2 is forever. It will take close to half a million years before a ton of CO2 emitted today from burning fossil fuels is completely removed from the atmosphere naturally. This means that when we try to neutralise or undo fossil fuel emissions – for example, with carbon offsets – those interventions should operate over a similar timeframe: a ton of emissions from cutting down trees can be neutralised by putting more carbon in trees or soils, but CO2 from fossil fuels needs to be balanced by more permanent carbon removal. This is the reason why the respected Science Based Targets initiative only allows measures that permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere to neutralise a company’s remaining fossil fuel emissions in their net-zero standard – and only alongside deep emissions reductions.

We should not oversell the role of carbon removal. The vast majority of the time it is cheaper to reduce emissions than to remove CO2 from the atmosphere after the fact. Models that limit warming to 1.5C show that we need to reduce global CO2 emissions by around 90%, while only using carbon removal for around 10%. But 10% of the solution to a problem as big as climate change is still something we cannot afford to ignore.

In 2021 the world spent a total of $755bn on reducing emissions. We should probably aim to spend about 1% of that money on carbon removal technologies.

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$7.5bn? If that amount was put in annually in venture capital, perhaps it would make some difference.
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Speed traps have no long-term effect on speeding • Strong Towns

Seairra Shepherd:

»

No one likes to get a speeding ticket, but police hand out citations thousands of times a day throughout the United States. In El Paso, along Delta Drive, law enforcement issued 136 speeding citations to drivers in just six days, in an effort to stop speeding along Delta Drive, where many locals had complained about cars passing by at dangerous speeds. After the six-day citation spree, the police department claimed on their twitter to have successfully slowed down the cars.

A month after this, Strong Towns member and El Paso Community College civil engineering student Zachary Staggs wondered if the speed trap really did put a stop to speeding. 

Deciding to conduct a speed study, Staggs placed himself in an inconspicuous spot away from school zones or intersections that may have influenced the results. He spent two hours tracking oncoming traffic speed from both directions to collect the study data. 

“My takeaway is that whatever the police did, it didn’t work,” said Staggs. “At all.” 

On a sunny October day, eight out of ten drivers exceeded the posted speed limit of 35 mph. One out of four drivers sped 10 mph or more over the limit. Some vehicles were caught going as fast as 60 mph.

“It was insane,” said Staggs. “I felt I could count the people who were going under the speed limit on my fingers, and that didn’t feel right to me.”

Staggs’s results are a striking demonstration of a basic truth about driving: The typical driver does not select their speed based on the posted speed limit. Rather, they rely on visual and other physical cues that intuitively communicate to them how fast it feels safe to go on a given roadway.

This is what’s known as “design speed,” and it may be substantially higher than the legal speed limit. Engineers often use the 85th percentile speed (the speed that 85% of drivers are going at or under) as an indication of design speed. According to Staggs’s findings, on Delta Drive, the 85th percentile speed falls at 45 mph, a full ten miles per hour over the posted speed limit.

«

If you look at the picture in the article, it’s obvious why vehicles don’t drive along it at 35mph: it’s a long, straight dual carriageway with wide pavements and no houses on either side. The question isn’t why people disobey the speed limit; it’s why anyone thought a speed limit of 35mph could make sense. The headline isn’t supported by finding. As Staggs says later in the story, the problem is the road design, if they really want to enforce that limit.
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FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to infamous online-poker cheating scandals • Poker.org

Haley Hintze:

»

While many mainstream reports on FTX’s collapse have focused on the failed deals between the billionaire owner-founders of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Binance, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the story also includes the involvement of at least one dark figure in online poker history, Daniel S. Friedberg, who serves as FTX’s Chief Regulatory Officer. Friedberg is positioned in a central role in assuring that FTX remains in compliance with financial exchanges and licensing regimes around the globe.

Friedberg played a prominent and infamous role in the coverup of the insider-cheating scandal at UltimateBet in the mid-2000s, and he helped orchestrate some of the questionable legal moves that allowed the Portland, Oregon-based site evade US law enforcement efforts throughout its existence. Those business and legal moves included the creation of a false-front office in Canada which in turn allowed for an IPO on the London Stock Exchange, a faked sale of the company to Tokwiro Enterprises (an entity created by the former chief of the Kahnawake nation, Joseph Tokwiro Norton), licensing in various offshore “rubber stamp” jurisdictions, and ultimately, a shadowy merger with another online-poker company, Absolute Poker, which was also riddled with insider fraud and crippled by its own cheating scandal.

Friedberg, who served as FTX’s general counsel before taking on the company’s regulatory role, was recently described by Coingeek’s Steven Stradbrooke as being “almost comically inappropriate” for the job. The description appears apt, given Friedberg’s long history of not complying with various jurisdictions’ regulations, but rather, evading them.

«

Oh now you tell us. Though actually this stuff was obvious for anyone who took the trouble to look at the backgrounds of people like Friedberg. But crypto boosters wouldn’t pay attention to that. FTX (or Alameda) though was essentially self-funded by Bankman-Fried’s real trading skills doing arbitrage on Korean crypto exchanges. After that, though, things went bad. Very bad.
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Google agrees to $392m privacy settlement with 40 states • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang:

»

In the location privacy settlement, the state attorneys general claimed that Google gave the false impression that when users turned off location tracking services, the company no longer collected geolocation data about them. But through Google’s broad array of other services like search, maps and apps that connect to Wi-Fi and cellular phone towers, the company continued amassing and storing an intricate history of users’ movements, according to the states.

Until May 2018, Google even tracked the location of users who had logged out of Google apps, an action that could lead a consumer to believe location tracking had been disabled, the attorneys general said.

“For years, Google prioritized profit over the privacy of people who use Google products and services,” said Ellen Rosenblum, the Oregon attorney general, who led the case along with Nebraska. “Consumers thought they had turned ‘off’ their location tracking features on Google, but the company continued to secretly record their movements and use that information for advertisers.”

In addition to paying the monetary sum, which will go to state coffers, Google has promised to make clearer how it collects location data, including what kinds of data it can still accumulate when location tracking is disabled for one setting but not for others. The company must also notify users about how to disable location tracking, delete the data collected by the settings and set data retention limits. Users will be notified by pop-up boxes and more detailed information on Google’s informational page about location technologies.

The states’ investigation began after a 2018 Associated Press article on Google’s misleading location tracking practices.

«

Note that little bit at the end. Journalism can actually make a difference to these behaviours. Recall that the whole issue about location tracking (and, later, address uploading) began with journalists writing about the topic, which then came to wider notice, and then to legislators’ notice.
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DeviantArt upsets artists with its new AI art generator, DreamUp • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Friday, the online art community DeviantArt announced DreamUp, an AI-powered text-to-image generator service powered by Stable Diffusion. Simultaneously, DeviantArt launched an initiative that ostensibly lets artists opt out of AI image training but also made everyone’s art opt-in by default, which angered many members.

DreamUp creates novel AI-generated art based on text prompts. Due to its Stable Diffusion roots, DreamUp learned how to generate images by analyzing hundreds of millions of images scraped off sites like DeviantArt and collected into LAION datasets without artists’ permission, a potential irony that some DeviantArt members find problematic.

As we’ve reported frequently on Ars in the past, Stable Diffusion’s web-scraping nature ignited a huge debate earlier this year among artists that challenge the ethics of AI-generated artwork. Some art communities have taken hard stances against any AI-generated images, banning them completely.

Perhaps anticipating a backlash, DeviantArt is making overtures to pacify artists who might be upset about their work being used to train AI image generators. The site is providing a special “noai” flag that artists can check in their image settings to opt out of third-party image datasets. (Whether third-party image scrapers will honor this flag, however, remains to be seen.)

«

“NoAI” is reminiscent of the “nofollow” tag that emerged a couple of decades ago when spam in blog comments began to be a problem: it told Google (and other search engines took the scheme up too) essentially to ignore the linked site. Perhaps that’s going to be the next step in this debate.
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Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks • MIT Technology Review

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

“Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its “Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover. “It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,” says the engineer.

The small suggestions of something wrong will amplify and multiply as time goes on, he predicts—in part because the skeleton staff remaining to handle these issues will quickly burn out. “Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality, and we’re already kind of seeing this,” he says. 

Twitter’s remaining engineers have largely been tasked with keeping the site stable over the last few days, since the new CEO decided to get rid of a significant chunk of the staff maintaining its code base. As the company tries to return to some semblance of normalcy, more of their time will be spent addressing Musk’s (often taxing) whims for new products and features, rather than keeping what’s already there running.

This is particularly problematic, says [highly experienced SRE Ben] Krueger, for a site like Twitter, which can have unforeseen spikes in user traffic and interest. Krueger contrasts Twitter with online retail sites, where companies can prepare for big traffic events like Black Friday with some predictability. “When it comes to Twitter, they have the possibility of having a Black Friday on any given day at any time of the day,” he says. “At any given day, some news event can happen that can have significant impact on the conversation.” Responding to that is harder to do when you lay off up to 80% of your SREs—a figure Krueger says has been bandied about within the industry but which MIT Technology Review has been unable to confirm. The Twitter engineer agreed that the percentage sounded “plausible.”

«

This article appeared a week ago, and things have just started to fray at the edges. The World Cup’s now starting: that’s going to load-test Twitter in multiple non-Western countries at once. Interesting times.
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Fake Eli Lilly account may cost Twitter millions • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

»

Inside the real Eli Lilly, the fake sparked a panic, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Company officials scrambled to contact Twitter representatives and demanded they kill the viral spoof, worried it could undermine their brand’s reputation or push false claims about people’s medicine. Twitter, its staffing cut in half, didn’t react for hours.

The aftermath of that $8 spoof offers a potentially costly lesson for Musk, who has long treated Twitter as a playground for bawdy jokes and trolls but now must find a way to operate as a business following his $44bn takeover.

By Friday morning, Eli Lilly executives had ordered a halt to all Twitter ad campaigns — a potentially serious blow, given that the $330bn company controls the kind of massive advertising budget that Musk says the company needs to avoid bankruptcy. They also paused their Twitter publishing plan for all corporate accounts around the world.

“For $8, they’re potentially losing out on millions of dollars in ad revenue,” said Amy O’Connor, a former senior communications official at Eli Lilly who now works at a trade association. “What’s the benefit to a company … of staying on Twitter? It’s not worth the risk when patient trust and health are on the line.”

«

Later in the day Musk tweeted that verification would be done…by Twitter.
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Dan O’Dowd is the rich tech CEO spending millions to stop Elon Musk • The Washington Post

Gerrit de Vynck:

»

O’Dowd, who made his fortune selling software to military customers, has been using the [Tesla] Model 3 to test and film the [car’s] self-driving software. He’s documented what appear to be examples of the car swerving across the centerline toward oncoming traffic, failing to slow down in a school zone and missing stop signs. This summer, he triggered an uproar by releasing a video showing his Tesla — allegedly in Full Self-Driving mode — mowing down child-size mannequins.

“If Tesla gets away with this and ships this product and I can’t convince the public that a self-driving car that drives like a drunken, suicidal 13-year-old shouldn’t be on the road, I’m going to fail,” O’Dowd said in an interview from his Santa Barbara office, where glass cases display his collection of ancient coins and auction-bought mementos from NASA moon missions.

O’Dowd has run nationwide TV ads with the videos and even launched an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate as part of his one-man crusade to challenge what he sees as the cavalier development of dangerous technology. For O’Dowd and other skeptics, the program is a deadly experiment foisted on an unsuspecting public — a view underscored by a recently filed class-action lawsuit and a reported Department of Justice investigation into the tech.

Despite O’Dowd’s high-profile campaign, and the concern from some regulators and politicians, Tesla is charging ahead with what it claims is world-changing technology. The company and its supporters argue their approach will help usher in a future in which death from human errors on roadways is eliminated. At the end of September, during a four-hour event in which Tesla showed off its latest artificial intelligence tech, Musk said Full Self-Driving is already saving lives and keeping it off public roads would be “morally wrong.”

“At the point of which you believe that adding autonomy reduces injury and death, I think you have a moral obligation to deploy it even though you’re going to get sued and blamed by a lot of people,” Musk said. Musk and Tesla, which does not typically answer media inquiries, did not respond to requests for comment.

«

How nice – a Musk story that’s about screwups at a company that isn’t Twitter. Except.. if this is wrong, then people die.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The story of FTX’s collapse – and Sam Bankman-Fried’s knowledge of it – will be told by “Big Short” author Michael Lewis. Can’t wait. CC-licensed photo by Bybit 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’ll be another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Well, rested. Another 20 weeks of this and we hit 2,000. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Everything Elon Musk told Twitter employees in his first company meeting • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

During a nearly one-hour Q&A session, which The Verge obtained a recording of — you can read a full transcript below — Musk was blunt about Twitter’s financial state, his ambition to turn Twitter into an app for payments, his love for “gizmos,” and that he now expects employees to work with a “maniacal sense of urgency.”

…Musk: do we have compelling shortform video as opposed to exactly what Vine was? It’s not “let’s copy Vine from whichever year with ancient code.” It’s really just, how do we have compelling shortform video, just compelling content in general? I was actually flipping through the Twitter video where, once you go into kind of a full-screen video mode, you can just start flipping through videos. It’s actually not bad. I was like, “Okay, well, it’s pretty good.” I think building on that makes a ton of sense.

I told a whole bunch of people this morning that I was on it for like maybe 15 minutes, and I could have easily been on it for half an hour. The videos that it showed me were interesting. It was some good videos. And when I told a roomful of people that this morning, they didn’t know it existed. So I think if we try to surface it and make it more obvious that it exists, that would be a good move.

[Inaudible exchange with an employee.]

You know, I’ve got no problem with battle, obviously [laughs]. Yeah, just email it to me. I’m pretty responsive on email. Every now and again, it’s a crisis, and if I didn’t respond within 24 hours, email me again. It rarely takes me longer than 24 hours to respond. Usually it’s within hours. And I’m also for like, “Hey, let’s have some fun and let’s have some adventure here.” Let’s just try some crazy stuff. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll stop it. And if it does work, we’ll amplify it. But I think that’s really fun and exciting.

Just try weird stuff. It’s nothing ventured, nothing gained. If we’re too cautious, then how do we make revolutionary improvements? Revolutions are not done with caution. So we want to try things, ideally things that don’t break the whole system, but I think as long as we’re agile and we react quickly to improve things and correct mistakes, I think it’ll be fine.

«

The whole thing is worth reading, because it makes clear how Musk is just thrashing here. He has no pathway, no coherent idea of where he’s trying to get to. He’s fired half the employees, many of the content moderators, driven away advertisers, annoyed politicians, damaged brands.. what’s left to do? Musk is rapidly discovering that Twitter isn’t rocket science; it’s much harder than that, because at least rockets rigorously obey the laws of physics. Humans find ways around any laws or rules you put in front of them. The relentless trolling Musk has suffered is the perfect comeuppance: the guy who thought he was the best discovering he’s a rank amateur.
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Hollywood FTX frenzy as Michael Lewis reveals he spent six months with founder • The Ankler

Richard Rushfield:

»

With the stunning collapse of crypto exchange FTX still rippling through the financial markets, the entertainment industry sprang into action over the weekend with a far more pressing concern: Who’s going to nab the rights to this story?

We now know at least one part of how this plays out. The town was abuzz Saturday after an email spread that revealed that Michael Lewis — the most talented and successful non-fiction writer working today — had embedded with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for the past six months and was making the collapsing cryptocurrency exchange the centerpiece of his next book. The Ankler obtained the email from CAA agent Matthew Snyder, originally sent to potential buyers on Friday (CAA did not immediately return a request for comment). The email reveals that not a word of the book has been written yet but, well, things just can’t wait.

…In August, Lewis hinted about his new book in an interview with Financial News.

“I really don’t want to reveal exactly what I’m writing about,” he said “But I found a character through whom I can write about — it weirdly links up Flash Boys, The Big Short and Liar’s Poker.

“I guess it is possible it will be framed as a crypto book, but it won’t be a crypto book. It’ll be about this really unusual character. You’ll learn all about crypto and you’ll learn about what screwed up market structure in the United States and so on.”

«

Lewis has an incredible knack for being in just the right place. And this will be the tale to end them all. Well, perhaps to end all crypto. (Bitcoin is bumping around $16,000, following hefty selloffs in the past few days, down from its 52-week high of $66,000.)
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Are you a parent of a toddler or an assistant to a male CEO of a tech startup? • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Justine Cotter nails it:

»

1. A disproportionate amount of your time is spent cleaning up messes and bringing him snacks.

2. He summons you by screaming your name at the top of his lungs.

3. He won’t stop talking about how he’s going to build a rocket ship and blast off into outer space.

4. He uses a lot of words that sound entirely made up.

5. When you tell him you need a day off, he laughs in your face.

6. He refuses to wear shoes.

7. He routinely overestimates his abilities.

8. He offers unsolicited deep insights about subjects he knows nothing about.

9. When he says something that doesn’t make sense, you smile, nod, and tell him he’s a genius.

10. He never pays taxes.

11. He has a room filled with toys that he refers to as his “office.”

«

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The mysteries of the astronaut microbiome • Undark

Doug Johnson:

»

Astronauts face numerous known health problems in space, including a loss in bone density, muscle atrophy, and psychological issues. And on Earth, researchers are increasingly discovering how the various bacteria and other microorganisms that live inside and outside of people — the human microbiome — affect physical and mental health.

Space, of course, is an entirely different environment from Earth, with high radiation levels and microgravity. Although the science is far from certain, these vast differences may cause unexpected changes in the microbiome of astronauts. In turn, this could result in a range of health problems, which may be more pronounced on long-haul stints in space, like traveling to another planet.

Still, the implications of a disrupted microbiome are poorly understood, even on Earth, said David Pearce, a bioscience researcher at Northumbria University and author of a 2022 paper exploring how a trip to Mars might affect microbes in the gut — which makes the range of related illnesses and diseases in space difficult to predict. And direct research is limited because only around 600 people have ever been to space. Those who have taken the trip don’t typically stay long, as the average length of a trip to the International Space Station is about six months. And some researchers aren’t yet convinced there’s enough evidence suggesting the human microbiome will change much in space at all.

All the same, many researchers, including Pearce, are trying to figure out whether or not astronauts will enter a state in which their microbiome changes in adverse ways, called dysbiosis. “Because they’re going to be away for a long time, will that dysbiosis become a significant problem,” he said, “or lead to them having health impacts that impair their ability to function?”

…As for studies conducted in space, there are a few. One 2019 study, for instance, compared the microbiomes of astronaut Scott Kelly and his twin brother, Mark, after the former went to the ISS for nearly a year starting in 2015. The study posited that Scott Kelly’s microbiome did indeed change in space. For him, this included a reduction in bacteria called Bacteroidetes, the dysregulation of which has been linked to neurological, immune system, and metabolic issues, as well as increase in Firmicutes, a type of bacteria that can help break down certain starches and fibers.

«

Might be relevant if you were, say, planning a two-year trip to Mars.

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WhatsApp Business India revenue set to cross $1bn by next year; experts see ‘WeChat moment’ • Money Control India

Vikas Sn and Priyanka Iyer:

»

India is the biggest market for the Meta-owned messaging app with over 400 million users in the country. The app, which makes money by enabling businesses and brands to engage with their customers, is set to hit revenue of $1bn in India by next year, people familiar with the matter told Moneycontrol. WhatsApp declined to comment on these numbers.

That said, the rising user complaints of promotional messages from brands on WhatsApp without robust controls to tackle them, could also potentially dampen this growth.

WhatsApp launched its first revenue-generating enterprise product called WhatsApp Business API in 2018. However, industry experts say business messaging has become strategically important for the company over the past 12-18 months due to which it has built several capabilities and features to the platform.

On October 26, during the company’s earnings conference call, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg mentioned business messaging as a “major monetisation opportunity” and one of the three primary areas where they will focus their investment in 2023.

A major chunk of the revenues is currently coming from “click to message”/ “click to WhatsApp” ads wherein businesses can enable consumers to directly send a message from an ad they see on platforms like Facebook or Instagram or provide a call to action to send a WhatsApp message and interact with them.

During the call, Zuckerberg said that Click-to-WhatsApp ads have crossed a $1.5bn run rate, growing more than 80% year over year.

«

So not exactly money generated inside WhatsApp. Even so, by becoming the conduit for these messages, Meta gets metadata (ha) that could be useful.
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The lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI that could change the rules of AI copyright • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

Microsoft, its subsidiary GitHub, and its business partner OpenAI have been targeted in a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that the companies’ creation of AI-powered coding assistant GitHub Copilot relies on “software piracy on an unprecedented scale.” The case is only in its earliest stages but could have a huge effect on the broader world of AI, where companies are making fortunes training software on copyright-protected data.

Copilot, which was unveiled by Microsoft-owned GitHub in June 2021, is trained on public repositories of code scraped from the web, many of which are published with licenses that require anyone reusing the code to credit its creators. Copilot has been found to regurgitate long sections of licensed code without providing credit — prompting this lawsuit that accuses the companies of violating copyright law on a massive scale.

“We are chal leng ing the legal ity of GitHub Copi lot,” said programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick, who filed the lawsuit with the help of the San Francisco-based Joseph Saveri Law Firm, in a press statement. “This is the first step in what will be a long jour ney. As far as we know, this is the first class-action case in the US chal leng ing the train ing and out put of AI sys tems. It will not be the last. AI sys tems are not exempt from the law. Those who cre ate and oper ate these sys tems must remain account able.”

«

The credit point is a narrow one, which will probably work. But that’ll just mean that Copilot will get a rejig in which it credits a ton of sources, but operates in exactly the same way.
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Egypt’s COP27 summit app is a cyber weapon, experts warn • POLITICO

Mark Scott and Vincent Manancourt:

»

Policymakers from Germany, France and Canada were among those who had downloaded the app by November 8, according to two separate Western security officials briefed on discussions within these delegations at the U.N. climate summit.

Other Western governments have advised officials not to download the app, said another official from a European government. All of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss international government deliberations.

The potential vulnerability from the Android app, which has been downloaded thousands of times and provides a gateway for participants at COP27, was confirmed separately by four cybersecurity experts who reviewed the digital application for POLITICO.

The app is being promoted as a tool to help attendees navigate the event. But it risks giving the Egyptian government permission to read users’ emails and messages. Even messages shared via encrypted services like WhatsApp are vulnerable, according to POLITICO’s technical review of the application, and two of the outside experts.

The app also provides Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, which created it, with other so-called backdoor privileges, or the ability to scan people’s devices.

«

Another four days of this. Plenty of time for more policymakers to download it and give their secrets away. Though I’d guess that it’s people from LDCs – less developed countries – who would have Android phones. At a guess, an iPhone wouldn’t give up so much.
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Stretch iPhone to its limit: a 2gib model that can draw everything, in your pocket • LiuLiu

Liu Liu:

»

Every year, we have a new iPhone that claims to be faster and better in every way. And yes, these new computer vision models and new image sensors can exercise the phone as hard as they can. However, you could already take good pictures on an iPhone 10 years ago. These are incremental improvements.

These incremental asks only deserve incremental improvements. Once in a few years, there are programs where even on the best of our computing devices they can be barely usable. But these new programs with newly enabled scenarios are so great that people are willing to suffer through.

Last time this happened was the deep neural networks, and the time before that, was the 3D graphics. I believe this is the third time. In fact, I am so convinced that I built an app to prove the point.

In the past three weeks, I built an app that can summon images by casting a few spells, and then editing it to the way you liked. It took a minute to summon the picture on the latest and greatest iPhone 14 Pro, uses about 2GiB [gibibytes] in-app memory, and requires you to download about 2GiB data to get started. Even though the app itself is rock solid, given these requirements, I would probably call it barely usable.

Even if it took a minute to paint one image, now my Camera Roll is filled with drawings from this app. It is an addictive endeavor. More than that, I am getting better at it. If the face is cropped, now I know how to use the inpainting model to fill it in. If the inpainting model doesn’t do its job, you can always use a paint brush to paint it over and do an image-to-image generation again focused in that area.

Now the cat is out of the box, let’s talk about how.

«

This is Stable Diffusion, as an app (called Draw Things) on the iPhone. If you want it. Consider that there are now tons of Stable Diffusion apps on the Apple App Store; how long before something like this comes by default with the phone?
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Meta is killing Portal and both its unreleased smartwatches • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Meta is pulling the plug on its Portal video calling smart displays and its two remaining unreleased smartwatch projects, my colleague Alex Heath can confirm, as the company cuts 11,000 jobs including many in tech divisions. Reuters reported earlier today that the company planned to kill off both Portal and smartwatches, citing Meta execs who spoke at a town hall meeting; we heard the same thing from other sources, so we can independently corroborate the news.

Meta had already quietly decided to stop producing Portal devices for consumers in June, and had shelved the smartwatch that was furthest in development — codename “Milan,” which was reportedly set to arrive in spring 2023 for around $349 and feature two built-in cameras for video calls. The Verge was the first to report on then-Facebook’s plans for that smartwatch a year earlier in June 2021.

But now, Meta is killing off its plans to sell Portal video calling hardware to businesses, too, and the other two smartwatches that were in early-stage and middle-stage development are also being shelved, according to our sources.

«

Smartwatches? Why would Facebook/Meta want smartwatches? It’s a difficult enough business if you’re capable at software (see: Google) but even then you need a hardware partner (see: Fitbit). Canning this sounds like a dose of sanity.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Mosquitoes are attracted to a specific chemical that humans exude – but different people give off more, making them tasty targets for the bloodsuckers. CC-licensed photo by John Tann 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.

Holiday! I’m having one, because the world has used up its available supply of news in the past couple of weeks, and needs replenishing. So The Overspill will be on a break for three weeks: back on Monday 14 November.

There’s another post coming at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 11 links for you. Bite me. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Battle with bots prompts mass purge of Amazon, Apple employee accounts on LinkedIn • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

On October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users.

Jay Pinho is a developer who is working on a product that tracks company data, including hiring. Pinho has been using LinkedIn to monitor daily employee headcounts at several dozen large organizations, and last week he noticed that two of them had far fewer people claiming to work for them than they did just 24 hours previously.

Pinho’s screenshot below shows the daily count of employees as displayed on Amazon’s LinkedIn homepage. Pinho said his scraper shows that the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming current roles at Amazon fell from roughly 1.25 million to 838,601 in just one day, a 33% drop.

…In late September 2022, KrebsOnSecurity warned about the proliferation of fake LinkedIn profiles for Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at some of the world’s largest corporations. A follow-up story on Oct. 5 showed how the phony profile problem has affected virtually all executive roles at corporations, and how these fake profiles are creating an identity crisis for the businesses networking site and the companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees.

A day after that second story ran, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a recruiter who noticed the number of LinkedIn profiles that claimed virtually any role in network security had dropped seven% overnight. LinkedIn declined to comment about that earlier account purge, saying only that, “We’re constantly working at taking down fake accounts.”

«

When you think about it, of course this was going to be LinkedIn’s moderation problem. It just happens out of the light, because who realises what’s going on at LinkedIn?
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Copilot: the next stage in the AI copyright wars? • TechnoLlama

Andres Guadamuz:

»

Copilot is an AI tool that writes code based on prompts. The program has been trained on the corpus of code submitted to the open source software repository Github, and it uses OpenAI’s Codex.

Almost from the start, Copilot has proven to be controversial, some people complained that this was a violation of open source principles (and potentially infringing copyright), yet it appears to be widely used by some developers. According to Github the tool has been used by 1.2 million users in a period of 12 months.

…While it may be difficult to find infringement in [Copilot] outputs, the question of inputs is really where things are starting to heat up. The most interesting legal debate is happening with the data used to train machine learning models. This has been a large part of the ongoing debate with art models (discussed here), but the first shot in the future of litigation may very well involve Copilot.

Programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick has been getting a lot of attention when he announced that he was starting an investigation into Copilot with the intention of eventually starting a class-action lawsuit against Github and their parent company Microsoft.

…There is also a very strong ethical element to the complaint. Open source software communities are there to share code, but Copilot takes that code and closes it in a walled garden that contributes nothing to the community.

This is probably the biggest potential challenge to AI that we have witnessed yet, and its reach cannot be underestimated. I have been getting a few questions about this: is Butterick right?

«

Could be an important case, but with US copyright laws tending to be looser than British ones it feels like this is unlikely to go against Microsoft. The UK already allows data mining for training ML, and so does the EU.
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Some people really are mosquito magnets, and they’re stuck that way • Scientific American

Daniel Leonard:

»

In a new paper published on October 18 in the journal Cell, researchers suggest that certain body odours are the deciding factor. Every person has a unique scent profile made up of different chemical compounds, and the researchers found that mosquitoes were most drawn to people whose skin produces high levels of carboxylic acids. Additionally, the researchers found that peoples’ attractiveness to mosquitoes remained steady over time, regardless of changes in diet or grooming habits.

“The question of why some people are more attractive to mosquitoes than others—that’s the question that everybody asks you,” says study co-author Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist and mosquito expert at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Rockefeller University. “My mother, my sister, people in the street, my colleagues—everybody wants to know.” That public interest is what drove Vosshall and her colleagues to design this study, she says.

…Vosshall and her colleagues gathered 64 participants and had them wear nylon stockings on their arms. After six hours, the nylons were imbued with each person’s unique smell. “Those nylons would not have a smell to me or, I think, to anyone really,” says Maria Elena De Obaldia, a senior scientist at the biotech company Kingdom Supercultures and lead author of this new study, which she conducted while at Rockefeller. Still, the stockings were certainly odorous enough to entice mosquitoes.

The researchers cut the nylons into pieces and placed two (from different participants) into a closed container housing female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Did they migrate to subject number one’s sample en masse or prefer the scent of subject number two’s? Or were both equally appealing? The researchers continued these head-to-head battles over several months, Vosshall says, collecting new samples from the participants as needed. When the tournament was over, the team had clear proof that some people were more attractive than others.

«

I’ve lived in multiple tropical countries, and it was always our belief that mosquitoes preferred particular people’s scent. Anyhow, as I’m going to be holidaying somewhere with mosquitoes, this is only mildly encouraging news.
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Adobe plays catch-up with Project Blink, an AI-powered video editor • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Wednesday, Adobe announced Project Blink, an AI-powered web app that can recognize objects, people, sounds, and words spoken in videos to help edit them faster. It uses text editing to make the process of editing a video similar to using a word processor, Adobe claims.

Adobe debuted Project Blink during a “sneaks” session at its Adobe MAX conference, according to CNET. The firm also released a demonstration video that depicts editing video by editing a text transcription of words spoken during the video. “Just upload your video, and our AI engine will figure out what happened,” it says.

Adobe claims that Project Blink can search a video for specific people, objects, or feelings—or locate sections where people are laughing or singing. Additionally, Adobe says you’ll be able to delete silent sections or remove filler words like “ums” in text, with changes automatically reflected in the video.

Some of Project Blink’s editing capabilities strongly resemble existing AI-powered video editors such as Runway, which we reported on last month, and Descript, which can edit videos based on written transcripts similar to a word processing document. It’s been a busy year for deep learning AI applications, including text-to-image and text-to-video products that have turned assumptions about creative content generation on their head. All that AI activity has prompted some to wonder how Adobe would respond, and now we’re seeing some reaction from the creative app giant.

«

Microsoft and Adobe. Everyone’s doing it.
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These mini wind generators with no spinning blades can power homes and buildings • Singularity Hub

Vanessa Bates Ramirez:

»

In 2021, wind turbines generated more than 9% of US utility-scale electricity. The majority of the turbines making up that figure are the horizontal-axis variety (a rotor mounted at the top of a pole, blades twirling windmill-style). But wind energy isn’t limited to this classic design. There are also small vertical-axis turbines; large offshore vertical-axis turbines; and now, rooftop wind generators that aren’t really turbines and don’t have an axis at all, at least not in the traditional sense.

The generators are called Aeromines. Made by Aeromine Technologies, they harness wind and convert it to energy differently than conventional turbines. The latter use wind to turn blades attached to a rotor, and the spinning rotor powers a generator. Aeromines don’t have rotors or blades; instead, they have two airfoils or “wings” shaped like spoilers, angled towards each other on either side of a pole.

The generators sit on the edge of a building’s roof, taking advantage of the aerodynamic effect created by the wall below. As wind hits the airfoils, it creates a low pressure zone that sucks air through perforations and turns a propeller at the bottom of the unit. The spinning propeller is connected to a generator, which can be hooked up to a battery or connect directly to the building to provide electricity.

…The average US household uses about 9,000 kWh of electricity each year, which requires a 6.6 kW array of solar panels (about 21 standard panels). That means one Aeromine could meet the needs of an energy-conserving home, and two would be more than enough for an energy-gobbling home.

«

This link suggests that Aeromines generate 50% more energy per dollar spent than solar panels, which sounds promising. But a cursory glance suggests they need a flat roof, which not that many domestic houses in the UK (not many domestic houses generally?) have.
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Three fundamental problems still plaguing Meta’s Enterprise XR ambitions • Creative Strategies

Oliver Blanchard:

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The first point of friction in Meta’s enterprise metaverse play is the cost of entry of its hardware: Even under the best economic tailwinds, adding $1,500 per head to budget allocations that already include phones, tablets and PCs would be hard to justify, especially when the reason behind the extra spending is an XR headset whose purpose and value for the average employee remain difficult to quantify. Granted, $1,500 per unit isn’t a lot of cash for large orgs so long as the value is there, and we have seen the math work well in niche use cases. But if Meta and Microsoft are setting their sights on mass adoption and scale, either the ROI of that investment will have to be made clear and indisputable, or the pricing will have to come down. Way down.

The second point of friction is the form factor of the hardware itself. As impressive as the Quest 2 Pro’s specs and capabilities are, it still looks and feels more like a deconstructed fighter jet helmet than a pair of AR glasses: Bulbous, wide, on the wrong side of light and comfortable, and not particularly portable. The question almost asks itself: Does anyone really want to wear a cumbersome XR headset at work all day? Probably not, at least not unless you absolutely have to.

…The third point of friction is Meta’s unfortunate dehumanization of collaboration in the metaverse. As cute as it may initially seem to transform coworkers into Wii-themed digital avatars (with or without digital legs) I worry that replacing human faces with digital ones will have a negative emotional and psychological impact on remote workers over time, and we would do well not to overlook or underestimate this potential problem in the making.

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Hard to disagree with, though as he says price isn’t much of a barrier. Companies were happy to lay out thousands of dollars for the first PCs because they saw they might be transformative. Though there’s a fair bit of persuasion to be done here on that.
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MubertAI/Mubert-Text-to-Music: a simple notebook demonstrating prompt-based music generation via Mubert API • Github

Ilya Belikov:

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We’re glad to present you our new Text-to-Music demo interface. Now as a Google Colab, and soon we’ll add this feature as a simple form on our website. This has already gone viral, so the community has questions about how everything works

People ask how generative this music really is. Each time you send a request, our API generates a unique combination of sounds. The probability of repetition is extremely small. Music is not taken from the database of finished tracks, it is created at the time of the request.

How are sounds selected for generation? The input prompt and Mubert API tags are both encoded to latent space vectors of a transformer neural network. Then the closest tags vector is selected for each prompt and corresponding tags are sent to our API for music generation.

All sounds (separate loops for bass, leads etc.) are created by musicians and sound designers, they are not synthesized by any neural network. Our paradigm is “from creators to creators”. We are musicians ourselves and it is important for us that musicians stay in the equation.

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View it on YouTube. It’s quite weird (the prompt “Vladimir Lenin smoking weed with Bob Marley” produces a reggae tune with strange overtones).

Anyhow, another AI-generated content source.
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Damaged cable leaves Shetland cut off from mainland • BBC News

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Communications to Shetland have been severely disrupted after a subsea cable was damaged.

Police have declared a major incident after the south subsea cable between the islands and the mainland was cut. The force said some landlines and mobiles were not usable and that officers were patrolling to try to reassure residents.

Repairs to another cable connecting Shetland and Faroe are ongoing after it was damaged last week.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was an emergency situation for the island.

The Scottish government’s resilience committee had met and was working with partner agencies to ensure support was provided, she added. She said the assumption was the damage was accidental, adding: “There is nothing to suggest otherwise, but work is continuing to assess exactly what the cause of the problem has been.”

MP for Orkney and Shetlands Alastair Carmichael told the BBC he had raised the issue with the UK government, but understood it could be days before communications were restored.

…The cable that was damaged between Faroe and Shetland last week will be repaired on Saturday, according to Faroese Telecom’s head of infrastructure Páll Vesturbú. He said: “The damage is affecting most of telecom services to Shetland. There are some services still working but we will try to establish more services during the day if that’s possible.

“We expect it will be fishing vessels that damaged the cable but it is very rare that we have two problems at the same time.” MP Alistair Carmichael added that the damage had caused “catastrophic impact”.

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Fishing vessels, one hopes. Or possibly.. Russian submarines?
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Warner Bros.’ Lord of the Rings NFT ‘experience’ sounds like a nightmare • The Verge

Charles Pulliam-Moore:

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On Thursday, Warner Bros. announced the impending arrival of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Extended Version) Web3 Movie Experience,” a cumbersomely named rerelease of Peter Jackson’s 2001 film that will live on Eluvio’s branded Content Blockchain. In a press release about their partnership, Eluvio CEO Michelle Munson sang Warner Bros.’ praises for its commitment to NFT projects and said that their partnership is poised to help bring films-as-NFTs to an even bigger audience of consumers.

“Fans of The Lord of the Rings can now acquire, participate, and trade in an epic living media experience that will undoubtedly surprise and delight them,” said Munson. “It’s truly designed for a mass consumer audience, not just Web3 enthusiasts, which is why it should, and does, feel so remarkable and engaging.”

You can already buy and permanently own physical copies of The Fellowship of the Ring and all of Warner Bros.’ Lord of the Rings films in 4K. But the studio’s banking on a handful of NFT-related features being enough to convince people to buy either the “Mystery” or “Epic” editions of the movie as their first step toward becoming embedded in WB’s Movieverse.

…it’s hard to imagine Warner Bros. will really be able to sell people on what sounds very much like a gussied-up, browser-based DVD selection menu masquerading as a collectible item.

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Reasonable points, though I feel that it shouldn’t be impossible to find a person – analyst, cynic, whatever – who would make the point about the uselessness of the “Web3 Movie Experience”.
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Year of the Four Emperors • Wikipedia

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The Year of the Four Emperors, AD 69, was the first civil war of the Roman Empire, during which four emperors ruled in succession: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian.[1] It is considered an important interval, marking the transition from the Julio-Claudians, the first imperial dynasty, to the Flavian dynasty. The period witnessed several rebellions and claimants, with shifting allegiances and widespread turmoil in Rome and the provinces.

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Hmm, can’t think what it was that prompted Overspill reader G to point us to this one. The UK is so far only on its third prime minister (and, OK, second monarch, but cool your jets), though of course the 12 months began in the summer, so plenty of time yet for prime minister No.4 to make an entrance some time in 2023.
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How a secret rent algorithm pushes rents higher • ProPublica

Heather Vogel, Haru Coryne and Ryan Little:

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On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.

“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?

“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”

The celebratory remarks were more than swagger. For years, RealPage has sold software that uses data analytics to suggest daily prices for open units. Property managers across the United States have gushed about how the company’s algorithm boosts profits.

“The beauty of YieldStar is that it pushes you to go places that you wouldn’t have gone if you weren’t using it,” said Kortney Balas, director of revenue management at JVM Realty, referring to RealPage’s software in a testimonial video on the company’s website.

The nation’s largest property management firm, Greystar, found that even in one downturn, its buildings using YieldStar “outperformed their markets by 4.8%,” a significant premium above competitors, RealPage said in materials on its website. Greystar uses RealPage’s software to price tens of thousands of apartments.

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Depressing, honestly. Rent income is effectively unearned, yet this is about squeezing money from people doing actual work.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An academic has calculated that sticking with Daylight Savings Time would save people serious money on energy bills. So why don’t we do it? (Picture by Diffusion Bee on the prompt: “clocks going back for daylight savings time”.)

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. Not involved in stand-up rows. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

AI is changing scientists’ understanding of language learning – and raising questions about an innate grammar • The Conversation

Morten Christiansen (prof of psychology, Cornell U) and Pablo Contreras Kallens (PhD student in psych, Cornell U):

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many language scientists – including Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics – believe that language learners require a kind of glue to rein in the unruly nature of everyday language. And that glue is grammar: a system of rules for generating grammatical sentences.

Children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience – or so the thinking goes.

This template, for example, might contain a “super-rule” that dictates how new pieces are added to existing phrases. Children then only need to learn whether their native language is one, like English, where the verb goes before the object (as in “I eat sushi”), or one like Japanese, where the verb goes after the object (in Japanese, the same sentence is structured as “I sushi eat”).

But new insights into language learning are coming from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence. A new breed of large AI language models can write newspaper articles, poetry and computer code and answer questions truthfully after being exposed to vast amounts of language input. And even more astonishingly, they all do it without the help of grammar.

Even if their choice of words is sometimes strange, nonsensical or contains racist, sexist and other harmful biases, one thing is very clear: the overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them – they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be.

GPT-3, arguably the most well-known of these models, is a gigantic deep-learning neural network with 175 billion parameters. It was trained to predict the next word in a sentence given what came before across hundreds of billions of words from the internet, books and Wikipedia. When it made a wrong prediction, its parameters were adjusted using an automatic learning algorithm.

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If Chomsky lives to see his fondest theory overturned, then it will be a moment to savour, given how fabulously wrong he has been about so many things outside his specialist field.
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Quantifying Britain’s moron risk premium • Financial Times

Louis Ashworth:

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Britain has finally got its longed-for exceptionalism in recent weeks, experiencing a yadda yadda yadda (you know the story).

Not a whole lot of value has emerged from the past month’s omnishambles, but one valuable development is the coining of “moron risk premium” — in short, the extra money the UK is paying to borrow because its leaders are a few sandwiches short of a tea party.

TS Lombard’s inimitable Dario Perkins appears to have coined the term, which is now pretty widespread.

Section I: The signs you might have MRP
If you’re just getting to grips with MRP, here’s what we’re talking about. The yield on 30-year gilts has shot up far more quickly than other countries’ equivalent bonds since Liz Truss and the wild bunch took power in early September:

In case you’re worried this focuses unfairly on the time since the author joined Alphaville Truss entered Number 10 (on September 5), here’s a year-to-date view:

As that graph shows more clearly, the UK has a potential partner in Italy, whose own MRP peaked in mid-June as former prime minister Mario Draghi’s leadership fell into crisis.

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A funny-yet-serious piece, as the entire edifice of the government falls to pieces around Truss’s ears. (Free to read.)
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Save energy by not turning clocks back in October, says expert • The Guardian

Rachel Hall:

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Households could save more than £400 a year on energy bills if clocks are not put back at the end of October, according to an expert, who said it would help people with the cost of living crisis and reduce pressure on the National Grid this winter.

Evening energy demand peaks between 5pm and 7pm during winter, when the sun has already set after daylight savings time (DST). If clocks didn’t go back, it would remain light for at least part of this time, reducing carbon emissions and energy demand.

Prof Aoife Foley, a clean energy expert at Queen’s University Belfast, said: “By simply forgoing the winter DST in October, we save energy because it is brighter in the evening during winter, so we reduce commercial and residential electrical demand as people leave work earlier, and go home earlier, meaning less lighting and heating is needed.”

This would help the government tackle the “energy war” in Europe resulting from the Ukraine invasion, she said. “Dependent on weather conditions this winter it is very likely we may need to start rationing energy very seriously to avoid bigger energy issues in December and January when gas reserves start to run low,” she said.

Foley’s calculations suggest that households could save £1.20 a day and more than £400 a year on electricity bills if clocks are not put back at the end of October, although exact amounts depend on tariffs.

There has long been debate over whether to scrap DST, which was introduced in 1916 to reduce energy demand during the war by prolonging evening daylight in summer. It still benefits some farmers, but is less popular among people who would prefer more light later in the day in winter, and is thought to cause sleep disturbance.

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Well I’m going to implement this in my house, and damn the rest of you.
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Ask an AI art generator for any image. The results are amazing—and terrifying • WSJ

Joanna Stern looks at AI art generators, and it’s much as you’d expect, but this is interesting:

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What about the bias? 

My first query for “a technology columnist writing a column” in Dall-E 2 returned four images of white men. Another I conducted of “a man commuting to work” returned four images of white men. In DreamStudio a prompt for a basketball player on the moon returned an image of a Black man.

The source material for training the AI is found across the internet. “We are aware that the data is heavily biased toward western culture and white male culture,” said Jean Oh, an associate research professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “These models can amplify these biases, generating more stereotypical images.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said the company continues to do research on mitigating bias and improve results. It recently modified Dall-E to diversify its results when a query doesn’t include race or gender—I did see a few examples of this. Both OpenAI and Stability AI suggest you can add specific prompts to increase the diversity of image results.

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Something we’ll need to keep tabs on.
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75% of the time we spend with our kids in our lifetime will be spent by age 12 • 1000 Hours Outside

Ginny Yurich:

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Every year at the start of the summer vacation I see all sorts of posts about the 18 summers we get with our kids. The intention of these posts is exactly the same as mine. They are a reminder that we need to fight to slow down and to simplify. We need to pray for perspective on the days that drag on. We need to put down the screens and connect. 

While our intentions may be the same I fully disagree with the number. Maybe those who write articles about the 18 summers with our kids still have only little ones at home. Maybe they have forgotten the summers when they turned 15 and then 16 and were able to drive and have jobs. There is a significant developmental shift that happens during childhood around age 12 (occasionally earlier) and with that often comes a change in family dynamics. Summers begin to have a different look and then eventually parents and siblings become more of a background object, a less integral piece of the puzzle. In fact, 75% of the time we spend with our kids in our lifetime will be spent by age 12.

Don’t get me wrong. Growing up is a good thing, something to be celebrated. Ultimately we want our kids to take on the challenges of the real world and they begin to do this in stages. Drivers training. First jobs. Dating. What all of this means is that  it’s highly unlikely that any of us will get 18 endless summers with our kids. Maybe we will get 13 or 14 if we are fortunate. Our time truly is limited.

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It’s quite a sobering thought. OK, the first three years are totally exhausting, which means the next two are mostly spent recovering from them (unless another child happens along, in which case rinse, repeat). But the years after 12 are very high quality, in general. So it’s not all bad.
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Mango Markets exploiter comes clean, claims all actions were legal • The Block

Osato Avan-Nomayo:

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Avraham Eisenberg, the man behind the $114m exploit on Mango Markets, has confirmed that he orchestrated the attack on the DeFi platform in a statement issued today.

“I was involved with a team that operated a highly profitable trading strategy last week,” Eisenberg confirmed, adding, “I believe all of our actions were legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed, even if the development team did not fully anticipate all the consequences of setting parameters the way they are.” Eisenberg declined to comment on the size of his team when asked by The Block.

This legal trading strategy required $10m on Eisenberg’s part to drain $114m from Mango Markets. The “trade” worked by manipulating the price oracle to inflate the mango token price three-fold from $0.30 to $0.91. This boosted the value of Eisenberg’s collateral, allowing him and his team to borrow more funds from the protocol.

Eisenberg’s name was linked to the attack barely a day later. Independent reporter Chris Burnet published an article providing some evidence connecting Eisenberg to the attack. The evidence included leaked screenshots of Discord chats describing the planned attack as well as suspicious on-chain activities following the incident. This is not the first time Eisenberg has been linked to a DeFi exploit. Earlier this year he was accused of defrauding FortressDAO investors to the tune of $14m. 

With regards to FortressDAO, Eisenberg said, “In February, Fortress DAO voted for a full redemption of the Treasury and I helped implement that. By the end of March, this redemption was complete and any fort token holders were able to exit for a proportional share of the Treasury.”

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Eisenberg’s form of words – “legal open market actions” – is the same as the defence lawyer for a hacker facing a charge saying “but, your honour, my client simply asked the computer for access, and the computer granted it. That cannot be illegal, because it was allowed.” I’m pretty sure I heard that exact argument, literally in Southwark Crown Court in the 1990s.

And that is the problem for Mango. Their screwy protocol, their problem, Eisenberg’s advantage. Oh, and the hacker got off, via a jury decision.
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Broadband customers face up to 14% hike in bills, warns Which? • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

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Broadband bills could surge by as much as £113 [£9.40 per month] next year if a number of the UK’s biggest telecoms firms push ahead with inflation-busting price increases next spring, says consumer watchdog Which?

Many of the country’s main internet providers – including the largest player BT, along with TalkTalk, EE, Plusnet and Vodafone – use a mechanism to increase the cost of bills annually by the rate of inflation as measured by the consumer prices index (CPI) in January, plus 3.9%.

The Bank of England forecasts inflation at just below 10% for January, meaning millions of broadband customers will face a 14% mid-contract increase in their bills.

Which?’s latest broadband survey found that a typical BT customer is facing the largest potential increase of £113 compared with what they were paying in January this year.

Customers of Plusnet, also owned by BT, will face the smallest hike of £87.15 [£7.25 per month] among the five telecoms companies that use the mechanism surveyed by Which?

Given the telecoms companies pushed through inflation-busting rises of around 10% in April, next spring their customers will have seen their bills increase by between £120 and £156 in just two years.

“It is unacceptable that many broadband customers are facing price hikes during an unrelenting cost of living crisis,” said Rocio Concha, director of policy and advocacy at Which? “Customers should be allowed to leave their contract without penalty if prices are hiked mid-contract, regardless of whether or not these increases can be said to be ‘transparent’.”

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It’s also wild that broadband companies, which truly aren’t reliant on workers toiling in the data factories to turn out stuff (sure, they have workers who want pay rises, but they aren’t their total opex) should raise prices like this. My advice: call them and say you’re looking to change. Weirdly, they’ll want to keep you and when they look down the back of the sofa, they’ll find a special, cheaper offer.
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Global smartphone market fell 9% as consumers trim spending • Canalys

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In Q3 2022, the global smartphone market recorded its third consecutive decline this year, dropping 9% year-on-year, marking the worst Q3 since 2014. The gloomy economic outlook has led consumers to delay purchasing electronic hardware and prioritize other essential spending. This will likely continue to dampen the smartphone market for the next six to nine months.

Samsung retained its leading position with a 22% market share driven by heavy promotions to reduce channel inventory. Apple was the only vendor in the top five to record positive growth, improving its market position further with an 18% share during the market downturn thanks to relatively resilient demand for iPhones. Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo continued to take a cautious approach to overseas expansion given domestic market uncertainty, retaining 14%, 10% and 9% global market shares, respectively. 

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By Canalys’s numbers, in the past 15 quarters (since Q1 2019) the smartphone market has only had growth above 5% twice – both in the first half of 2021.

The precise size of the market isn’t important any more, but has become an interesting proxy for worldwide consumer sentiment about discretionary big-ticket (comparatively) purchases – whether bought on monthly repayments or by a single payment.

This data suggests that economically, things haven’t been too good for quite a while, and now are getting worse.
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Experts grade Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube on readiness to handle midterm election misinformation • The Conversation

Anjana Susarla:

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The 2016 US election was a wake-up call about the dangers of political misinformation on social media. With two more election cycles rife with misinformation under their belts, social media companies have experience identifying and countering misinformation. However, the nature of the threat misinformation poses to society continues to shift in form and targets. The big lie about the 2020 presidential election has become a major theme, and immigrant communities are increasingly in the crosshairs of disinformation campaigns – deliberate efforts to spread misinformation.

Social media companies have announced plans to deal with misinformation in the 2022 midterm elections, but the companies vary in their approaches and effectiveness. We asked experts on social media to grade how ready Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube are to handle the task.

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The experts consulted are Dam Hee Kim, assistant professor of Communication at the University of Arizona; Anjana Susarla, professor of Information Systems, Michigan State University; and Scott Shackelford, professor of Business Law and Ethics, Indiana University.

So consider: they looked at Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. How would you grade each, on an A (great) to F (appalling) scale? Now see how the experts think they do. Bear in mind this is only really for US elections; for other countries, things tend to be worse.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK’s competition authority has told Facebook that it can’t buy Giphy, a repository of GIFs. Sayonara to the format? CC-licensed photo by Alan Levine 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 11 links for you. Not run by a mole. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The hunt for Wikipedia’s disinformation moles • WIRED

Masha Borak:

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Governments have good reasons to influence Wikipedia: 1.8 billion unique devices are used to visit Wikimedia Foundation sites each month, and its pages are regularly among the top results for Google searches. Rising distrust in institutions and mainstream media have made sources of reliable information all the more coveted.

“Because of its transparency and auditability, Wikipedia became one of the few places where you can actually build a sense of trust in information,” says Mathieu O’Neil, an associate professor of communication at the University of Canberra in Australia who studies Wikipedia. “Governments and states that want to promote a particularly strategic perspective have every reason to try and be there and kind of try and influence it.”

Proving government intervention, however, has proved difficult, even as some cases have raised suspicion. In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation banned an “unrecognized group” of seven Wikipedia users from mainland China and revoked administrator access and other privileges for 12 other users over doxing and threats to Hong Kong editors. Speculation of “pro-China infiltration,” however, was never proven.

[Research director at CASM, part of think tank Demos, Carl] Miller can’t say if coordinated disinformation campaigns already happen on Wikipedia nor whether such attempts would be successful in avoiding the platform’s intricate disinformation rules. But, he says, new tools might shed more light on it: “We’ve never tried to analyze Wikipedia data in that way before.”

The research tracked 86 editors who are already banned from Wikipedia. The editors tried to sway narratives on the English-language Wikipedia page for the Russo-Ukrainian war towards pro-Kremlin views, through subtle changes like casting doubt on the objectivity of pro-Western accounts, changing historical context, and adding links from Russian state-owned news and websites.

“Wikipedia has quite a lot of defenses that it’s built up to stop vandals just randomly adding bad information onto the site,” says Miller. “But when you look at the way that states can attack Wikipedia, the kind of threat looks completely different. It would be much like these editors.”

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Apple TV Remote now has a USB-C port • MacRumors

Sami Fathi:

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Apple today announced an updated Apple TV and, along with it, a new Siri remote that has a USB-C port for charging rather than Lightning.

In the press release announcing the new TV, Apple said the new Siri remote now features USB-C in the same design introduced in April 2021.

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The Siri Remote has the same beloved design and functionality as the previous generation and adopts USB-C for charging. It is included with the new Apple TV 4K, or can be purchased separately for $59 (US) starting today, and is compatible with all generations of Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD.

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Why link to this? Because it’s a subtle sign that a future – perhaps even the next? – iPhone will have USB-C too. As all the accessories move to USB-C (only the keyboards, mice and AirPods are now Lightning) it signals that the iPhone will too. But it will probably be the last to go. And even so the legacy of Lightning connectors will live on for a decade.
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The hottest app right now? One where teens have to say nice things about each other • WSJ

Ann-Marie Alcántara:

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TBH was hot. Five years ago, the app, which prompted teens to compliment one another, topped Apple’s App Store charts and quickly amassed millions of users in the coveted high-school demographic. Facebook snapped it up less than three months after launch—and soon shut it down.

Now one of TBH’s co-creators is back with Gas, a nearly identical iPhone app. Gas asks teens multiple-choice questions about people in their school, letting them choose yearbook-style superlatives such as “the most beautiful person you have ever met” or the classmate who is “never afraid of getting in trouble.” 

As of Friday, Gas was the most popular free iPhone app and the No. 1 social-networking download in the App Store, despite being limited to a handful of states.

Like TBH, the questions Gas asks are positive, urging teens to compliment each other—that is, to gas each other up. Those selected in the polls receive “flames,” notifications that they were chosen. The voting is anonymous by default—people only find out the gender and grade of those who voted for them. But users of the free app can make in-app purchases to find out their admirers’ names, or to keep their own names hidden in poll results.

Users have downloaded Gas more than 500,000 times since its launch in late August, according to Data.AI. 

“To us, being at No. 1 is a vote of confidence that we’re doing something right for teens,” says Nikita Bier, co-creator of TBH and president of Find Your Crush LLC, which developed Gas.

…The rapid popularity has come with some bumps. Some people are sharing what appear to be Snapchat screenshots, alleging that Gas collects excessive data that could be used for sex trafficking.

Mr. Bier says Gas uses location data to help people pick their school. The location data isn’t associated with user accounts or stored on the app’s servers, he adds. Gas has also developed a system to remove users who may be lying—for instance, if a user has no contacts at the school they claim to attend.

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Every single possible vein of social networking is being mined – or if you prefer, is having a needle stuck into it to see whether there’s still blood running.
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Kakao outage in South Korea prompts security, monopoly concerns • The Washington Post

Bryan Pietsch:

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In South Korea, Kakao is ubiquitous. Nearly everyone, from schoolchildren to the elderly, uses the Korean tech company’s apps for messaging, taxis, navigation and payments. It’s Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Uber, Google Maps and Venmo wrapped into one.

So when a fire broke out this weekend at the building where the company’s servers are run, disabling its apps, people joked that the country would shut down.

But the outage forced a serious reckoning over security and monopoly concerns in Korea, where a handful of giant conglomerates hold dominance over the country’s economy. (Hyundai, known for its cars in the United States, operates apartment complexes and department stores here; Samsung, the technology giant, also sells insurance and owns a high-end clothing company.)

Kakao said in a presentation to investors in August that its customer base had grown to 53.3 million active users, with 47.5 million of those in South Korea — striking dominance in a country of more than 51 million. Many stores accept Kakao Pay, most of the taxis across the Seoul metropolitan area run on Kakao T, the company’s ride-hailing app, and friends, companies and even the government use Kakao Talk to exchange messages.

…On Monday, as Kakao was still getting some of its services back online, President Yoon Suk-yeol said his administration would investigate whether Kakao had a monopoly on the market. If that were the case, with Kakao becoming “nationwide infrastructure,” Yoon said, “then the state must take necessary measures for the good of the people.”

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Monopolies of an Everything App are bad? That’s interesting.
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Meta gets final order to sell Giphy from UK antitrust watchdog • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

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Bye-bye: Meta has again been ordered by the U.K.’s competition watchdog to sell animated GIF platform Giphy. And this time it’s final.

The decision follows a ‘stay of execution’ for Meta this summer, after the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal sent the case back to the antitrust regulator to be reassessed following a procedural finding that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had not provided full, unredacted disclosure to Meta representatives of documents related to its decision.

But the tribunal upheld the CMA’s decision on five of the six challenged grounds — saying it had “no hesitation” in concluding that the regulator’s finding that the merger substantially reduced dynamic competition was lawful. So this news should shock precisely no one.

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I’m shocked, shocked. Well, possibly not. The CMA seems to think Meta is big enough. Everyone is amazed that the CMA should do this over GIFs – GIFs!! – but if you think it’s too big, it’s too big. Also, on the topic of GIFs..
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The GIF is on its deathbed • The Atlantic

Kaitlyn Tiffany:

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About 40% of my first full-time job was dedicated to making GIFs—a skill I had professed to have during the interview process, and that turned out to be much harder than I thought. It took trial and error to figure out how to make sure the colors weren’t too weird, the frame rate too fast, the file too big.

This was 2015, and GIFs had to be smaller than 1 megabyte before you could upload them to most social platforms. Fiddling with them was worthwhile, because GIFs were very important. You had to have them! They were the visual style that the audience craved. Not only did I make dozens a day for the website I worked for, but I often made extras for co-workers who requested them for their personal use. (I was eager to please!)

…As the GIF’s star rose, GIF-searching features were added to Facebook, Twitter, and iMessage, making it even easier to find a GIF to express whatever emotion you wanted to convey without words.

And that was the turning point. These search features surfaced the same GIFs over and over, and the popular reaction GIFs got worn into the ground. They started to look dated, corny, and cheap. “GIFs Are for Boomers Now, Sorry,” Vice’s Amelia Tait argued in January. As older adults became familiar with GIFs through the new, accessible libraries attached to essentially every app, GIFs became “embarrassing.” (Tait specifically cites the GIF of Leonardo DiCaprio raising a toast in 2013’s The Great Gatsby, and I agree—it is viscerally humiliating to be reminded of that movie.) The future is dark for GIFs, Tait suggested: “Will they soon disappear forever, like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge?”

…Tumblr is now a rarity for displaying GIFs at all. Most popular sites—including Twitter and Imgur—convert GIF uploads and serve the animations as MP4 videos. As Kohler explained to me, video compression has improved so much over the years that many video files are much smaller than GIF image files. He pulled a GIF from a movie and a graphic-art GIF to show me the difference. The GIF from the movie was nearly 4.5 megabytes, and the MP4 translation of it was about 20 times smaller, at less than 0.23 megabytes. “MP4 is the right choice for this kind of image,” he said. “Much smaller, very similar visual effect.”

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Very interesting how formats all trend towards whatever takes least space. MP3s v AIFF, MP4s v GIF.
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Land below 1.0 meters of water • Climate Central

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An interactive map showing areas threatened by sea level rise and coastal flooding. Combining the most advanced global model of coastal elevations with the latest projections for future flood levels.

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Climate Central is “an independent group of scientists and communicators who research and report the facts about our changing climate and how it affects people’s lives. We are a policy-neutral 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

“Climate Central uses science, big data, and technology to generate thousands of local storylines and compelling visuals that make climate change personal and show what can be done about it. We address climate science, sea level rise, extreme weather, energy, and related topics. We collaborate widely with TV meteorologists, journalists, and other respected voices to reach audiences across diverse geographies and beliefs.”

There’s lots more to explore than just land that may be below a metre of water in a few decades. A remarkably deep site.
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EVs exploding in Florida after water damage • Technocracy News

Thomas Catenacci:

»

A top Florida state official warned Thursday that firefighters have battled a number of fires caused by electric vehicle (EV) batteries waterlogged from Hurricane Ian.

EV batteries that have been waterlogged in the wake of the hurricane are at risk of corrosion, which could lead to unexpected fires, according to Jimmy Patronis, the state’s top financial officer and fire marshal.

“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start,” Patronis tweeted Thursday. “That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”

“It takes special training and understanding of EVs to ensure these fires are put out quickly and safely,” he continued in a follow-up tweet. “Thanks to [North Collier Fire Rescue] for their hard work.”

Patronis published a video of firefighters in Naples, Florida, battling a fire started from a Tesla EV’s battery. A bystander is overheard in the video saying that the crew had used hundreds of gallons of water attempting to put the fire out.

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Not sure water is the best plan there. Firefighters need to learn a little more about EVs.
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DuckDuckGo’s new browser for Mac protects your data on YouTube • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

»

DuckDuckGo launched a web browser for macOS in beta on Tuesday, offering privacy-minded web surfers a new way to browse. The browser uses a variety of techniques to protect your information from snooping websites and even includes some innovative tools, including Duck Player, which is supposed to let you watch YouTube with fewer ads and less data collection. You can download DuckDuckGo for Mac here.

If you’re like most people on earth, you’re cruising around the web using Google Chrome, which sends so much data back to company servers that some privacy advocates call the browser spyware. There are a number of more private options, including FireFox, Brave, and even Apple’s Safari. DuckDuckGo already has a browser for mobile devices, but this marks the company’s first foray into desktop browsing.

As far as features go, the more private YouTube player might be the star of the show. Duck Player harnesses Google own tools for embedding video on another page using the strictest privacy settings available. According to DuckDuckGo, that means you’ll be better protected from tracking, and the ads you see won’t be personalized. In fact, the company says it prevented most ads from playing altogether during their tests, a perk YouTube otherwise makes users pay for. It’s hard to imagine Google will let a fewer-ads version of YouTube slide for ever, but you can enjoy it while it lasts. You’ll also be able to watch your videos in a cleaner, distraction-free interface.

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Fewer ads on YouTube would be nice. It’s infested with them. Though I suspect this is just going to be a money pit for DDG, because it won’t be a huge hit, yet will require updating: it’s not a Chromium fork, and it’s all done by the DDG team.
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What is a Semaform, anyway? And why should you care? • Semafor

Gina Chua is executive editor at Semafor, the new news organisation set up by ex-Buzzfeed, ex-NYT folk, and now trying to justify its existence :

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We’re redesigning the atomic unit of written news, the article.

We’re breaking articles into:
• The News
• The Reporter’s View (or analysis)
• Room For Disagreement (or counterargument)
• The View From (or different perspectives on the topic)
• Notable (or some of the best other writing on the subject)

Let’s dive in.

The news article is a venerable format, designed for more than a century of print newspapers, but its age is showing. Too much news — even some of the best journalism that’s practiced today — so tightly intertwines facts and analysis that readers have trouble telling the two apart. Articles don’t always honestly offer opposing viewpoints. And they’re usually told from a single perspective. All that makes it hard for time-strapped readers to trust — or even understand — the big picture.

So we rebuilt the story form into what we’re calling a Semaform. This format separates the undisputed facts from the reporter’s analysis of those facts, provides different and more global perspectives, and shares strong journalism on the subject from other outlets.

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The survival of the news article format is because it’s an effective method of communicating information. I worked at The Independent when it experimented with really different writing formats for news stories. It didn’t work. Semafor isn’t ripping anything up. This is just well-written standard news stories.
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The Wire intends to review its reporting on Meta • The Wire

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Starting from October 6, 2022, The Wire published four reports on Meta, plus a statement on October 17. Our first report disclosed the fact that Meta’s controversial XCheck programme was operating in India and that BJP leaders were among those given this status – usually understood as safeguarding their posts from takedown complaints. The document we received also indicated that the role extended to taking down others’ posts as well – a claim Meta denied. In the second story, we published an email from a senior Meta official, Andy Stone, expressing anger at the leak of the document.

The publication of each report prompted appreciation as well as criticism. Meta said the documents reproduced by The Wire were fabricated but there were also questions from other quarters about the authenticity of the documents on which our reports were based.

The Wire received the information and other materials from our sources, at least one of whom had earlier supplied material that we have been using for a separate and ongoing investigation. We sought to check the integrity and authenticity of the new source material as best we could, and then proceeded to draft each report, being careful to strike a balance between showing our readers what this material contained but not enough to reveal the sources’ identities. (The Wire’s whistleblower policy is available to read here.)

In the light of doubts and concerns from experts about some of this material, and about the verification processes we used – including messages to us by two experts denying making assessments of that process directly and indirectly attributed to them in our third story – we are undertaking an internal review of the materials at our disposal.

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There was a lot of speculation that this story was wrong because The Wire (an Indian publication) was hoaxed by someone external, but the denials from experts that they verified material makes it look like the hoaxer is closer to home.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The British government will collect energy use data from smart meters – and link it to your name and address as part of its fuel subsidy scheme. Are you concerned? CC-licensed photo by Ambernectar 13 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 11 links for you. Artificially intelligent. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Stability AI, the startup behind Stable Diffusion, raises $101m • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

»

Stability AI, the company funding the development of open source music- and image-generating systems like Dance Diffusion and Stable Diffusion, today announced that it raised $101m in a funding round led by Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC. The tranche values the company at $1bn post-money, according to a Bloomberg source, and comes as the demand for AI-powered content generation accelerates.

London- and San Francisco-based Stability AI is the brainchild of CEO Emad Mostaque. Having graduated from Oxford with a Master’s in mathematics and computer science, he served as an analyst at various hedge funds before shifting gears to more public-facing works. Mostque co-founded and bootstrapped Stability AI in 2020, motivated both by a personal fascination with AI and what he characterized as a lack of “organization” within the open source AI community.

“Nobody has any voting rights except our employees — no billionaires, big funds, governments or anyone else with control of the company or the communities we support. We’re completely independent,” Mostaque told TechCrunch in a previous interview. “We plan to use our compute to accelerate open source, foundational AI.”

Stability AI has a cluster of more than 4,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs running in AWS, which it uses to train AI systems including Stable Diffusion. It’s quite costly to maintain — Business Insider reports that Stability AI’s operations and cloud expenditures exceeded $50m. But Mostaque has repeatedly asserted that the company’s R&D will enable it to train models more efficiently going forward.

«

This whole field has suddenly accelerated dramatically, which feels weird given that we have been hearing about Moore’s Law hitting a wall. GPUs though seem to have plenty of headroom, and they scale well, so it starts to feel like the sky’s the limit.
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Use of electricity meter and gas meter personal data collected through the Energy Price Guarantee scheme: privacy notice • GOV.UK

»

We will collect and process the following personal data, related to each electricity and gas meter in Great Britain:

• Meter Point Administration Number (MPAN) – electricity meter number
• Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN)
• postcode
• electricity consumption
• data about each meter (for example profile class, energisation status)
• data about how the meter point is billed (for example billing cycle, payment type)
• energy tariff data
• personal data including; name, date of birth, address, communication data, email address
•

We are processing the data to:

• enable BEIS to monitor the progress and operational delivery of the Energy Price Guarantee scheme (EPG) (this includes monitoring the reach of the scheme across regions and vulnerable groups)
• conduct financial checks on EPG payments including for assurance and the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences including fraud
• allow BEIS to evaluate the scheme to understand its impact and to inform future government policy.

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This page was updated on the 1st of October, but it’s only just been noticed. That your personal data will be connected to the smart meter and collected by the government is the biggest invasion of privacy I think I’ve ever seen by a British government – not even the Covid app required this.

At the end of June there were 29.5m smart meters in use in homes and small businesses, or just over half of all the meters installed. I’d predict uptake will stall unless really good reasons for this intrusion can be given.
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Intel is planning thousands of job cuts in face of PC slump • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Mark Gurman and Debby Wu:

»

The layoffs will be announced as early as this month, with the company planning to make the move around the same time as its third-quarter earnings report on Oct. 27, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The chipmaker had 113,700 employees as of July.

Some divisions, including Intel’s sales and marketing group, could see cuts affecting about 20% of staff, according to the people.

Intel is facing a steep decline in demand for PC processors, its main business, and has struggled to win back market share lost to rivals like Advanced Micro Devices Inc. In July, the company warned that 2022 sales would be about $11bn lower than it previously expected. Analysts are predicting a third-quarter revenue drop of roughly 15%. And Intel’s once-enviable margins have shriveled: They’re about 15 percentage points narrower than historical numbers of around 60%.

…Intel’s last big wave of layoffs occurred in 2016, when it trimmed about 12,000 jobs, or 11% of its total. The company has made smaller cuts since then and shuttered several divisions, including its cellular modem and drone units. Like many companies in the technology industry, Intel also froze hiring earlier this year, when market conditions soured and fears of a recession grew.

The latest cutbacks are likely meant to reduce Intel’s fixed costs, possibly by about 10% to 15%, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh said in a research note. He estimates that those costs range from at least $25bn to $30bn.

«

Intel’s problem isn’t just the PC slump, though. It’s that it’s spending too much and yet moving too slowly. TSMC can fabricate better than it can; Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook are designing their own chips for their own uses. The CPU market is beginning to look like the low-end commodity market, and nothing good happens there.
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Football is sexy and VAR is coitus interruptus; can we just get back to banging please? • Football365

John Nicholson:

»

Sunday revealed just how deeply embedded the VAR system is in the Premier League: No VAR, no football. [Soccer, for US readers.]

At Elland Road, a game could not go ahead without the all-seeing eye when the Leeds v Arsenal game was suspended due to an electrical fault causing VAR [Video Assistant Referee, which is used to adjudicate contested decisions on goals or offside] to fail and the officials being not able to communicate with each other via ear-pieces.

Football was played without VAR for 150 years; it was played for almost all that time with officials communicating by the simple means of talking or shouting at each other. That VAR has so occupied football’s real estate at this level that games literally cannot go on without it, shows just how complete its takeover of the game is.

It is tempting to think they were scared to show that football can be played perfectly well without VAR and show that it has made football worse, that it has neutered and blunted every player and fan’s reaction to every goal. That it is thoroughly inconsistent and leaves many of us bewildered and confused.

VAR is often called ‘technology’ but it’s not really technology. It’s not some nuanced algorithm crunched by a big giant brain of a computer in a bunker under a volcano inhabited by men in white coats. It’s a bloke looking at a telly. Calling it technology is to aggrandise the process in order to make it seem more sophisticated and thus important. That conned some into believing infallible robots would be in charge, not the pesky fallible humans. But no, it’s just a bloke and a telly.

The vast majority of fans do not want VAR but it is now a legal obligation to play games with it. So we fans don’t matter. Oh no. We saw that at Elland Road as they held up the game for 40 minutes until they’d fixed VAR without any thought for the Arsenal fans who had to get back to London on a Sunday evening, without thought for the home fans too.

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VAR does feel like technology imposed on the game, rather than one that helps the game – as much as anything because it’s so slow. In tennis, it’s almost instant, and ditto in squash. Nobody really likes VAR, though: there’s just growing resentment when it is brought in.
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Remove objects from video: Inpaint content-aware fill • RunwayML

»

Remove Objects From Video: The Magic Tool that lets you remove any object from any video with just a few simple brush strokes.

«

I’ve linked to Runway before, but this demonstration is quite scarily good. You can imagine that Stalin would have loved it.
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This Danish political party is led by an AI • Motherboard

Chloe Xiang:

»

The Synthetic Party, a new Danish political party with an artificially intelligent representative and policies derived from AI, is eyeing a seat in parliament as it hopes to run in the country’s November general election.

The party was founded in May by the artist collective Computer Lars and the non-profit art and tech organization MindFuture Foundation. The Synthetic Party’s public face and figurehead is the AI chatbot Leader Lars, which is programmed on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970 and is meant to represent the values of the 20% of Danes who do not vote in the election. Leader Lars won’t be on the ballot anywhere, but the human members of The Synthetic Party are committed to carrying out their AI-derived platform.

“We’re representing the data of all fringe parties, so it’s all of the parties who are trying to get elected into parliament but don’t have a seat. So it’s a person who has formed a political vision of their own that they would like to realise, but they usually don’t have the money or resources to do so,” Asker Staunæs, the creator of the party and an artist-researcher at MindFuture, told Motherboard.

Leader Lars is an AI chatbot that people can speak with on Discord. You can address Leader Lars by beginning your sentences with an “!”. The AI understands English but writes back to you in Danish.

“As people from Denmark, and also, people around the globe are interacting with the AI, they submit new perspectives and new textual information, where we collect in a dataset that will go into the fine-tuning. So that way, you are partly developing the AI every time you interact with it.” Staunæs said.

Some of the policies that The Synthetic Party is proposing include establishing a universal basic income of 100,000 Danish kroner per month, which is equivalent to $13,700, and is over double the Danish average salary. Another proposed policy change is to create a jointly-owned internet and IT sector in the government that is on par with other public institutions.

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I suppose that an AI wouldn’t be able to feel mortified when its policies had to be reversed because the (algorithm-driven, often) markets didn’t like them. Surely this will be or was a Black Mirror plot? Though I feel that phrase gets used a lot. Talking of feeling mortified…

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The Liz Truss travesty becomes Britain’s humiliation • The Atlantic

Tom McTague:

»

Britain has been broke before. It was in this position after the war when it needed US assistance, and then again in the late 1970s when it was bailed out by the IMF. It was battered by the markets in 1992 when John Major’s economic strategy collapsed.

What’s happening now is entirely new: the very real prospect that the markets will force a change of prime minister before an election. They have already forced a change in policy. Truss’s problems are so acute that Tory MPs are discussing removing her as a serious option, perhaps their only one. If Truss is removed any time soon, hers would be the shortest premiership in British history, beating George Canning’s 119-day tenure in 1827. And he died in office.

Those considering this drastic course are doing so, in large part, to restore calm and confidence to the markets, not simply to voters. This has not happened before and would surely act like a knife to the body politic, leaving a permanent scar on the country’s reputation.

An old friend who died recently once told me a story about economic decline that stuck with me. He had traveled the world as a journalist for Reuters and said Argentina was the best place he’d ever lived. But that was before its collapse into chaos, populism, and crisis in the late 1990s. I last saw him in 2019; he was living in Brussels then, but told me that he worried some similar decline was happening in Britain.

Back then, I dismissed his fears. I’d lived through the turmoil of Afghanistan and Iraq, the global financial crisis and Brexit. I’d seen Scotland coming close to seceding from the country, David Cameron’s austerity leading to calamity, Boris Johnson’s turbulent administration, and Jeremy Corbyn leading Labour to electoral oblivion. But through it all, Britain had plodded along, not exactly prospering as it once had but inching forward nonetheless. Its institutions did their job, the constitution held up, people’s lives went on much as they always had.

And then Liz Truss came along… Britain was once a rich country, seemingly well governed with institutions that sat like sedimentary rock on its surface, solid and everlasting. Today it is very obviously not a rich country or well governed, but a poor country, badly governed, with weak institutions. In trying to reverse this reality, Truss has made it visible for all to see.

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“The hell with it”—Elon Musk to keep funding Ukrainian Starlink service • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

In a tweet early Saturday afternoon, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that satellite-based ISP Starlink will continue providing Internet service to Ukrainian forces battling the Russian invasion, as well as the country’s government. “The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free,” Musk tweeted.

«

Oh well, that was easily solved. It seems Musk donated around 20,000 handset units, and that another 8,000 have been requested, and that use over the rest of this year would cost “more than $120m” and “close to $400m for the next 12 months”.

Assume 20,000 handsets (ie 8,000 were broken), that’s $20,000 per handset per year, or $1,666 per month. Not cheap, but for essential military equipment, probably not the most expensive. SpaceX, which runs Starlink, says that the most expensive units cost $4,500 per month to run. (Again, this is all about what you think is an actual “cost”: probably no, not the data, but probably yes keeping the satellites in position.)
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Kanye West is buying ‘free speech platform’ Parler • The Verge

Jon Porter and James Vincent:

»

Kanye West, the musician now legally known as Ye, is buying Parler, a social media platform that styles itself as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter. The acquisition was announced by Parler in a press release, which said that it has entered into an agreement in principle with Ye that’s expected to close later this year.

“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” said Ye in a press statement.

Parlement Technologies, Parler’s parent company, said the acquisition would help create “an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome.” In a message sent this morning to the “Parler Family,” [included in the full story], Parlement Technologies CEO George Farmer said, “The current Parler staff you’ve come to know —many of whom you’ve interacted with— will still be working on the app, and the platform will continue to utilize Dynascale’s cloud services.”

In a press statement, Farmer said the deal would “change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech.” Notably, Farmer is the husband of conservative influencer and commentator for right-wing outlets Candace Owens, who has visibly become close to Ye recently, with TMZ reporting the two are “in constant talks” and saying his friends believe she’s influencing him.

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Well, it’ll certainly change Farmer’s bank balance, which is likely feeling the pain of funding Parler. However as quite a few have pointed out, Parler ranks far behind the other right-wing talk sites such as Gab. Ye is getting the short end of a bad deal.
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Elon Musk’s business ties deserve more scrutiny • Slow Boring

Matthew Yglesias:

»

Musk, like most global manufacturing executives these days, has extensive business dealings with China. And while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, it means Musk has to watch what he says regarding the People’s Republic of China (PRC), not just in his personal capacity as a business executive but potentially in his institutional role as well. And he’s not alone; Apple TV+, for example, has a rule that none of its content can portray China negatively.

That’s an unfortunate but straightforward consequence of Apple TV+ being so small compared to Apple’s core business of making and selling smartphones: they compromise the content business for the sake of the manufacturing business. The good news for the world is that Apple TV+ is a very small share of western cultural output. They’re doing well with niche content (I love “For All Mankind”), and they won an Oscar for “Coda.” But it’s a small service in the scheme of things.

The problem for the world is that Twitter would be the Apple TV+ of Elon Musk’s enterprises, much smaller and less important than Tesla, so its interests will always be sacrificed to advance Tesla’s interests. And Tesla, like Apple’s hardware business, is deeply enmeshed in China. But Twitter is much more important to global politics and culture than Apple TV+. That’s the whole reason the Musk/Twitter saga has been such a subject of fascination. Twitter is one of a handful of other influential media properties — The New York Times, the three cable networks, AM talk radio stations — that exert a cultural and political influence that far exceeds their modest financial footprints. Apple executives are much less polarizing and controversial than Musk. But pretty much everyone on both the left and right knows they’re a bit squirrelly about China for business reasons. And if they bought the New York Times, that would have dire implications for the integrity of their China coverage.

Musk is mercurial and I won’t pretend to be able to predict what he will do. But I think his business relationships with China and tendency to take pro-PRC positions in his public statements raise some disturbing questions about the future of Twitter that deserve much more scrutiny relative to the concern that he won’t be strict enough in policing hate speech.

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Higher heating bills poised to hit US households this winter • WSJ

Ryan Dezember:

»

Americans should expect bigger home-heating bills compared with last winter, thanks to higher prices for natural gas, heating oil, propane and electricity as well as slightly colder weather, the US Energy Information Administration said in its seasonal outlook.

Government energy specialists predict that it will cost $931 to warm the typical home that is heated with natural gas between this month and March. That is up 28% from a year earlier in nominal terms. If it gets colder than federal weather forecasters expect, heating bills could be 51% more than last year for homes with gas-fuelled furnaces and boilers, which is nearly half of US households. A 19% year-over-year jump is anticipated if it is a warm winter.

The base case for those who burn heating oil—mainly in the Northeast, where low imports and closed refineries have reduced supply—is for 27% greater expense. Those with propane, popular in rural areas, and electric heat are expected to pay 5% and 10% more, respectively, if temperature forecasts hold.

“Winter energy expenditures for most households are likely to be higher than last winter,” said Joseph DeCarolis, EIA administrator. “Much higher if the weather is very cold.”

A really chilly winter could throw energy markets back into overdrive and turn up the pressure on central bankers, who are fighting what has been the highest inflation in four decades with the steepest interest-rate increases since the early 1980s.

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But of course Americans don’t get any help with their bills. The only thing that can save the economy is.. global warming?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A DeepMind system has invented – or discovered? – an entirely new, and faster, way to multiply certain matrices. That could help GPU algorithms in future.

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’ll be another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. No motion capture, please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

America curbs Chinese access to advanced computing • The Economist

»

Visions of a technologically ascendent China keep American strategists up at night. They see the contours of a surveillance state implementing the will of President Xi Jinping by algorithmic edict at home and projecting computing power abroad. To erase those contours for good, on October 7th President Joe Biden’s administration announced the most sweeping set of export controls in decades. The new rules cut off people and firms in China from many advanced technologies of American origin, and from products made using these. The list includes chips used for artificial intelligence (ai), software to design advanced chips and the machine tools to manufacture them. Selling such things to China is now barred without explicit permission from America’s government. Rulebreakers risk being cut off from American tech themselves.

The share prices of affected Chinese firms have sunk. China’s biggest producer of memory chips, the state-owned ymtc, has 60 days to allow American officials to inspect its operations for compliance. American companies that sell advanced semiconductor technology to China have also been hit, even as they reel from a deep cyclical slump in demand for their wares. This week it emerged that Intel, America’s chipmaking champion with Chinese sales of $21bn last year, is about to axe thousands of jobs.

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Another piece (because this has huge ramifications) from the Center For Strategic and International Studies:

»

The most important chokepoints in the context of this discussion are AI chip designs, electronic design automation software, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and equipment components. The Biden administration’s latest actions simultaneously exploit US dominance across all four of these chokepoints. In doing so, these actions demonstrate an unprecedented degree of US government intervention to not only preserve chokepoint control but also begin a new US policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry—strangling with an intent to kill.

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And there’s a Twitter thread (on a single page) on the effects this is having in China, which kicks off with this:

»

To put it simply, Biden has forced all Americans working in China to pick between quitting their jobs and losing American citizenship. Every American executive and engineer working in China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry resigned yesterday, paralyzing Chinese manufacturing overnight.

One round of sanctions from Biden did more damage than all four years of performative sanctioning under Trump.

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DeepMind AI finds new way to multiply numbers and speed up computers • New Scientist

Matthew Sparkes:

»

the mathematician Volker Strassen proved in 1969 that multiplying a matrix of two rows of two numbers with another of the same size doesn’t necessarily involve eight multiplications and that, with a clever trick, it can be reduced to seven. This approach, called the Strassen algorithm, requires some extra addition, but this is acceptable because additions in a computer take far less time than multiplications.

The algorithm has stood as the most efficient approach on most matrix sizes for more than 50 years, although some slight improvements that aren’t easily adapted to computer code have been found. But DeepMind’s AI has now discovered a faster technique that works perfectly on current hardware. The company’s new AI, AlphaTensor, started with no knowledge of any solutions and was presented with the problem of creating a working algorithm that completed the task with the minimum number of steps.

It found an algorithm for multiplying two matrices of four rows of four numbers using just 47 multiplications, which outperforms Strassen’s 49 multiplications. It also developed improved techniques for multiplying matrices of other sizes, 70 in total.

AlphaTensor discovered thousands of functional algorithms for each size of matrix, including 14,000 for 4×4 matrices alone. But only a small minority were better than the state of the art. The research builds on AlphaZero, DeepMind’s game-playing model, and has been two years in the making.

Hussein Fawzi at DeepMind says the results are mathematically sound, but are far from intuitive for humans. “We don’t really know why the system came up with this, essentially,” he says. “Why is it the best way of multiplying matrices? It’s unclear.”

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The Strassen algorithm is a bit mindbending in its own right, since it requires creating new matrices, so seems like it’s entailing much more work. But more intriguing is that the humans don’t quite know why this works; it needs to be reverse engineered to understand.
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A six-year cult has the Tories in its grip. Only defeat can free them • The Sunday Times

Matthew Syed:

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In the autumn of 1954 a young and rather daring psychologist called Leon Festinger infiltrated a UFO cult in Minnesota. The cult insiders believed that they would be picked up in a spaceship at midnight on December 21 and transported to a new planetary utopia on the edge of the galaxy. They had sold their possessions and told the local newspaper what was about to unfold.

Festinger was not interested in the prophecy per se. Many such groups have risen up from time to time in different parts of America. Rather, he was fascinated in what would happen after the prophecy failed. Would the cult members admit their folly? Would they go back to their lives? Would they become reacquainted with reality?

In fact the 35-year-old Festinger, who had spent his career examining dogmatic thinking in all its forms, had a different expectation. He thought their convictions would become even more entrenched. It would be too psychologically threatening to admit they were wrong, too mortifying to confront the stares of those who had warned them. Sure enough, as the clock ticked past midnight, the cult members rapidly found an alternative explanation. The planetary timetable had shifted: the spaceship would now come two years later. Within a week they were back out on a recruitment drive.

I mention this research because it offers the only lens through which to make sense of what has unfolded over the past six years of British politics.

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Very astute. Let’s see how The Markets like the appointment of Jeremy Hunt – someone very much not in the cult (voted to Remain, backed Rishi Sunak, doesn’t agree with supply-side economics) – this morning.
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Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX says it can no longer pay for critical satellite services in Ukraine, asks Pentagon to pick up the tab • CNN Politics

Alex Marquardt:

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Since they first started arriving in Ukraine last spring, the Starlink satellite internet terminals made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been a vital source of communication for Ukraine’s military, allowing it to fight and stay connected even as cellular phone and internet networks have been destroyed in its war with Russia.

So far roughly 20,000 Starlink satellite units have been donated to Ukraine, with Musk tweeting on Friday the “operation has cost SpaceX $80m and will exceed $100m by the end of the year.”

But those charitable contributions could be coming to an end, as SpaceX has warned the Pentagon that it may stop funding the service in Ukraine unless the US military kicks in tens of millions of dollars per month.

Documents obtained by CNN show that last month Musk’s SpaceX sent a letter to the Pentagon saying it can no longer continue to fund the Starlink service as it has. The letter also requested that the Pentagon take over funding for Ukraine’s government and military use of Starlink, which SpaceX claims would cost more than $120m for the rest of the year and could cost close to $400m for the next 12 months.

“We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales wrote to the Pentagon in the September letter.

Among the SpaceX documents sent to the Pentagon and seen by CNN is a previously unreported direct request made to Musk in July by the Ukrainian military’s commanding general, General Valerii Zaluzhniy, for almost 8,000 more Starlink terminals.

In a separate cover letter to the Pentagon, an outside consultant working for SpaceX wrote, “SpaceX faces terribly difficult decisions here. I do not think they have the financial ability to provide any additional terminals or service as requested by General Zaluzhniy.”

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First: if only SpaceX knew someone of immense wealth – perhaps worth billions personally – to whom it could turn for funding. (Though the world’s richest man seems to think Ukraine should just roll over.)

Second: how is this costing SpaceX any money? It puts up the satellites: that’s a capital cost, but one it has to bear to run its business. It has to keep the satellites in position: that’s an operating cost, but one it has to bear to run its business. It has ground stations: that’s an operating cost, etc etc. The bandwidth, though, is essentially free. It only “costs” in that use of bandwidth may be exclusionary to paying users. Though there probably aren’t that many in Ukraine.
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The Kettle Companion

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The Kettle Companion is an assisted living product, that helps those who live apart to stay connected, by illuminating when a loved one activates their kettle at home.

This is signaled through a monitoring plug and communicated via Wi-Fi to a paired Kettle Companion in another user’s home. Additionally, if there is a change in pattern of use, for instance, an elderly parent has not had their habitual morning cup of tea by the usual time, the paired Kettle Companion will illuminate red. A text message alert can also be sent to the owner of this appliance, prompting them to check on their loved one. 

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Very neat little idea. Nothing about price, but you’d hope it would be.. tolerable?
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Company documents show Meta’s flagship metaverse falling short • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz, Salvador Rodriguez and Meghan Bobrowsky:

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While Mr. Zuckerberg has said the transition to a more immersive online experience will take years, the company’s flagship metaverse offering for consumers, Horizon Worlds, is falling short of internal performance expectations.

Meta initially set a goal of reaching 500,000 monthly active users for Horizon Worlds by the end of this year, but in recent weeks revised that figure to 280,000. The current tally is less than 200,000, the documents show.

Most visitors to Horizon generally don’t return to the app after the first month, and the user base has steadily declined since the spring, according to the documents, which include internal memos from employees.

By comparison, Meta’s social-media products, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, together attract more than 3.5 billion average monthly users—a figure equivalent to almost half the world’s population. Horizon is currently reaching less than the population of Sioux Falls, S.D.

Horizon is designed to be a sprawling collection of interactive virtual spaces, or worlds, in which users appearing as avatars can shop, party and work. Yet there are rarely any girls in the Hot Girl Summer Rooftop Pool Party, and in Murder Village there is often no one to kill. Even the company’s showcase worlds, such as Questy’s, a virtual arcade featured in a Super Bowl commercial earlier this year, are mostly barren of users.

According to internal statistics, only 9% of worlds built by creators are ever visited by at least 50 people. Most are never visited at all.

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I’m trying to think of ways by which this could really, really turn round for Meta, but honestly can’t. It requires a huge shift in how people work akin to the smartphone, but VR is far, far away from that. We could have holographic TV first.
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Meta’s virtual reality legs video was a lie: it used motion capture • Kotaku

Luke Plunkett:

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While the updates bringing full-body avatars aren’t expected until 2023, Zuckerberg was clearly seen jumping around in the video, giving everyone an early look at the tech. Or was he?

Anyone who has ever been around—*checks the culture*—any piece of marketing ever made should know by now that not everything is as it seems when a company is trying to sell you something. And in this case, the video Meta showed off was made with some help.

As UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton has since reported, Meta has issued a follow-up statement, which says, “To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.”

Deep down, of course, you all knew this. From vertical slices at E3 to photo tricks shown at Apple events, there are always grains of salt we need to chew on every time a company trying to sell us something that isn’t out yet.

But there’s something especially funny about this in particular, that a project that has spent billions of dollars to look like a Kinect demo—a piece of hardware first shown off in 2009—has ended up with its own dumb feet-related moment.

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Deep sigh.
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Lipstick on a pig • Pixel Envy

Nick Heer:

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This is clearly an area Zuckerberg is passionate about to a truly painful degree. So far, though, the best use case — the best use case — for even the more credulous believers is meetings. I cannot imagine buying dedicated expensive hardware for meetings, but I am probably not in the right market; two-and-a-half years into working from home and I still have not bought a ring light. Regardless, that sounds pretty dull. Are businesses champing at the bit to have staff sit in a virtual board room instead of just on a call? Is this solving a meaningful problem for them?

Zuckerberg preemptively responded to criticisms like these by reminding everyone that this category is just getting started. But that is a bit of misdirection. Oculus, the virtual reality hardware company Meta bought, was founded in 2012; Meta bought it in 2014. On a technical level, Meta can point to plenty of improvements. But it is much more difficult for anyone to point to clarifications in the concept and purpose of virtual reality. Again, I would be an idiot to argue there are none at all, but this week’s keynote would have been a great time for Meta to illustrate something new and enrich the story. So far, it does not have legs.

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VR has been around for ages: I first tried it out in the early 1990s, on games, though it was also being tried for some less trivial applications. The fact that it keeps not getting traction suggests to me that it’s like 3D TV or films: a technological breakthrough that completely fails to enthral users.
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Alaska snow crab season cancelled as officials investigate disappearance of an estimated 1 billion crabs • CBS News

Jonathan Vigliotti:

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In a major blow to America’s seafood industry, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has, for the first time in state history, canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers. While restaurant menus will suffer, scientists worry what the sudden population plunge means for the health of the Arctic ecosystem.

An estimated one billion crabs have mysteriously disappeared in two years, state officials said. It marks a 90% drop in their population.

“Did they run up north to get that colder water?” asked Gabriel Prout, whose Kodiak Island fishing business relies heavily on the snow crab population. “Did they completely cross the border? Did they walk off the continental shelf on the edge there, over the Bering Sea?” 

Ben Daly, a researcher with ADF&G, is investigating where the crabs have gone. He monitors the health of the state’s fisheries, which produce 60% of the nation’s seafood.

“Disease is one possibility,” Daly told CBS News.

He also points to climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Alaska is the fastest warming state in the country, and is losing billions of tons of ice each year — critical for crabs that need cold water to survive. 

“Environmental conditions are changing rapidly,” Daly said. “We’ve seen warm conditions in the Bering Sea the last couple of years, and we’re seeing a response in a cold adapted species, so it’s pretty obvious this is connected. It is a canary in a coal mine for other species that need cold water.”

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For much, much more, read this thread. (Unfortunately I couldn’t find a single-page version of it.) TL;DR it’s both climate change (warmer seas) and commercial trawling.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified