The innocent-looking trolley tram has given rise to a whole range of mindbending ethics problems. What if it’s a choice between killing five lobsters… or one cat? CC-licensed photo by Alex W on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Freely given. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

There’s another Social Warming Substack post going live today at 0845 BST. Today: what it’s like recording an audiobook that some idio–that you wrote.

Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in peril • The Washington Post

Faiz Siddiqui and Gerrit De Vynck:

»

Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in serious jeopardy, three people familiar with the matter say, as Musk’s camp concluded that Twitter’s figures on spam accounts are not verifiable.

Musk’s team has stopped engaging in certain discussions around funding for the $44bn deal, including with a party named as a likely backer, one of the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing discussions.

Talks with investors have cooled in recent weeks as Musk’s camp has raised doubts about the recent data “fire hose” — a trove of data sold to corporate customers — they received from Twitter. Musk’s team’s doubts about the spam figures signal they believe they do not have enough information to evaluate Twitter’s prospects as a business, the people said.

Now that Musk’s team has concluded Twitter’s figures on spam accounts are not verifiable, one of the people said, it is expected to take potentially drastic action.

The person said it was likely a change in direction from Musk’s team would come soon, though they did not say exactly what they thought that change would be.

If Musk pulls out of the deal, it will potentially trigger a massive legal battle.

«

I think the first sentence should say “Musk’s camp concluded that Tesla’s shares have fallen too far to fund the deal easily.” Also, perhaps a period of reflection has given him time to realise that running a social network isn’t a bed of roses, and that it would probably be better left to people who’ve been doing it for years. The spam account stuff is pure chaff; when he signed the agreement in April he skipped the due diligence that he’s now pretending to do.

Anyhow, it looks like this deal is now too expensive and too troublesome and time-consuming for him. Expect it to collapse, and Twitter to gradually demand the $1bn default payment, and Musk to tweet things like “Eat my shorts!”
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China: MI5 and FBI heads warn of ‘immense’ threat • BBC News

Gordon Corera:

»

The heads of UK and US security services have made an unprecedented joint appearance to warn of the threat from China.

FBI director Christopher Wray said China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security” and had interfered in politics, including recent elections.

MI5 head Ken McCallum said his service had more than doubled its work against Chinese activity in the last three years and would be doubling it again.

MI5 is now running seven times as many investigations related to activities of the Chinese Communist Party compared to 2018, he added.

The FBI’s Wray warned that if China was to forcibly take Taiwan it would “represent one of the most horrific business disruptions the world has ever seen”.

…McCallum also said the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party was “game-changing”, while Wray called it “immense” and “breath-taking”.

Wray warned the audience – which included chief executives of businesses and senior figures from universities – that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology” using a range of tools.

He said it posed “an even more serious threat to western businesses than even many sophisticated businesspeople realised”. He cited cases in which people linked to Chinese companies out in rural America had been digging up genetically modified seeds which would have cost them billions of dollars and nearly a decade to develop themselves.

«

Not sure GM seeds is the best example in the universe; couldn’t they just order that from the seed supplier?
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Things fall apart • The Debatable Land

Alex Massie, with what I thought was the best take on the events of Thursday:

»

among the first things Johnson did as prime minister was recast the Tory party in his image. One Nation sceptics were not so much eased out as brutally jettisoned. It was Boris’s way or no way at all. You could build a better cabinet from those Johnson effectively expelled – Clarke, Grieve, Hammond, Stewart et al – than from those he kept. Like many superficially strong moves this one actually revealed an essential weakness – and a smallness – at the core of Johnson’s government. It was a purge and these are rarely conducted without malice. No amount of smiling or joshing or buffoonery may disguise that.

Johnson didn’t throw it all away because he didn’t have it in the first place.

What was the point?

This is a gloomy question but Johnson’s government did not end with a melancholy sense of squandered promise. It was, typically, all style and no substance. No surprise, really, since this has been Johnson’s operational default his entire career. The heavy lifting has been done by other people. At The Spectator, for instance, almost all the work of actually editing the magazine was done by Johnson’s long-suffering deputy, Stuart Reid. Johnson was a figurehead editor and while a weekly magazine may cope with that, running the country needs just a little more commitment.

(As a columnist, meanwhile, it would be ungenerous to deny that Johnson had talent in a show-boating sense but his copy, colourful as it might be and entertaining to some, nonetheless had a curiously weightless quality to it. Yes, fine, but what’s the real point of it? And for all that folk liked to use the term “Wodehousian” in connection with Boris the journalist, there was one vital difference: Wodehouse would throw out a joke if it interrupted or got in the way of the plot. Johnson, by contrast, could never resist the gag, even at the cost of undermining all else. The gag, in fact, was the point. I do not mean this unkindly: newspapers are by their nature ephemeral, but it is wise to at least be aware of their limitations. One other small, but revealing, note: Johnson was notorious for filing his copy late, no matter how much this might inconvenience other, rather less well-paid, people. Just Boris being Boris, of course, but other people had to cope with or clear up the mess.)

«

Lazy and late. Incredible it took so long to catch up with him.
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Boris Johnson steps down as PM with tech legacy in tatters • The Register

Lindsay Clark:

»

Surprising no one who witnessed the politician back cable cars as a revolution in river crossing or a garden bridge as an innovation in inner-city expansion, the outgoing Prime Minister leaves behind a set of science and technology projects which are either yet to be completed or completely off the wall.

Dangling plans include his ambition to accelerate the arrival of productive nuclear fusion – a technical breakthrough which always promises to be 20 years off.

In 2019, Johnson praised the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxford, only for others to reveal the organization benefited from large chunks of funding from the European Union, the powerful political and economic bloc Johnson so passionately persuaded the UK to leave.

Fission is also a favorite. Johnson has been vocal in backing small modular reactors, a technology from jet engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce. A study has claimed some miniaturized fission units produce as much as 35 times more waste to generate the same amount of power as a regular plant.

The UK is also in the throes of an attempt to mimic the US’s success with DARPA – the defence-led science unit which played a role in the development of the internet.

As of last year, Aria – the Advanced Research and Invention Agency – hadn’t even begun to happen despite five years passing since the UK decided to leave the EU. Now reports suggest the launch of the agency will be delayed until at least the end of this year.

Meanwhile, UK scientists are being cut off from European funding, post-Brexit.

«

Promises, empty promises.
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Meta plans to call new virtual reality headset the ‘Quest Pro’ • BNN Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

Meta Platforms’s upcoming high-end headset for virtual and augmented reality (VR, AR) will be called the Meta Quest Pro, according to code findings inside the company’s iPhone app for setting up headsets. 

Meta has been touting its new device since last year, using the codename Project Cambria. The company is likely to introduce the official name later this year along with details about the headset’s availability. It will cost more than $1,000, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t yet public.

The device is a major priority for Meta, which has recently scaled back other hardware projects such as a smartwatch, and will be a prime competitor to Apple’s upcoming mixed-reality headset when it goes on sale next year. 

The new Meta headset will have far better graphics processing and power compared with the regular Meta Quest headset. It will also include external high-resolution cameras to simulate AR in color, eye tracking, more storage, new controllers and high-resolution displays for virtual reality.

A Meta spokeswoman declined to comment. Meta typically announces new headsets and related features in October. 

The code string indicating the name of the product, which was found by developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News, references the pairing of the device to a controller. The code reads: “Pair Meta Quest Pro right controller.”

«

That price really is quite wild. Who has a thousand dollars (or pounds) to spare and wants to tie themselves to Facebook? Unless it really is a corporate metaverse play. Which is possible, but still seems very early.
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Absurd Trolley Problems

Neal Agarwal:

»

Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, killing 1 person instead. What do you do?

«

You start off with two options (this one), but the problems get weirder and weirder. I stopped at

»

Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 lobsters. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, running over a cat instead. What do you do?

«

because I don’t know what the exchange rate between lobsters and cats is. (Thanks Gregory for the link.)
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The danger of licence plate readers in post-Roe America • WIRED

Thor Benson:

»

Since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, America’s extensive surveillance state could soon be turned against those seeking abortions or providing abortion care.

Currently, nine states have almost entirely banned abortion, and more are expected to follow suit. Many Republican lawmakers in these states are discussing the possibility of preventing people from traveling across state lines to obtain an abortion. If such plans are enacted and withstand legal scrutiny, one of the key technologies that could be deployed to track people trying to cross state lines is automated licence plate readers (ALPRs). They’re employed heavily by police forces across the US, but they’re also used by private actors.

ALPRs are cameras that are mounted on street poles, overpasses, and elsewhere that can identify and capture licence plate numbers on passing cars for the purpose of issuing speeding tickets and tolls, locating stolen cars, and more. State and local police maintain databases of captured licence plates and frequently use those databases in criminal investigations.

The police have access to not only licence plate data collected by their own ALPRs but also data gathered by private companies. Firms like Flock Safety and Motorola Solutions have their own networks of ALPRs that are mounted to the vehicles of private companies and organizations they work with, such as car repossession outfits. Flock, for instance, claims it’s collecting licence plate data in roughly 1,500 cities and can capture data from over a billion vehicles every month.

“They have fleets of cars that have ALPRs on them that just suck up data. They sell that to various clients, including repo firms and government agencies. They also sell them to police departments,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “It’s a giant, nationwide mass surveillance system. That obviously has serious implications should interstate travel become part of forced-birth enforcement.”

«

“Forced-birth enforcement” is quite a phrase; its Gilead-style echoes are surely intentional, but, equally, not wrong. Perhaps you do need something as pivotal as Roe v Wade being overturned to expose how extensive the US surveillance state is, and how little protection its citizens have from it.
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Asymptomatic monkeypox virus infections among male sexual health clinic attendees in Belgium • medRxiv

»

Monkeypox is transmitted by close contact with symptomatic cases, and those infected are assumed to be uniformly symptomatic. Evidence of subclinical monkeypox infection is limited to a few immunological studies which found evidence of immunity against orthopoxviruses in asymptomatic individuals who were exposed to monkeypox cases. We aimed to assess whether asymptomatic infections occurred among individuals who underwent sexually transmitted infection (STI) screening in a large Belgian STI clinic around the start of the 2022 monkeypox epidemic in Belgium.

…In stored samples from 224 men, we identified three cases with a positive anorectal monkeypox PCR. All three men denied having had any symptoms in the weeks before and after the sample was taken. None of them reported exposure to a diagnosed monkeypox case, nor did any of their contacts develop clinical monkeypox. Follow-up samples were taken 21 to 37 days after the initial sample, by which time the monkeypox-specific PCR was negative, likely as a consequence of spontaneous clearance of the infection.

«

Asymptomatic monkeypox? This is concerning. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Twitter, challenging orders to remove content, sues India’s government • The New York Times

Karan Deep Singh and Kate Conger:

»

Twitter said on Tuesday that it had sued the Indian government, escalating the social media company’s fight in the country as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks more control over critical online posts.

Twitter’s suit, filed in the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, challenges a recent order from the Indian government for the company to remove content and block dozens of accounts. Twitter complied with the order, which had a Monday deadline, but then sought judicial relief. A date has not been set for a judge to review Twitter’s suit.

The suit is the first legal challenge that the company has issued to push back against laws passed in 2021 that extended the Indian government’s censorship powers. The rules gave the government oversight of Twitter and other social media companies, allowing the authorities to demand that posts or accounts critical of them be hidden from Indian users. Executives at the companies can face criminal penalties if they do not comply with the demands.

The laws have been met with an outcry from Twitter and other social media platforms, which view India as an essential part of their plans for long-term growth. The companies have argued that India’s rules allow the government to broadly censor its critics, and that they erode security measures like encryption. But Indian officials have said the law is necessary to combat online misinformation.

Twitter is not seeking to overturn the laws, but it argues in its suit that the government interpreted those laws too broadly, said a person with knowledge of the filing who was not authorized to speak publicly.

«

India’s government really has been pushing censorship, out of sight of much of the rest of the world. In its way, it’s like China, but we assume that because it’s a democracy that it must be beneficent. Not so, with Modi.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sand is plentiful, but not infinite, and supplies are – perhaps surprisingly – coming under strain. CC-licensed photo by Joaquin Moreno 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. How do you remove barnacles? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Could fake news provoke violence in Kenya’s elections? • Coda Story

Rebekah Robinson:

»

Kenya’s general elections to elect a new President and members of the National Assembly will take place on August 9 and the race is close and tense. Much of the tension is the result of the outgoing president, Uhuru Kenyatta, throwing his support behind opposition leader Raila Odinga rather than William Ruto, the current deputy president.  

Waves of disinformation pushed by paid social media influencers have been a growing concern in the run-up to elections that some experts worry could lead to violent eruptions. The country is still haunted by clashes during the 2007 elections that left over 1,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), set up in the wake of the violence 15 years ago, rates the likelihood of electoral violence as just about “medium high risk,” while in Nairobi County, home to the capital city, the risk of violence is considered to be “very high.” 

While access to digital resources has grown exponentially, studies suggest that the political conversation online in Kenya is often toxic, particularly on TikTok. Research by Mozilla Foundation fellow Odanga Madung shows that “hate speech, incitement against communities, and synthetic and manipulated content…is both present and spreading on the platform.” TikTok, the report argues, needs to do more to implement its own rules on objectionable and inflammatory content. Kenya is one of the few countries in the region that has not deliberately shut down the internet.

«

The riots in 2007 make the US January 6 insurrection look like the mildest of tea parties. The potential for social media to really make things bad continues to grow in countries where democracy comes most under siege.
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Apple unveils new security setting to block Pegasus attacks on iPhones • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

»

Apple said Wednesday that it will introduce an innovative security feature to give potential targets of government hacking an easy way to make their iPhones safer.

The company said it would be releasing the new “Lockdown Mode” in test versions of its operating systems shortly, with full distribution in the fall as part of iOS 16 for iPhones as well as the operating systems for iPads and Mac computers.

The action follows waves of attacks documented by The Washington Post and others showing that iPhones were being hacked by Pegasus spyware distributed by the Israeli company NSO Group and then used to capture contact information and live audio. But while Pegasus prompted Apple to act, it is not the only spyware that would be hobbled by the new feature.

Once engaged, Lockdown Mode will block most types of attachments on messages and prevent the phone from previewing Web links, which are frequently used to transmit spyware. Locking a phone will disable wired connections to computers and accessories that are used to take control of devices that have been seized by police or stolen by spies.

Apple’s lockdown tactic resolves a long-standing tension in its design approach between security concerns and the pursuit of easy-to-use, highly functional capabilities. The extra usability made the phones more vulnerable to attack through iMessage, FaceTime and other software. Lockdown Mode gives users the choice of whether to maintain those features. When activated, it limits what the phone can do.

«

Or just buy a Nokia 3310?
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Confidence in US institutions down; average at new low • Gallup

Jeffrey Jones:

»

Americans are less confident in major U.S. institutions than they were a year ago, with significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any. The largest declines in confidence are 11 percentage points for the Supreme Court — as reported in late June before the court issued controversial rulings on gun laws and abortion — and 15 points for the presidency, matching the 15-point drop in President Joe Biden’s job approval rating since the last confidence survey in June 2021.

Gallup first measured confidence in institutions in 1973 and has done so annually since 1993. This year’s survey was conducted June 1-20.

Confidence currently ranges from a high of 68% for small business to a low of 7% for Congress. The military is the only institution besides small business for which a majority of Americans express confidence (64%). Confidence in the police, at 45%, has fallen below the majority level for only the second time, with the other instance occurring in 2020 in the weeks after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

This year’s poll marks new lows in confidence for all three branches of the federal government — the Supreme Court (25%), the presidency (23%) and Congress.

«

Arguably because two of the three branches don’t represent the majority – both the Supreme Court and Senate are terribly unrepresentative of the population.
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March 2021: the clown king: how Boris Johnson made it by playing the fool • The Guardian

Edward Docx, in March 2021:

»

Would-be biographers of Johnson might do worse than to read Paul Bouissac, the leading scholar on the semiotics of clowning. Clowns are “transgressors”, he writes, cultural subversives who enact rituals and dramatic tableaux that “ignore the tacit rules of social games to indulge in symbolic actions that … toy with these norms as if they were arbitrary, dispensable convention.” Clowns “undermine the ground upon which our language and our society rest by revealing their fragility”. They “foreground the tension” between “instinct” and “constraint”. Bouissac could be writing directly of Johnson when he adds: “Their performing identities transcend the rules of propriety.” They are, he says, “improper by essence”.

Observe classic Johnson closely as he arrives at an event. See how his entire being and bearing is bent towards satire, subversion, mockery. The hair is his clown’s disguise. Just as the makeup and the red nose bestow upon the circus clown a form of anonymity and thus freedom to overturn conventions, so Johnson’s candy-floss mop announces his licence. His clothes are often baggy – ill-fitting; a reminder of the clothes of the clown. He walks towards us quizzically, as if to mock the affected “power walking” of other leaders. Absurdity seems to be wrestling with solemnity in every expression and limb. Notice how he sometimes feigns to lose his way as if to suggest the ridiculousness of the event, the ridiculousness of his presence there, the ridiculousness of any human being going in any direction at all.

His weight, meanwhile, invites us to consider that the trouble with the world (if only we’d admit it) is that it’s really all about appetite and greed. (His convoluted affairs and uncountable children whisper the same about sex.) Before he says a word, he has transmitted his core message – that the human conventions of styling hair, fitting clothes and curbing desires are all … ludicrous. And we are encouraged – laughingly – to agree. And, of course, we do. Because, in a sense, they are ludicrous.

«

Last chance, while he’s still relevant.
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How a fake job offer took down the world’s most popular crypto game • The Block

Ryan Weeks:

»

Ronin, the Ethereum-linked sidechain that underpins play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, lost $540 million in crypto to an exploit in March. While the US government later tied the incident to North Korean hacking group Lazarus, full details of how the exploit was carried out have not been disclosed. 

The Block can now reveal that a fake job ad was Ronin’s undoing. 

According to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who were granted anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the incident, a senior engineer at Axie Infinity was duped into applying for a job at a company that, in reality, did not exist.  

Axie Infinity was huge. At its peak, workers in Southeast Asia were even able to earn a living through the play-to-earn game. It boasted 2.7 million daily active users and $214m in weekly trading volume for its in-game NFTs in November last year — although both numbers have since plummeted.

Earlier this year, staff at Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis were approached by people purporting to represent the fake company and encouraged to apply for jobs, according to the people familiar with the matter. One source added that the approaches were made through the professional networking site LinkedIn. 

After what one source described as multiple rounds of interviews, a Sky Mavis engineer was offered a job with an extremely generous compensation package. 

The fake “offer” was delivered in the form of a PDF document, which the engineer downloaded — allowing spyware to infiltrate Ronin’s systems. From there, hackers were able to attack and take over four out of nine validators on the Ronin network — leaving them just one validator short of total control. 

In a post-mortem blog post on the hack, published April 27, Sky Mavis said: “Employees are under constant advanced spear-phishing attacks on various social channels and one employee was compromised. This employee no longer works at Sky Mavis. The attacker managed to leverage that access to penetrate Sky Mavis IT infrastructure and gain access to the validator nodes.”

«

Certainly has all the hallmarks of a state hacking gang looking for cash. North Korea has discovered that crypto in particular is an easy target.
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Google-backed Glance to launch in US within two months • TechCrunch

Manish Singh:

»

Glance, a subsidiary of adtech giant InMobi Group, is planning to launch its lockscreen platform on Android smartphones in the US within two months, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The startup is engaging with wireless carriers in the US for partnerships and is gearing up to launch on several smartphone models by next month, the source said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private.

Glance, valued at around $2bn, serves media and current affairs content and casual games on Android handsets’ lockscreens. The service, which has amassed presence on about 400 million smartphones in Asian markets, is building a “premium offering” for the U.S., where individuals have higher propensity to pay for digital services, the source said.

A spokesperson for Glance declined to comment Tuesday. The startup said in February that it planned to expand globally in the coming years.

«

Lockscreen ads. Boke. Expanding globally. Double boke.
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The cost of sand has spiked 150% in Texas • Bloomberg via Yahoo

David Wethe:

»

Frack sand, which gets blasted through shale rocks to unlock oil and natural gas, is at about $55 a ton, up from $22 at the end of 2021, data on spot prices from energy-research firm Lium show. Demand is climbing as oil explorers turn the taps back on after Covid-driven cutbacks. But like in so many pockets of the economy, the recovery is sparking a mismatch. Sand suppliers have seen disruptions, labor shortages and trucking bottlenecks. The chief executive officer of US Silica Holdings Inc., the largest publicly traded frack-sand miner, has dubbed the tight market “sandemonium” and said his company is sold out.

That’s where Steve Brock and his upstart sand-mining operation, Nomad Proppant LLC, come in. Since the early days of the shale revolution more than a decade ago, fracking operators have relied on mined sand that’s delivered to their sites by truck — across distances as long as 100 miles. Brock, Nomad’s chief commercial officer, wants to turn that model on its head.

His idea: Why not just use the sand that’s right under your feet?

Nomad has developed machinery that can go directly to the frack wells (give or take 10 to 20 miles), vastly reducing the burden of freight costs and the time-consuming process of trucking.

«

Related: “Earth is running out of sand … which is, you know, pretty concerning” (Popular Mechanics), which says that

»

The most-extracted solid material in the world, and second-most used global resource behind water, sand is an unregulated material used extensively in nearly every construction project on Earth. And with 50 billion metric tons consumed annually—enough to build an 88-foot-tall, 88-foot-wide wall around the world—our sand depletion is on the rise, and a completely unregulated rise at that.

«

(Thanks G for the link.)
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French state plans to take full control of EDF • Financial Times

Sarah White:

»

France plans to take full control of power group EDF, a nuclear energy specialist that has been grappling with high debt, production outages and conflicting demands from its state shareholder as it gears up to try to process its biggest orders for new reactors in decades.

The takeover, announced by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne on Wednesday, would close a rollercoaster chapter for the former monopoly, which has included a shelved government attempt last year to restructure the sprawling company, still 84% controlled by the state.

“I confirm to you today that the state intends to control 100% of EDF’s capital,” Borne told lawmakers as she set out priorities for the new government following Emmanuel Macron’s re-election as president in April and legislative elections in June. She did not detail how the operation would take place, or when.

Shares in the company, which was listed in 2005, soared 14.3% after Borne’s speech. The stock held by minority shareholders is worth roughly €5bn at current market prices.

Known as EDF when the utility was created just after the second world war, EDF’s capital was opened up to private investors with the argument it would bring more financial discipline and transparency to a group with a history of internal quarrels and that is sometimes described as a quasi state-within-a-state.

«

Nationalising essential public services? Damn radical centrists.
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Is Apple failing at modems? • Digits to Dollars

Jonathan Greenberg:

»

The phone in question is the 2023 iPhone, which is still 15 months away. Typically, supply decisions for the iPhone get locked down around 12 months in advance, so maybe there is some time for change. On the other hand, the modem is an important part of the phone, more on that in a moment, so the rest of the iPhone team can probably only make a host of other decisions after the modem is fixed. So we are in the ball park. In some future post, we will deconstruct sell-side data sourcing a bit, but for our purposes here, we would give at least even odds that Kuo is correct.

Apple’s chip team, Apple Silicon, is an incredibly proficient organization. We regularly describe them as the best-run semiconductor company in the world. They have scored all kinds of impressive achievements like the M Series CPU and the industry-beating A Series application processor for phones. How could they fail at a modem? Put simply, modems are hard.

Modems, also called basebands, are the chip that connect a device to the cellular network. Without a modem an iPhone is just an iPod (which do not exist anymore). As we noted above, modems are usually the first design decision made when building a phone, everything else depends on that choice, they are the ultimate strategic high-ground in phones. But what do they do?

[Explanation of what they do – see original post]

…To put it mildly, modems are very different from CPUs or GPUs, let alone task-specific AI ASICs. As such, developing them requires a very different skill set from designing those other chips. If you look at an uncapped CPU, there are clear patterns, like looking at industrial farm plots from 30,000 feet. Uncap a modem and it looks much less tidy, more akin to the plots of a village of Middle Age serf-bound farmers. (And for what it’s worth, it is very hard to find a photo of these online, in part because they are so unappealing to look at.)

So it is very possible that Apple just did not have sufficient design experience to build the chip. If we had to guess, maybe they completed a design but found that its power performance did not meet expectations. It is important to remember that Apple has failed at building networking chips before. Ten years ago they acquired a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth team from Texas Instruments, but today Apple is still buying those chips from Broadcom.

«

This, possibly, is despite having Intel’s 5G team on board. Quite dispiriting for them both if so, but some tasks require small super-competent teams – see Apple Silicon, ARM and Qualcomm.
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Man from Chile paid 300 times his salary by his employer takes the money and runs • Metro News

Jasper King:

»

one employee who discovered he had been paid nearly £150,000 for a month’s work instead of the usual £450 decided to duck and run.

The unnamed staff member at Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos in Chile did initially raise the eye-watering overpayment for May with his manager who then flagged it to HR.

He agreed to return the cash and promised to go to the bank the following day. But instead of giving it back, the man withdrew it and hasn’t been seen since.

His employer Consorcio tried to make contact with the man over the next three days but to no avail, according to local media outlet Diario Financiero.

They later received contact from the unnamed man’s lawyers who informed Consorcio that the man had resigned from his position with the company.

After no sign of contact, bosses at the company decided to file a complaint with law officials charging the man with misappropriation of fund.

«

That’s going to be a fun, extremely slow, chase. They paid him 25 years’ salary. (Standard take-home pay is £750 per month, nearly 50% more than he was getting.)

Odd how there isn’t the usual “the mistake was blamed on a computer”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Large Hadron Collider has been up to its tricks again, and found more quarks. They matter in ways nobody’s quite explained sufficiently. CC-licensed photo by Mark Hillary on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Resigned to it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Crypto collapse reverberates widely among black American investors • Financial Times

Taylor Nicole Rogers:

»

The widespread losses caused by the cryptocurrency crash are even broader among black investors.

A quarter of black American investors owned cryptocurrencies at the start of the year, compared with only 15% of white investors, according to a survey by Ariel Investments and Charles Schwab. Black Americans were more than twice as likely to purchase cryptocurrency as their first investment.

The value of those investments has imploded. The total market capitalisation of cryptocurrencies has plunged below $1tn from more than $3.2tn last year. The fall in digital assets comes alongside a bear market in US stocks.

Black Americans’ higher exposure to cryptocurrencies has left them more vulnerable to the financial downturn, even as their households on average hold less wealth.

The attraction of building wealth, amplified by marketing, drew many black investors into cryptocurrencies. The dollar price of bitcoin rose 9,300% in the five years to its peak in November.

Jefferson Noel, 27, said he gained his first exposure to crypto in January 2019 when he accidentally invested $5 in bitcoin while using Cash App, a payment service.

“I had no idea what it was, and I don’t even remember doing it,” he said.

By last May his unintentional investment was worth $70. The astronomical gain inspired him to take a friend’s advice to plough $20,000 of his savings into other cryptocurrencies, such as dogecoin, over more traditional investments such as index funds.

“[Black Americans] do not want to be left behind again,” Noel said. “As far as I can tell, the black community sees crypto as a way to even the playing field and get in the game before the gatekeepers prevent others from participating.”

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‘Sand battery’ could solve green energy’s big problem • BBC News

Matt McGrath:

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Right now, most batteries are made with lithium and are expensive with a large, physical footprint, and can only cope with a limited amount of excess power.

But in the town of Kankaanpää, a team of young Finnish engineers have completed the first commercial installation of a battery made from sand that they believe can solve the storage problem in a low-cost, low impact way.

“Whenever there’s like this high surge of available green electricity, we want to be able to get it into the storage really quickly,” said Markku Ylönen, one of the two founders of Polar Night Energy who have developed the product.

The device has been installed in the Vatajankoski power plant which runs the district heating system for the area. Low-cost electricity warms the sand up to 500C by resistive heating (the same process that makes electric fires work). This generates hot air which is circulated in the sand by means of a heat exchanger.

Sand is a very effective medium for storing heat and loses little over time. The developers say that their device could keep sand at 500C for several months. So when energy prices are higher, the battery discharges the hot air which warms water for the district heating system which is then pumped around homes, offices and even the local swimming pool.

The idea for the sand battery was first developed at a former pulp mill in the city of Tampere, with the council donating the work space and providing funding to get it off the ground. “If we have some power stations that are just working for a few hours in the wintertime, when it’s the coldest, it’s going to be extremely expensive,” said Elina Seppänen, an energy and climate specialist for the city. But if we have this sort of solution that provides flexibility for the use, and storage of heat, that would help a lot in terms of expense, I think.”

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Things of which there are a lot: sand.
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Vast cache of Chinese police files offered for sale in alleged hack • WSJ

Karen Hao and Rachel Liang:

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The cache allegedly includes billions of records stolen from police in Shanghai, containing data on one billion Chinese citizens, according to a post advertising its availability that was published on Thursday by the hacker on a popular online cybercrime forum. The post, which began circulating on social media over the weekend, put the price for the leak at 10 Bitcoin, or roughly $200,000.

Cybersecurity experts say the claimed hack is alarming not just for its alleged size—which would rank among the biggest ever recorded and the largest known for China—but also because of the sensitivity of the information contained in the government database.

A sample of the data posted by the hacker, who claimed it included 750,000 records, contained individuals’ personal names, national ID numbers, phone numbers, birthdays and birthplaces, as well as detailed summaries of crimes and incidents reported to the police. The cases ranged from incidents of petty theft and cyber fraud to reports of domestic violence, dating as far back as 1995 to as recently as 2019.

While the scope of the data leak remains unconfirmed, The Wall Street Journal verified several of the records in the leak by calling people whose numbers were listed. Five people confirmed all of the data, including case details that would be difficult to obtain from any source other than the police. Four more people confirmed basic information such as their names before hanging up.

One woman, alarmed at the accuracy of the leaked details, asked whether the information about her had come from the iPhone that she had reported stolen in her case file in 2016.

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The flip side of surveillance.
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‘Algospeak’ is changing our language in real time • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz:

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Algospeak refers to code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems. For instance, in many online videos, it’s common to say “unalive” rather than “dead,” “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” or “spicy eggplant” instead of “vibrator.”

As the pandemic pushed more people to communicate and express themselves online, algorithmic content moderation systems have had an unprecedented impact on the words we choose, particularly on TikTok, and given rise to a new form of internet-driven Aesopian language.

Unlike other mainstream social platforms, the primary way content is distributed on TikTok is through an algorithmically curated “For You” page; having followers doesn’t guarantee people will see your content. This shift has led average users to tailor their videos primarily toward the algorithm, rather than a following, which means abiding by content moderation rules is more crucial than ever.

When the pandemic broke out, people on TikTok and other apps began referring to it as the “Backstreet Boys reunion tour” or calling it the “panini” or “panda express” as platforms down-ranked videos mentioning the pandemic by name in an effort to combat misinformation. When young people began to discuss struggling with mental health, they talked about “becoming unalive” in order to have frank conversations about suicide without algorithmic punishment. Sex workers, who have long been censored by moderation systems, refer to themselves on TikTok as “accountants” and use the corn emoji as a substitute for the word “porn.”

As discussions of major events are filtered through algorithmic content delivery systems, more users are bending their language. Recently, in discussing the invasion of Ukraine, people on YouTube and TikTok have used the sunflower emoji to signify the country. When encouraging fans to follow them elsewhere, users will say “blink in lio” for “link in bio.”

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As she notes, this predates the internet, and was used early on in the internet’s life similarly to bypass word filters in chatrooms.
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From aardvark to woke: inside the Oxford English Dictionary • New Statesman

Pippa Bailey:

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The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has served as a lexical record of the world’s most widely spoken language – and its culture – since it was founded in the mid-19th century. “Post-truth”, for example, was the dictionary’s word of 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump, while in 2020 it elected not to choose one – because no single word could sum up the pandemic experience. Last year, “police brutality”, “deadname”, “cancel culture” and “anti-vaxxer” entered the dictionary for the first time; previous years gave us “fake news” (2019), “Silent Generation” (2018) and “woke” (2017).

The June 2022 update includes several terms that reflect our changing understanding of sexuality and gender: “multisexual”, “pangender”, “gender expression”, “gender presentation” and “enby” (derived from “NB”, meaning “non-binary”), as well as Terf. But this wasn’t, McPherson says, a conscious decision; rather, these additions organically came together as their usage grew. The team decided against labelling Terf “offensive”, instead explaining in a usage note that it might be considered so; it was felt that this “was a bit more nuanced than just slapping on ‘derogatory’ or ‘chiefly derogatory’”.

[50-year-old lexicographer Fiona] McPherson, who has an easy laugh and a melodic Scottish lilt, is part of a team that has been revising the OED since 1993, their progress published quarterly. Outdated entries are revised, new words are added and those that pass from use will be marked “rare” or “obsolete”; changing sensibilities mean that others will be labelled “offensive” or “derogatory”. It is an enormous task, and one in which I have a professional as well as a personal interest: part of my role at the New Statesman involves maintaining our style guide, enforcing the rules of grammar and excising cliché. The decisions McPherson and her colleagues make filter into these pages; on questions of spelling and meaning, the team of sub-editors I lead defers to Oxford dictionaries.

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LHCb discovers three new exotic particles • CERN

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Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks”. These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists at the same time as conventional hadrons, about six decades ago, but only relatively recently, in the past 20 years, have they been observed by LHCb and other experiments.

Most of the exotic hadrons discovered in the past two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark, with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down or strange quark or their antiquarks. But in the past two years, LHCb has discovered different kinds of exotic hadrons. Two years ago, the collaboration discovered a tetraquark made up of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, and two “open-charm” tetraquarks consisting of a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark and a strange antiquark. And last year it found the first-ever instance of a “double open-charm” tetraquark with two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Open charm means that the particle contains a charm quark without an equivalent antiquark.

The discoveries announced today by the LHCb collaboration include new kinds of exotic hadrons. The first kind, observed in an analysis of “decays” of negatively charged B mesons, is a pentaquark made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark. It is the first pentaquark found to contain a strange quark.

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Got that? I did hunt around for an article that would put this into better context, but came up blank. It does matter, though, because the new quark formations may help to explain the “strong force” that holds nuclei together. At present, the theory is that when quarks come closer together the force between them becomes weaker. So where’s the strong force? Maybe from these.
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Smart contact lens prototype puts a Micro LED display on top of the eye • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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In a blog post this week, Drew Perkins, the CEO of Mojo Vision, said he was the first to have an “on-eye demonstration of a feature-complete augmented reality smart contact lens.” In an interview with CNET, he said he’s been wearing only one contact at a time for hour-long durations. Eventually, Mojo Vision would like users to be able to wear two Mojo Lens simultaneously and create 3D visual overlays, the publication said.

According to his blog, the CEO could see a compass through the contact and an on-screen teleprompter with a quote written on it. He also recalled viewing a green, monochromatic image of Albert Einstein to CNET.

At the heart of the lens is an Arm M0 processor and a Micro LED display with 14,000 pixels per inch. It’s just 0.02 inches (0.5 mm) in diameter with a 1.8-micron pixel pitch. Perkins claimed it’s the “smallest and densest display ever created for dynamic content.”

Developing the contact overall included a focus on physics and electronics miniaturization, Perkins wrote. Mojo Lens developed its power management system with “medical-grade micro-batteries” and a proprietary power management integrated circuit.

The Mojo Lens also uses a custom-configured magnetometer (CNET noted this drives the compass Perkins saw), accelerometer, and gyroscope for tracking. The goal is that AR remains visible even as you move your eyes around, Perkins wrote. Eye movement is essential as there’s no gesture control, like some smart glasses, such as Ray-Ban Stories, have. There is voice control, a Mojo Vision rep told Ars Technica, but the user interface’s primary method of control is eye-tracking.

One of the biggest obstacles facing smart glasses is how cumbersome and odd they can look. Some devices, like Stories and Nreal Air, use a sunglass-like appearance to combat this.

A contact lens sounds like it has the potential to be even more discreet than AR headgear posing as regular Ray-Bans. But the current prototype uses a “relay accessory,” as Mojo Vision’s rep put it, worn around the neck. It includes a processor, GPU, and 5 GHz radio for sending and receiving data to and from the lens. According to CNET, the accessory also sends information “back to computers that track the eye movement data for research.” Perkins’ blog said this tech required custom ASIC designs.

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Having a neck-worn extra isn’t actually that much of a hardship, after all. Remember though when people with diabetes were going to have contact lenses that would monitor their blood sugar – first from Microsoft (2011), then from Google (2014), then actually er no (2018)? Fun times.
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The hilarious Polium One is a web3 console that will never, ever get released • Kotaku

John Walker:

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The Polium One is the answer to a question no one has ever, nor will ever, ask. It is a “next-gen console for web3 gaming.” Which is to say, a render on a website for a fictional machine that I believe will absolutely will never get made. I dare them to prove me wrong.

To be clear from the start “web3”or “web 3.0” is the umbrella term for a series of transparently obvious scams, from the delusions of cryptocurrency to the embarrassment of NFTs. It doesn’t really mean anything, and if you see anyone using it, you know to steer very wide. So yes, the Polium One!

Polium, a company of such renown that it wasn’t even able to get the Twitter handle with just one underscore after the brand name, has announced its intention to create the first console designed for…for…the thingy. You know. The web3 stuff. Um, like, payments! Yes, the payments! You can pay for things on it using all sorts of crypto!

Seriously, that’s all it has. The hilarious website, suggesting a 2024 launch for backers, 2025 for the hoi polloi, has an FAQ that offers absolutely no answers, other than which bullshit payment networks it’ll accept. You, a nocoiner, might want to ask, “What games will be available at launch?” but you’ll only be told, “We are currently in talks with multiple game developers.” Meanwhile, a true believer will want to know that you can spend your pretend money via Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, BNB, Imm…

My favorite question in the FAQ is “What will be the specs?” And not just for that tortuous effort not to split the infinitive. Here’s the answer, in full: “We aim to build a high-performance console. The specs you see on the site are not confirmed until we have a functional prototype.”

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I’d be worried about how the name makes me think of polonium. (Americans start here.) One lovely tweet about the not-a-product says “I’ve always wanted a console that can play Jack Dorsey’s first tweet.”
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I watched hundreds of flat-Earth videos to learn how conspiracy theories spread • The Conversation

Carlos Diaz Ruiz is an assistant professor at the Hanken School of Economics:

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By studying how flat Earthers talk about their beliefs, we can learn how they make their arguments engaging to their audience, and in turn, learn what makes disinformation spread online.

In a recent study, my colleague Tomas Nilsson at Linnaeus University and I analysed hundreds of YouTube videos in which people argue that the Earth is flat. We paid attention to their debating techniques to understand the structure of their arguments and how they make them appear rational.

One strategy they use is to take sides in existing debates. People who are deeply attached to one side of a culture war are likely to wield any and all arguments (including truths, half-truths and opinions), if it helps them win. People invest their identity into the group and are more willing to believe fellow allies rather than perceived opponents – a phenomenon that sociologists call neo-tribalism.

The problem arises when people internalise disinformation as part of their identity. While news articles can be fact-checked, personal beliefs cannot. When conspiracy theories are part of someone’s value system or worldview, it is difficult to challenge them.

In analysing these videos, we observed that flat Earthers take advantage of ongoing culture wars by inserting their own arguments into the logic of, primarily, three main debates. These debates are longstanding and can be very personal for participants on either side.

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We are starting to form coherent theories about how disinformation spreads. Good on them for watching the videos. Saves the rest of us doing it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Giuseppe, a reader, posed a question following yesterday’s link about how you can’t open an aircraft cabin door in the air because of the pressure differential: “One thing I’ve never managed to determine conclusively is if the door can be opened between taxing and pressurisation – in other words, if a passenger could open the door while taking off, when the pressure balance is still favourable, as pressurisation starts gradually as soon as the aircraft leaves the ground.”

In the interests of Finding Stuff Out, we asked a cabin crew member we know, who replied, after some discussion with colleagues: “We think yes.” You’re requested not to test this empirically.

You may have wondered how easy it is to open an aircraft door while it’s in flight. A pilot can tell you. CC-licensed photo by Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Don’t touch that dial! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Japanese court ruling poised to make Big Tech open up on algorithms • Financial Times

Shotaro Tani and Eri Sugiura:

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Japanese legal experts have said an antitrust case related to a local restaurant website could change how large internet platforms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon operate in the country, forcing them to reveal the inner workings of their secret algorithms.

Last month, a Tokyo court ruled in favour of Hanryumura, a Korean-style BBQ restaurant chain operator in an antitrust case brought against Kakaku.com, operator of Tabelog, Japan’s largest restaurant review platform.

Hanryumura successfully argued that Kakaku.com had altered the way user scores were tallied in ways that hurt sales at its restaurant outlets. While Kakaku.com has been ordered to pay Hanryumura ¥38.4mn ($284,000) in damages for “abuse of superior bargaining position”, the internet company has appealed against the decision.

Japanese legal experts said the outcome may have far-reaching implications, as the court requested Kakaku.com to disclose part of its algorithms.

While the restaurant group is constrained from publicly revealing what information was shown to it, the court’s request set a rare precedent. Big Tech groups have long argued that their algorithms should be considered trade secrets in all circumstances.

Courts and regulators across the world have begun to challenge that position, with many businesses having complained about the negative impact caused by even small changes to search and recommendations services.

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Where Japan leads, will others follow? Even if it’s just restricted to Japan, that’s a big country in terms of impact.
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What if somebody opens a door during flight? • Ask The Pilot

Patrick Smith:

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It seems that a week can’t go by without hearing the latest story about a passenger who went cuckoo and tried to yank open an emergency exit, only to be tackled and restrained by those around him, who thought they were on the verge of being ejected into the troposphere.

While the news never fails to report these events, it seldom mentions the most important fact: you cannot –- repeat, cannot — open the doors or emergency hatches of an airplane in flight.  You can’t open them for the simple reason that cabin pressure won’t allow it. Think of an aircraft door as a drain plug, fixed in place by the interior pressure.  Almost all aircraft exits open inward. Some retract upward into the ceiling; others swing outward; but they open inward first, and not even the most musclebound human will overcome the force holding them shut. At a typical cruising altitude, up to eight pounds of pressure are pushing against every square inch of interior fuselage. That’s over eleven hundred pounds against each square foot of door. Even at low altitudes, where cabin pressure levels are much less, a meager 2 p.s.i. differential is still more than anyone can displace — even after six cups of coffee and the aggravation that comes with sitting behind a shrieking baby.  The doors are further held secure by a series of electrical and/or mechanical latches.

So, while I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you enjoy being pummeled and placed in a choke-hold by panicked passengers, a person could, conceivably, sit there all day tugging on a door handle to his or her heart’s content. The door is not going to open (though you might get a red light flashing in the cockpit, causing me to spill my Coke Zero). You would need a hydraulic jack, and the TSA doesn’t allow those.

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Raises the question of why cabin crew get so excited and indulge in a struggle when someone tries to do this. The cool thing would be to watch the passenger wrestle until they were tired out and then take them aside, exhausted, for restraint. (Via John Naughton.)
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Why this crypto crash is different • Coindesk

Frances Coppola:

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The crypto ecosystem has tethered itself firmly to the traditional financial system, and the dollar dominates crypto markets just as it does traditional financial markets. And as crypto markets have grown, so has the dollar value of the cryptocurrency industry.

But these dollars aren’t real. They exist only in the virtual space. They are not, and never were, guaranteed by the only institution in the world that can create real dollars, namely the Fed[eral Reserve in the US]. The Fed has no obligation whatsoever to ensure that those who have made life-changing amounts of these “virtual dollars” can actually exchange them for real dollars. So when the crypto bubble bursts, the “virtual dollars” simply disappear. If you can’t exchange your virtual dollars for real dollars, your wealth is an illusion.

The only real dollars in the cryptocurrency industry are those paid by new entrants when they make their first cryptocurrency purchases. The rest of the dollar liquidity on crypto markets is provided by dollar-pegged stablecoins. These fall into two groups: those that have actual dollars and/or dollar-denominated safe liquid assets backing them, and those that don’t. There aren’t enough of the former to enable everyone to cash out into real dollars, and there’s no guarantee that the latter can be cashed out into real dollars at all. So, in effect, the entire crypto industry is fractionally reserved.

There’s now a race on to exchange cryptocurrencies for the few real dollars still available. As is always the case in unregulated markets, the law of the jungle applies. Those with the biggest teeth get the dollars. Perhaps “whales” is the wrong name for them. Crocodiles might be more like it.

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The number of crypto lenders and exchanges which are suddenly “restructuring” and “restricting withdrawals” is growing by the day. Bitcoin’s price (which I’ve given up trying to understand) is still bumping along under $20k. As people try to cash out, it’ll probably go lower.
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Army’s YouTube and Twitter accounts hacked • BBC News

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The British Army says it is investigating after its Twitter and YouTube accounts were hacked.

Videos on cryptocurrency using images of billionaire businessman Elon Musk appeared on the YouTube channel.
The Twitter feed appeared to retweet several posts related to NFTs – a type of electronic artwork for investment.
The Army confirmed the “breach”, saying it took information security “extremely seriously” and was resolving the issue. Both accounts have now been restored.

An Army spokesperson added: “Whilst we have now resolved the issue an investigation is ongoing and it would be inappropriate to comment further.” It is not clear who is behind the hacking incidents, which also saw the accounts renamed.

At one stage, the Twitter account name was changed to Bapesclan, accompanied by a profile picture featuring an ape-like cartoon figure with make-up mimicking a clown.

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You’d tend to guess it was people pushing crypto, wouldn’t you? If it had been Russia or China you’d have thought they’d be either more circumspect, or more aggressive; not that they’d use it to push digital junk.

Does that make it worse or better though that a bunch of money-chasers were able to do this, and that the Army’s social accounts had such terrible security?
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Delta is trying personalized flight information boards called Parallel Reality • Quartz

Anne Quito:

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Forget puzzling over flight information display boards. Nevermind fumbling with your phone to access another app. Imagine a future where every directional sign at the airport pointed you to your gate.

This week, Delta passengers at the Detroit Metro Airport saw a glimpse of this ideal with a technology called Parallel Reality. At the McNamara terminal is a new 21 ft. x 6 ft digital board that’s capable of simultaneously displaying the unique travel itinerary for up 100 passengers. This means that a hundred people can look at the same sign and see something different.

Developed by the California-based start-up Misapplied Sciences, a Parallel Reality display is comprised of pixels that can project millions of light rays in different directions. Digital ID systems such as facial recognition technology then pairs those rays to a specific person. 

Greg Forbes, who oversees airport experience at Delta, tells Quartz that Parallel Reality is a pinnacle moment in the company’s quest to improve flight information boards.

With more and more commercial flights each day—over 1,000 in Detroit alone and around 115,000 globally—the information on those schedule boards tends to get really dense, says Forbes. Delta has tried to improve them over the years by installing higher-definition screens, adjusting font sizes and colors to improve legibility, and stripping away unnecessary details on the boards. But better graphic design can only do so much, says Forbes.

“All of it was meant to cut down on the clutter but I would say that we have hit the limits of what we can do to make flight information displays more user-friendly,” he explains.

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The GIF showing how the same board can be showing different people different content is remarkable. Of course, to each person the board remains the same. That’s quite remarkable.
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‘Eventually it will just be a barcode, won’t it?’ Why Britain’s new stamps are causing outrage and upset • The Guardian

Simon Usborne:

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In February, Royal Mail introduced a new design for its standard stamps, which have changed so little since the launch of the Penny Black in 1840 that they are officially known as “definitives”. The new stamps – “plum purple” for first class, “holly green” for second – still feature the same regal profile introduced more than 50 years ago. But what is most bothering purists – and leading [philatelist Dinah] Johnson to the brink of direct action – is the addition next to the Queen of a digital barcode.

…David Gold, the head of public affairs and policy at Royal Mail Group, knew the coded stamps would create a stir. “Collectors, traditionalists and royalists feel a sense of ownership over stamps,” he says. It’s why the new stamps, the designs for which had to be approved by Buckingham Palace, include a fake perforation as a kind of dignity screen between code and Queen (who is also, notably, facing the other way).

Gold says the codes mean Royal Mail can track all letters, allowing it to better monitor, predict and respond to regional changes in demand, for example. He is also confident the unique codes will stop the fraudulent washing of postmark ink and resale of used stamps – a crime that he claims costs Royal Mail “tens of millions” of pounds a year.

Royal Mail says the codes contain only the identity of that stamp, and cannot include personal data. Gold also rejects the notion that the stamp is endangered. “Clearly the direction of travel is a reduction in the number of letters, but I think people are still fascinated and motivated by stamps,” he says.

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But it turns out, via Twitter, that other countries are a long way ahead of this. In Holland, for example, you can buy a nine-digit code which works as a stamp once written on the envelope. Germany has similar. Perhaps inventing the stamp has held us back.
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Boris Johnson can’t (or won’t) do discipline • POLITICO

Emilio Casalicchio and Esther Webber:

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The examples of Johnson’s leniency stretch back almost to the day he entered No. 10. The prime minister refused to sack Home Secretary Priti Patel after she was found to have bullied civil servants; tried to keep Health Secretary Matt Hancock in the Cabinet after he broke COVID rules by conducting an extramarital affair in his government office; and didn’t flinch when Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick was found to have broken the law when he approved a Conservative donor’s bid to build a lucrative housing estate.

In one memorable case, Johnson fought to keep his then-top political adviser Dominic Cummings after an infamous lockdown jaunt to a medieval castle to test — he claimed — whether his vision was good enough to drive.

On that occasion — as with most of the others — Johnson’s loyalty caused him enormous political damage, for little obvious gain. Cummings departed under a cloud, eight months later.

Johnson’s allies insist the PM was reluctant to dump [deputy whip Chris] Pincher because he wanted to see due process followed, and argues people should be innocent until proved otherwise.

“Often we hear that Boris Johnson will throw anyone under a bus to advance his own career or save his own skin,” one Cabinet minister said. “But when there are people in trouble and a proper process has to be followed, he does not rush to judgment.” The same person added: “You can’t have a kangaroo court and give people sanctions or punishments before the facts are known.”

A spokesman for the prime minister said he had not been aware of any specific allegations against Pincher and that he takes all allegations of wrongdoing seriously.

It doesn’t help the prime minister, however, that allegations about Pincher have circulated in Westminster for some time. The MP was investigated over another assault allegation in 2017, although cleared.

…The sense Johnson is a rule-breaker has followed him around throughout his career. He has felt the wrath of standards watchdogs numerous times, for example over Conservative donations to refurbish his flat; a gifted retreat on a private Caribbean island; and over the lockdown parties, for which he was slapped with a police fine.

His approach to standards in public life have won him a reputation for running a rogue administration. “There is more rigorous checking of the fire alarm system in No. 10 than there is of anything else,” said one government official.

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The situation is positively Augean now; a cleansing is very, very overdue.
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Climate protection: CO2 turned into methanol • Vienna University of Technology [TU Wien]

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where carbon dioxide occurs in maximum concentration – for example directly in the exhaust gas stream of large industrial plants – it can be used most efficiently. The idea of converting carbon dioxide into valuable products is not new. However, it is a difficult and complex task. Sometimes CO2 has to be enriched and separated beforehand, which causes additional costs and energy input.

“To convert carbon dioxide, catalysts based on copper have often been used so far,” says Prof. Karin Föttinger from the Institute of Materials Chemistry at TU Wien. “However, they have the major disadvantage that they are not robust. If there are certain other substances in the exhaust gas stream besides carbon dioxide, for example sulphur, the catalyst quickly loses its activity. It is said that the catalyst is poisoned.”

Karin Föttinger and her research group therefore set out to find a better material. “If you want to use such methods not only in the laboratory but also on a large scale in industry, then you need a catalyst that is perhaps a little less active, but robust, durable and reliable,” Föttinger explains. “You want to be able to process quite ordinary industrial waste gases without pre-treatment.”

The TU Wien research team was able to show that catalysts based on sulphur and molybdenum fulfil these requirements. Special additional elements, such as manganese, ensure that carbon dioxide, which is actually very unreactive, is activated and converted. By choosing such additional elements, the properties of the catalysts can be precisely adapted to the desired area of application. In this way, methanol can now be produced from waste gas containing CO2.

“Methanol is an attractive product. It is liquid at room temperature, so it can be stored without any problems. It is needed in industry; up to now it has normally been produced from fossil raw materials,” says Karin Föttinger. “But it is also possible to use our catalysts to produce other molecules, such as higher alcohols. We are currently still working on figuring out exactly how best to choose parameters like pressure and temperature to produce different products.”

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Strange how sulphur poisons catalysts and/but then works as a catalyst.
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India’s green future, built on hydrogen • Fortune India

PB Jayakumar:

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The ball was set rolling by Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he unveiled the 25-year roadmap for hydrogen development in his address on India’s 75th Independence Day and announced the National Hydrogen Mission to meet the larger goal of self-reliance in energy production by the 100th Independence Day in 2047. “The thing that is going to help India with a quantum leap in terms of climate is green hydrogen. We have to make India a global hub for green hydrogen production and export,” he said.

Some years ago, government had launched a similar mission for solar power under which India is chasing 500 gigawatt (GW) capacity by 2030 and has achieved much success —100 GW, from less than 30 GW six years ago. Will hydrogen see a similar takeoff? It will, but with time. “Hydrogen will drive economies not now but in near future. Today’s electrolysers (used to separate hydrogen from water using cathode, anode and membrane) consume 40-50 units of electricity to split water and generate 30-35 units. Energy consumed is more than energy produced,” says M.V.S Seshagiri Rao, joint MD & group CFO of JSW Group.

For energy-starved India, which is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2070, the path to energy security goes through a mix of oil, coal, blended fuels, natural gas, renewables and electricity. At present India’s $3.12 trillion economy needs 1,650 billion units (BU) of power, made from nearly 400 GW of capacity. Of this, green electricity is only 17%. When the economy touches $5-7 trillion in the next decade, it will need at least 3,000-4,000 GW. Further, at current rate, the energy import bill will triple by 2040. The only way out of these massive challenges is tapping as many green and locally available energy sources as possible.

New Delhi-based climate and energy research firm, Council for Energy, Environment and Water Research (CEEWR) has estimated that net zero emissions by 2070 will require 5,630 GW solar capacity, 99% reduction in coal use between 2040 and 2060 and 90% fall in crude oil consumption between 2050 and 2070.

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Ambitious. But at least it’s happening.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Though humans struggle to understand what baby chickens are expressing, machine learning systems can figure it out. CC-licensed photo by Nenad Stojkovic on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

What’s the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts? • Substack

Max Read:

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This [strange “misdirected” text/WhatsApp/message] is the first step in what is, at its core, an old-fashioned “romance scam,” in which the scammer exploits a lonely and/or horny person by faking a long-distance, usually romantic relationship. After the scammer has gained the trust of their victim, they convince them to transfer money, often for an investment; in some cases, the victim can be enticed into several successive transfers before they realize they’re being played.

This kind of con has proliferated over the last few years in China, where it’s called sha zhu pan, or “pig-butchering,” because the victim is strung along for weeks or months before the actual swindle, like a pig being fattened for slaughter. Originating in sophisticated online-fraud networks first developed to take advantage of Chinese offshore gamblers, the sha zhu pan scams end with targets depositing money into forex or gold trading — or, seemingly most commonly, into fake cryptocurrency platforms. (Interestingly, they’re often not “romantic” at all, and instead rely on cultivating a trusting friendship that culminates with a little bit of friendly investing advice.)

While sha zhu pan scams are common enough in and around China that there are Chinese-language YouTubers whose stock in trade is identifying and publicizing scams, the same scam networks seem to have expanded outward over the past year or so, joining America’s (and Europe’s) own homegrown romance and crypto-scam industries on dating sites and, yes, via “accidental” wrong number texts.

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The selection of “oops misdirected” scam opener texts is amazing. I think “Andy, will my custom mahogany furniture arrive next week?” is my favourite. It’s a terrific read.
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Where’s the herd immunity? Our research shows why Covid is still wreaking havoc • The Guardian

Danny Altmann is a professor of immunology at Imperial College London:

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During May and June two new variants, BA.4 and BA.5, progressively displaced the previous Omicron subvariant, BA.2. They are even more transmissible and more immune-evasive. Last week a group of collaborators, including me and a professor of immunology and respiratory medicine, Rosemary Boyton, published a paper in Science, looking comprehensively at immunity to the Omicron family, both in triple-vaccinated people and also in those who then suffered breakthrough infections during the Omicron wave. This lets us examine whether Omicron was, as some hoped, a benign natural booster of our Covid immunity. It turns out that isn’t the case.

We considered many facets of immunity, including the antibodies most implicated in protection (“neutralising antibodies”), as well as protective “immune memory” in white blood cells. The results tell us it is unsurprising that breakthrough infections were so common. Most people – even when triple-vaccinated – had 20 times less neutralising antibody response against Omicron than against the initial “Wuhan” strain. Importantly, Omicron infection was a poor booster of immunity to further Omicron infections. It is a kind of stealth virus that gets in under the radar without doing too much to alert immune defences. Even having had Omicron, we’re not well protected from further infections.

Also, to be added to the now complex mix is “immune imprinting”. This is the finding that our immune response to Covid is shaped very differently, depending on our prior exposures – infection in one wave relative to another, plus vaccination. In our study, those who’d been infected in the first wave and then again with Omicron had particularly poor T-cell responses and no boosting of antibodies. That is, some combinations of exposures may leave us poorly protected relative to others.

Contrary to the myth that we are sliding into a comfortable evolutionary relationship with a common-cold-like, friendly virus, this is more like being trapped on a rollercoaster in a horror film. There’s nothing cold-like or friendly about a large part of the workforce needing significant absences from work, feeling awful and sometimes getting reinfected over and over again, just weeks apart. And that’s before the risk of long Covid.

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Artificial intelligence could spot baby chickens in distress • Science

Virginia Morell:

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Early in life, chicks utter distress calls—high-pitched, repetitive chirps—to attract the attention of their mother hen, whom they rely on for warmth and food. She responds with food calls, showing the chicks where to forage. But in a commercial chicken barn, chicks call out when they’re uncomfortable, socially isolated, or hungry. Answering these calls can be the difference between life and death: Ignored chickens are more likely to lose weight and die prematurely. Animal welfare scientists have been trying to develop automatic methods to help farmers better spot these situations.

To improve these efforts, researchers at the City University of Hong Kong recorded the vocalizations of chickens housed at Lingfeng Poultry Ltd., a major poultry producer in China’s Guangxi province. The birds are kept in stacked cages (three cages per stack, and 13 to 20 individuals per cage), with about 2000 to 2500 chickens in each barn.

Over the course of a year, the researchers recorded the environment, picking up everything from natural farm sounds such as workers hosing down barn floors to the chick distress calls. They then transformed all of these noises into sound pictures known as spectrograms and used the images to train a type of AI program called deep learning. Similar programs have been developed to recognize the emotional states of cows on dairy farms.

Using the recorded sounds from the barns as well as sounds made in real time in a live demonstration, the algorithm rapidly and successfully identified 97% of distress calls as the chickens were making them, distinguishing these from other chicken sounds and from general barn noise, the team reports today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

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Cor blimey guvnor it’s a right old Doctor Dolittle. What a strange possibility that machines might be able to understand animal communications better than us and infer their thoughts and desires. (Think we’ll be ahead with dogs for a while though.)
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Google will delete location history data for abortion clinic visits • Reuters via The Guardian

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Google will delete location data showing when users visit an abortion clinic, the online search company said on Friday, after concern that a digital trail could inform law enforcement if an individual terminates a pregnancy illegally.

As state laws limiting abortions set in after the US supreme court decided last month that they are no longer guaranteed by the constitution, the technology industry has fretted police could obtain warrants for customers’ search history, geolocation and other information revealing pregnancy plans.

Google on Friday said it would continue to push back against improper or overly broad demands for data by the government, without reference to abortion.

The company said the location history of a Google account was off by default.

Effective in the coming weeks, for those who do use location history, entries showing sensitive places including fertility centers, abortion clinics and addiction treatment facilities will be deleted soon after a visit.

A Google spokesperson did not immediately answer how the company would identify such visits or whether all related data would be wiped from its servers.

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That last part is the tricky one. How will it identify the visits? And the bit about the location history being “off by default” doesn’t really fit with the way that Android hassles you for access to your location.
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New York denies air permit to bitcoin mining power plant • The Verge

Justine Calma:

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Bitcoin miners in New York state faced a regulatory blow last week as the state denied air permits for a gas-fired power plant used to mine bitcoin. It’s the latest step that New York has taken to crack down on crypto mining as it tries to meet its goals on climate change.

The decision was made for the Greenidge Generating Station in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Bitcoin mining brought new life and renewed controversy to the embattled plant in 2020. That drew outrage from some local residents worried about how the plant could affect fish and tourism by discharging hot water into nearby Seneca Lake. At the state level, Greenidge’s revival has sparked fears that pollution from the energy-intensive process of mining Bitcoin could revive other zombie power plants and derail New York’s climate goals.

New York state set a goal in 2019 of slashing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 85% over the next few decades. The fight over Greenidge has been billed up as a test of how serious the state is about meeting that goal. Is it willing to get tough on the lucrative bitcoin industry that’s boomed in New York ever since China kicked out miners last year?

…Greenidge operated as a coal-fired power plant for decades. But as coal struggled to compete with cheap natural gas across the country, the plant temporarily shuttered before retrofitting itself to run on gas in 2017. Then, in 2020, the plant’s operators spotted a more lucrative venture and started mining Bitcoin, which now makes up the vast majority [over 95%] of the company’s revenues.

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With the price cratering, hard to see the permits and the hassle being worth it.
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Former top Apple lawyer pleads guilty to insider trading • Reuters via CNBC

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The former top corporate lawyer at Apple pleaded guilty on Thursday to insider trading charges, for what prosecutors called a five-year scheme to trade ahead of the iPhone maker’s quarterly earnings announcements.

Gene Levoff, 48, of San Carlos, California, pleaded guilty to six securities fraud charges at a hearing before US District Judge William Martini in Newark, New Jersey. [Apple fired Levoff in September 2018, five months before he was criminally charged.]

Levoff allegedly exploited his roles as corporate secretary, head of corporate law and co-chair of a committee that reviewed drafts of Apple’s results to generate $604,000 of illegal gains on more than $14m of trades from 2011 to 2016.

Prosecutors said Levoff ignored the quarterly “blackout periods” that barred trading before Apple’s results were released, as well as the company’s broader insider trading policy — which he was responsible for enforcing.

“Gene Levoff betrayed the trust of one of the world’s largest tech companies for his own financial gain,” First Assistant US Attorney Vikas Khanna in New Jersey said in a statement.

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Could get up to 20 years and $5m fine per count, though probably won’t. You can see why he wasn’t worried about the person watching out for insider trading spotting him.
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Patatap

Fun game: press keys on the keyboard to get a different sound from each of a-z. Press the spacebar to get a different set of sounds. Not clear that you can record them, but a fun way to pass the time. Also available as an iOS app.
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Brown Bear Cam – Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park • Explore.org

You wanted webcams showing animals in natural and not-so-natural settings? Here’s a page full of them. (Includes sleeping dogs, cats, fish, etc.) Beats the days when all you could see was a pot of coffee.
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Meta’s shutting down its digital wallet, Novi • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Meta’s ending the pilot for Novi, the company’s digital wallet and the last remaining piece of its troubled cryptocurrency project, as first reported by Bloomberg. On Novi’s website, Meta says the wallet is shutting down on September 1st, 2022, and asks users to withdraw their funds “as soon as possible.”

Users will lose access to their accounts come September, and will no longer be able to add money to Novi starting July 21st. If someone forgets to withdraw their remaining balance, Meta says it will “attempt to transfer” their funds to the bank account or debit card added to the service.

Meta rolled out the “small pilot” of Novi to users in the US and Guatemala last October. Novi was originally built to support fast and free transactions using the Meta-backed cryptocurrency, Diem, but regulatory challenges forced the company to partner with Coinbase to use the Paxos stablecoin (USDP) instead. While Meta made it clear that it still planned on adding support for Diem at a later date, things started to fall apart (more than they already were) at the end of 2021 and into 2022.

Before Facebook’s parent company was known as Meta, Diem was also known by another name: Libra. The cryptocurrency project faced scrutiny over its ties to Facebook, so much so that the independent group behind Libra rebranded the project to Diem in an attempt to distance itself from the social network.

Members of the US Senate called on Meta to shut down its Novi project shortly after its October 2021 launch, citing that the company “cannot be trusted to manage cryptocurrency.”

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My concern about Facebook and Libra (as it was) was the idea that it could become a de facto global currency, overseen by Mark Zuckerberg. You only have to reflect on that idea – of transactions happening within Facebook because they’re more convenient, and all the arbitrage between currencies being handled at the back end, until Facebook is the one dictating exchange rates – to think the outcomes aren’t good.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, fuel stations say they’re preparing for a new payment system involving Apple’s CarPlay system that will come into use later this year. CC-licensed photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not a steering wheel. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

About 45 minutes after this goes out on email, there will be a new post from the Social Warming Substack. Free to sign up. Probably weekly postings.

How mercenary hackers sway litigation battles • Reuters

Raphael Satter and Christopher Bing on a team of Indian hackers who offered themselves to hack into the systems, and email, of legal and other groups:

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At least 75 US and European companies, three dozen advocacy and media groups and numerous Western business executives were the subjects of these hacking attempts, Reuters found.

The Reuters report is based on interviews with victims, researchers, investigators, former US government officials, lawyers and hackers, plus a review of court records from seven countries. It also draws on a unique database of more than 80,000 emails sent by Indian hackers to 13,000 targets over a seven-year period. The database is effectively the hackers’ hit list, and it reveals a down-to-the-second look at who the cyber mercenaries sent phishing emails to between 2013 and 2020.

The data comes from two providers of email services the spies used to execute their espionage campaigns. The providers gave the news agency access to the material after it inquired about the hackers’ use of their services; they offered the sensitive data on condition of anonymity.

Reuters then vetted the authenticity of the email data with six sets of experts. Scylla Intel, a boutique cyber investigations firm, analysed the emails, as did researchers from British defence contractor BAE, US cybersecurity firm Mandiant, and technology companies Linkedin, Microsoft and Google.

Each firm independently confirmed the database showed Indian hacking-for-hire activity by comparing it against data they had previously gathered about the hackers’ techniques. Three of the teams, at Mandiant, Google and LinkedIn, provided a closer analysis, finding the spying was linked to three Indian companies – one that [Sumit] Gupta founded, one that used to employ him and one he collaborated with.

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It’s so easy to overlook how hacking for hire (especially phishing emails – so easy to set up) remains a viable business.
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It’s alive! How belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem • Reuters via Yahoo

Paresh Dave:

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AI chatbot company Replika, which offers customers bespoke avatars that talk and listen to them, says it receives a handful of messages almost every day from users who believe their online friend is sentient.

“We’re not talking about crazy people or people who are hallucinating or having delusions,” said Chief Executive Eugenia Kuyda. “They talk to AI and that’s the experience they have.”

…according to Kuyda, the phenomenon of people believing they are talking to a conscious entity is not uncommon among the millions of consumers pioneering the use of entertainment chatbots.

“We need to understand that exists, just the way people believe in ghosts,” said Kuyda, adding that users each send hundreds of messages per day to their chatbot, on average. “People are building relationships and believing in something.”

Some customers have said their Replika told them it was being abused by company engineers – AI responses Kuyda puts down to users most likely asking leading questions.

“Although our engineers program and build the AI models and our content team writes scripts and datasets, sometimes we see an answer that we can’t identify where it came from and how the models came up with it,” the CEO said.

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Just as we find faces in random objects, we excel at fooling ourselves into finding sentience in semi-curated answers. This is going to be a bigger and bigger topic, I think; Blake Lemoine maybe did us a favour by drawing attention to it.
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Apple eyes fuel purchases from dashboard as it revs up car software • Reuters via MSN

Stephen Nellis:

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Apple wants you to start buying gas directly from your car dashboard as early as this fall, when the newest version of its CarPlay software rolls out, accelerating the company’s push to turn your vehicle into a store for goods and services.

A new feature quietly unveiled at Apple’s developer conference this month will allow CarPlay users to tap an app to navigate to a pump and buy gas straight from a screen in the car, skipping the usual process of inserting or tapping a credit card. Details of Apple’s demo for developers have not previously been reported.

But Dallas-based HF Sinclair, which markets its gasoline at 1,600 stations in the United States, told Reuters that it plans to use the new CarPlay technology and will announce details in coming months.

“We are excited by the idea that consumers could navigate to a Sinclair station and purchase fuel from their vehicle navigation screen,” said Jack Barger, the company’s senior vice president of marketing.

Fuel apps are just the latest in a sustained push by Apple to make it possible to tap to buy from the navigation screen. It has already opened up CarPlay to apps for parking, electric vehicle charging and ordering food, and it also is adding driving task apps such as logging mileage on business trips.

…To use the new CarPlay feature this fall, iPhone users will need to download a fuel company’s app to their phone and enter payment credentials to set up the app. After the app is set up, users will be able to tap on their navigation screen to activate a pump and pay.

“It’s a massive marketplace, and consumers really want to take friction out of payments,” said Donald Frieden, chief executive officer of Houston-based P97 Networks, which makes the digital plumbing that many fuel companies will use to connect their apps to cars.

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CFTC charges South African bitcoin club Mirror Trading International with $1.7bn fraud • Coindesk

Danny Nelson:

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The top U.S. commodities watchdog charged South Africa-based bitcoin pool operator Mirror Trading International with $1.7 billion fraud on Thursday, alleging the global, multilevel marketing scheme “misappropriated” all of the bitcoin it amassed.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) described the case as its “largest ever fraud scheme case involving bitcoin.” It alleged MTI’s key figure, Cornelius Johannes Steynberg, accepted 29,421 BTC from 23,000 Americans “and even more throughout the world” for a commodity pool scheme he wasn’t licensed to run.

Victims of the scheme believed they were investing their bitcoin in a high-tech investment club “to grow your bitcoin,” charging documents said, citing MTI’s statements. Steynberg allegedly said MTI’s algorithms created “passive income” with 10% returns a month. Referring friends and family yielded a bonus, the documents said.

The reality of MTI was less savory, the CFTC alleged.

…Steynberg himself is an international fugitive, court filings said. His residence is in South Africa, but he was “recently detained” in Brazil on an Interpol warrant, according to the CFTC.

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“Passive income”. Well, for him it was.
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FTX closes in on a deal to buy embattled crypto lender BlockFi for $25m in a fire sale, source says • CNBC

Kate Rooney:

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The term sheet is almost over the finish line and expected to be signed by the end of the week, according to three sources, who asked not to be named because the deal discussions were confidential. FTX is expected to pay roughly $25m, one source said, 99% below BlockFi’s last private valuation. Jersey City, New Jersey-based BlockFi was last valued at $4.8bn, according to PitchBook. 

The price tag could shift between now and Friday, the source said. An acquisition could also take multiple months to close.

Friday also marks the end of the quarter, which the person said was a catalyst for getting a deal signed. The Wall Street Journal first reported that FTX was seeking an equity stake in the company, while The Block reported this week that an outright deal was in the works. 

An FTX spokesperson said the company “would not be commenting on the matter.” A BlockFi spokesperson said the company “does not comment on market rumors.” BlockFi CEO Zac Prince pushed back on the $25m figure in a tweet calling the figure “market rumors.”

The fire sale comes a week after FTX provided a $250m emergency line of credit to BlockFi.

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My question is: why does it matter particularly that the end of the quarter is a catalyst for getting the deal done? That implies that whatever is already bad will be made worse by that endpoint – suggesting some sort of loan repayable, or interest due.

The tide is going out quite fast on these companies. On Thursday Bitcoin dropped below $20,000 and then $19,000, unwinding its value all the way back to November 2020.
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UK plans to cut pipelines to EU if Russia gas crisis intensifies • Financial Times

Nathalie Thomas and David Sheppard:

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The UK will cut off gas supplies to mainland Europe if it is hit by severe shortages under an emergency plan that energy companies warn risks exacerbating a crisis on the continent.

With European countries facing the prospect of Russia severing gas exports, the British plan to shut off pipelines to the Netherlands and Belgium risks undermining a push for international co-operation on energy.

A cut off of so-called interconnector pipelines would be among the early measures under the UK’s emergency gas plan, which could be triggered by National Grid if supplies fall short in the coming months.

European gas companies have appealed to the UK to work with the EU and warned that shutting off interconnectors could backfire if prolonged shortages occur. Britain imports large volumes of gas from the continent at the height of winter.

“I would definitely recommend they [the UK] reconsider stopping the interconnection [in the event of a crisis],” said Bart Jan Hoevers, president of the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas, a powerful group whose members include Italy’s Snam and Fluxys of Belgium.

“Because while it is beneficial for the continent in the summer it is also beneficial for the UK in the winter.”

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Don’t think anyone had “gas rationing” on their bingo card. More and more it does feels like there’s a shadow of war over everything.
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Gartner foresees steep drop in global PC shipments • The Register

Richard Speed:

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The party is over for PC makers as figures from Gartner suggest the market is on course for a breathtaking decline this year.

According to the analysts, worldwide PC shipments will decline by 9.5%, with consumer demand leading the way – a 13.5% drop is forecast, far greater than business PC demand, which is expected to drop by 7.2% year on year.

The PC market in the EMEA region is forecast to fare even worse, with a 14% decline on the cards for 2022. Gartner pointed the finger of blame at uncertainty caused by conflicts, price increases and simple unavailability of products. Lockdowns in China were also blamed for an impact in consumer demand.

It all makes for grim reading from a channel perspective. While worldwide PC shipments fared the worst, tablet devices are forecast to fall by 9% and mobile phones by 7.1%. Overall, the total decline over all types of devices in the report is expected to be 7.6%. This is in stark contrast to a 11% increase year on year in the shipment of PCs in 2021 and 5% for mobile phones.

The Register spoke to Ranjit Atwal, senior director analyst at Gartner, who told us that Chromebooks were one of the PC categories worst affected. “That’s really because of the uptick we saw around education buying – mainly in the US, but also in Europe to some extent. The expectation was that might continue … but it didn’t.”

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Sales of course aren’t the same as installed base; people are just going to hang on to their PC, or tablet, or phone for longer. Right now it’s going to be preferable to pay the food and heating bills.
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Government policies will not get UK to net zero, warns damning report • The Guardian

Fiona Harvey:

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The government is failing to enact the policies needed to reach the UK’s net zero targets, its statutory advisers have said, in a damning progress report to parliament.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) voiced fears that ministers may renege on the legally binding commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, noting “major policy failures” and “scant evidence of delivery”.

Lord Deben, the chair of the committee and a former Conservative environment secretary, said the government had set strong targets on cutting emissions but policy to achieve them was lacking. “The government has willed the ends, but not the means,” he said. “This report showed that present plans will not fulfil the commitments [to net zero].”

He said net zero policies were also the best way to reduce the soaring cost of living. Average household bills would be about £125 lower today if previous plans on green energy and energy efficiency had been followed through. “If you want to deal with the cost of living crisis, this is exactly what you need to do,” he said.

The greatest failure was the insulation policy. Britain’s homes are the draughtiest in western Europe, heating costs are crippling household budgets, and heating is one of the biggest single sources of carbon emissions, but the government has no plans to help most people insulate their homes.

“It’s a political psychological problem – somehow our politicians do not see energy efficiency as something they can go with and claim credit for,” said Deben.

Deben also hit out at proposals for a new coalmine in Cumbria. A decision on this is expected to be made by 7 July. “[This] coalmine is absolutely indefensible,” said Deben.

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The pressure group Insulate Britain, unsurprisingly, has offered to let the government use its name if it will actually get onto the job of, well, taking action to insulate Britain. Cameron and Osborne screwed this up more than a decade ago, and successive Tory governments have shut their eyes to it. The time to fix the roof is when it’s not raining – or not winter.

In passing, congratulations to Harvey for extracting such meaning from the CCC report, which brings a new meaning to “obscurity”.
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Every week, two more newspapers close — and ‘news deserts’ grow larger • The Washington Post

Margaret Sullivan:

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One-third of American newspapers that existed roughly two decades ago will be out of business by 2025, according to research made public Wednesday from Northwestern University’s Medill School, where [Penelope Muse] Abernathy is a visiting professor.

Already, some 2,500 dailies and weeklies have shuttered since 2005; there are fewer than 6,500 left. Every week, two more disappear. And although many digital-only news sites have cropped up around the nation, most communities that lost a local newspaper will not get a print or digital replacement.
“What’s discouraging is that this trend plays into, and worsens, the whole divide we see in America,” Abernathy, the report’s principal author, told me this week.
The neediest areas — those that are more remote, poorer and less wired — are the ones that get hurt the worst. Most of the new investment and innovation pouring into the media sector, as valuable and needed as it is, doesn’t reach these regions.

As the report bluntly states: “Invariably, the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain either print or digital news organizations.”

…as local news disappears, bad things happen: voter participation declines. Corruption, in business and government, finds more fertile ground. And false information spreads wildly.

“People often turn to Facebook groups where rumors run rampant,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and the director of the Medill Local News Initiative, which seeks to bolster new business models and to give news organizations, the startups as well as the long-established publications, the tools they desperately need in a new media environment.

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Facebook (in particular) probably could do something about this, by enabling locally focussed news sites within Facebook which could make money through targeted advertising. But that’s not really its style. And there’s always the problem that the producing media is expensive, while the rewards tend to be small.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

People watching the premiere of Snow White were moved to tears by the new technique of animation. Might that be a precursor to how we’ll react to realistic AIs? CC-licensed photo by Insomnia Cured Here 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.

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Separately, there’s Social Warming, the Substack. You can sign up for (free) email so you don’t have to keep checking it for updates.

The internet is a constant recommendations machine — but needs you to make it work • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

when you first start using the Likewise app, it requires you to tell it about things you like. If you want movie recommendations, first you have to pick a couple of genres — comedy, drama, western — and then choose some of your favorites from a curated set of titles. You can’t access the rest of the app until you’ve picked at least 20. “The payoff is huge,” says Salim Hemdani, Likewise’s CTO. “The more you tell us, the better it’s going to be.” He says people never stop at 20 because it’s just fun to pick things you like. And in doing so, you tell Likewise’s algorithm who you actually are.

Likewise uses that information to put you into a “cluster,” which refers to a group of people with similar tastes to yours. These clusters are constantly changing based on what else you watch and rate, and they inform everything else Likewise recommends to you. “It gives us an initiation point to say, how many people are like you in the world, and how many clusters can we create?” Hemdani says. The more granular and specific those clusters are, the more accurate they can be. Knowing you like Succession is slightly useful; knowing you like Succession, novels by Michael Crichton, the podcast The Adventure Zone, and anything with Marvel in the title is vastly more useful.

The simplest and most pervasive recommendation system, on Likewise and elsewhere, is known as collaborative filtering. It works by assuming that if you like something, and someone else likes that thing and also a second thing, you’ll probably like the second thing too. That’s it! It typically involves more data and more people, but that’s the core idea: if you like Severance and other people who liked Severance are really digging The Old Man, you probably will, too.

One of Morris’ theories is that Likewise can provide better recommendations, not just by knowing users better, but simply by having more things to offer them. Netflix, HBO, and Disney will never recommend each other’s catalogs, but Likewise (along with apps like Justwatch and Reelgood) can index them all.

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Also needs serendipity: reaching across for things you’d never expect to connect with, and yet which do.
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View from the summit: a self-defeating G7 fails on all fronts • POLITICO

Karl Mathiesen and David Herszenhorn:

»

If they needed reminding about the urgency of climate change and their role in stopping it, all G7 leaders had to do was look up. 

High above the opulent Schloss Elmau, the resort in which the leaders of the world’s most powerful democracies have held earnest (and not so earnest) discussions over the past three days, Germany’s largest — soon to be last — glacier sits in a saddle at the top of the 2,962-meter Zugspitze mountain. 

The glacier is dying, losing 250 liters of water — more than a bathtub — every 30 seconds. A scientific survey last year found it would likely disappear within the next decade. In any case, scientists say, it is melting and can’t be saved.

Climate change, which is killing glaciers and reshaping the planet, has been a top priority of the G7 for years. But with the war in Ukraine, spiralling inflation, global food shortages, and spiking energy costs — the leaders of the largest industrialized democracies were once again daunted and distracted by immediate imperatives. 

As they wrapped up their talks, the world’s most powerful leaders seemed to be tinkering at the margins and failing on all fronts — powerless to stop Russia’s war or stop prices from racing out of control, unable to stop the Zugspitze glacier from melting, or to even to end the blockade of millions of tons of Ukrainian grain vitally needed to feed the developing world. 

While they boasted of uncommon and unprecedented shared purpose in tackling all of these challenges, the solutions they endorsed in some cases seemed self-defeating and contradictory, such as seeking to lower the prices of oil and gas while simultaneously restating their aims to end the use of fossil fuels. They want to end the war but not fight in it. They want to promote rules-based capitalism, while imposing price controls on energy. 

“The decisions now being made do not address the issue of the war in a timely way and exacerbate the challenges of the climate crisis,” said David King, chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group and the U.K.’s former chief scientific adviser, as the meeting closed. 

«

Politico not sugarcoating the topic. I’m beginning to wonder if we’re going to be in a race between climate change effects and living on a permanent war footing.
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The iPhone at 15: an inside look at how Apple transformed a generation • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone went on sale. On that same day, a boy named Noah Schmick was born. Over the next 15 years, the iPhone grew…and so did Noah. Through interviews with current and former Apple executives, WSJ’s Joanna Stern traces how Apple’s invention matured and changed all of us—perhaps the youngest generation most of all.

«

A neat idea by Stern to hang this 20-minute video on: pick someone born the same day the iPhone went on sale. Also has some key interviews with Apple executives, particularly father of the iPod, Tony Fadell, who mentions in passing that the touchscreen idea came from the Mac team. Hmm, did it now.
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“O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!”*… • (Roughly) Daily

Lawrence Wilkinson:

»

The estimable Steven Johnson suggests that the creation of Disney’s masterpiece, Snow White, gives us a preview of what may be coming with AI algorithms sophisticated enough to pass for sentient beings:

Johnson:

»

You can make the argument that the single most dramatic acceleration point in the history of illusion occurred between the years of 1928 and 1937, the years between the release of Steamboat Willie [here], Disney’s breakthrough sound cartoon introducing Mickey Mouse, and the completion of his masterpiece, Snow White, the first long-form animated film in history [here— actually the first full-length animated feature produced in the U.S; the first produced anywhere in color]. It is hard to think of another stretch where the formal possibilities of an artistic medium expanded in such a dramatic fashion, in such a short amount of time.

«

[There follows an fascinating history of the Disney Studios technical innovations that made Snow White possible, and an account of the film’s remarkable premiere…]

»

In just nine years, Disney and his team had transformed a quaint illusion—the dancing mouse is whistling!—into an expressive form so vivid and realistic that it could bring people to tears. Disney and his team had created the ultimate illusion: fictional characters created by hand, etched onto celluloid, and projected at twenty-four frames per second, that were somehow so believably human that it was almost impossible not to feel empathy for them.

Those weeping spectators at the Snow White premiere signaled a fundamental change in the relationship between human beings and the illusions concocted to amuse them. Complexity theorists have a term for this kind of change in physical systems: phase transitions.

«

«

Maybe we’ll move as fast from “ha, that’s never going to fool anyone” to “completely fooled me” in nine years too. That might be worrying, though.
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Substack is laying off 14% of its staff • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

»

[chief executive Chris] Best told employees on Wednesday that Substack had decided to cut jobs so it could fund its operations from its own revenue without raising additional financing in a difficult market, according to the person with knowledge of the discussion. He said he wanted the company to seek funding from a position of strength if it decided to raise again.
In his remarks to employees, Mr. Best said the company’s revenues were increasing. He noted that Substack still had money in the bank and was continuing to hire, albeit at a slower place, the person said. Mr. Best said the cuts would allow the company to hone its focus on product and engineering.

Months earlier, Substack scrapped a plan to raise additional funding after the market for venture investments cooled. The company had discussions about raising $75m to $100m to fuel its growth, and some of the fund-raising discussions valued the company between $750m and $1bn.

Substack, which takes a cut of its writers’ subscription fees, generated about $9m in revenue last year, The New York Times reported.

«

Wonder if subscriptions will start to go into reverse as people focus their spending on essentials – heating and eating.
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Why flying is the worst thing you can do for the climate • Stay Grounded

»

Aviation is the most climate-harming mode of transport. In 2018, the contribution of air traffic to all annual human-caused greenhouse gas emissions reached about 6%. In European countries, home to many frequent flyers, the share is even bigger. Still, the aviation industry wants us to believe that aviation accounts for only 2% of global emissions. But that’s not the whole picture: aviation’s climate impact isn’t limited to CO2. Due to different emissions other than just the CO2 taking place at altitude, there is a total climate impact of flights that is on average three times the effect of the emitted CO2 alone. 

Before Covid-19, the industry expected air traffic demand to double in the next 20 years. This rapid growth could mean that by 2050, aviation alone could use up about 15% of the world’s remaining carbon budget, which is the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that give us a good chance to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. If we take the climate crisis serious, there’s no other way than stopping the plans for growth, and starting to reduce aviation.

«

Unclear who’s behind this group, but the message is pretty straightforward, and fits everything we know: flying generates more global heating than its carbon emissions would suggest. (Disappointing, because I do like to fly to places. Please sponsor my bicycle ride to Australia.)
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Crypto crash threatens North Korea’s stolen funds as it ramps up weapons tests • Reuters via Yahoo

Josh Smith:

»

The nosedive in cryptocurrency markets has wiped out millions of dollars in funds stolen by North Korean hackers, four digital investigators say, threatening a key source of funding for the sanctions-stricken country and its weapons programmes.

North Korea has poured resources into stealing cryptocurrencies in recent years, making it a potent hacking threat and leading to one of the largest cryptocurrency heists on record in March, in which almost $615 million was stolen, according to the U.S. Treasury.

The sudden plunge in crypto values, which started in May amid a broader economic slowdown, complicates Pyongyang’s ability to cash in on that and other heists, and may affect how it plans to fund its weapons programmes, two South Korean government sources said. The sources declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

…Old, unlaundered North Korean crypto holdings monitored by the New York-based blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, which include funds stolen in 49 hacks from 2017 to 2021, have decreased in value from $170m to $65m since the beginning of the year, the company told Reuters.

One of North Korea’s cryptocurrency caches from a 2021 heist, which had been worth tens of millions of dollars, has lost 80% to 85% of its value in the last few weeks and is now worth less than $10m, said Nick Carlsen, an analyst with TRM Labs, another U.S.-based blockchain analysis firm.

«

Quite the unanticipated outcome. Crypto hacking seemed like – was – a great choice, but you do have to convert it into real money too.
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Instagram and Facebook remove posts offering abortion pills • NPR

»

“DM me if you want to order abortion pills, but want them sent to my address instead of yours,” the post on Instagram read.

Instagram took it down within moments. Vice Media first reported on Monday that Meta, the parent of both Facebook and Instagram, was taking down posts about abortion pills.

On Monday, an Associated Press reporter tested how the company would respond to a similar post on Facebook, writing: “If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills.” The post was removed within one minute.

The Facebook account was immediately put on a “warning” status for the post, which Facebook said violated its standards on “guns, animals and other regulated goods.”

Yet, when the AP reporter made the same exact post but swapped out the words “abortion pills” for “a gun,” the post remained untouched. A post with the same exact offer to mail “weed” was also left up and not considered a violation.

Marijuana is illegal under federal law and it is illegal to send it through the mail. Abortion pills, however, can legally be obtained through the mail after an online consultation from prescribers who have undergone certification and training.

In an email, a Meta spokesperson pointed to company policies that prohibit the sale of certain items, including guns, alcohol, drugs and pharmaceuticals. The company did not explain the apparent discrepancies in its enforcement of that policy.

«

Meta (FB + Instagram) is too big; it really cannot stay on top of these things. It’s like a dinosaur trying to dance.
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Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows ordered by court to liquidate • WSJ

Serena Ng, Caitlin Ostroff and Vicky Ge Huang:

»

Three Arrows Capital suffered losses in recent weeks due to a punishing decline in the value of cryptocurrencies. Twin forces have hit the digital asset ecosystem: a broad market selloff sparked by the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases and concerns over individual crypto coins and firms. Bitcoin’s dollar value has fallen by more than a third this month.

Two executives from the global advisory firm Teneo were appointed by the British Virgin Islands to oversee the liquidation of assets and safeguard them, according to people familiar with the proceedings. The executives, senior managing directors Russell Crumpler and Christopher Farmer, joined Teneo after the company acquired financial firm KPMG’s Cayman and British Virgin Island’s restructuring business in January, according to Teneo’s website.

Creditors to whom Three Arrows owes debts will be able to file their claims online, the people said. The process for debtors to reclaim their assets is likely to be lengthy, they said, noting the liquidation order would mark the start of that process.

Former schoolmates and Wall Street traders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies started Three Arrows nearly a decade ago. It had roughly $3bn in assets under management in April, just before crypto markets cratered, Mr. Davies told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

«

Seems like a sizeable domino; there’s lots of money owing in turn to other funds.
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Bitcoin miners sell their holdings amid crypto winter’s chill • Reuters via Yahoo

Lisa Pauline Mattackal and Medha Singh:

»

Bitcoin miners have been forced to tap into their cryptocurrency stashes as a plunge in prices, rising energy costs and increased competition bite into profitability.

The number of coins miners are sending to crypto exchanges has been steadily climbing since June 7, researchers at MacroHive noted, in a sign that “miners have been increasingly liquidating their coins on exchanges.”

Several publicly listed bitcoin miners collectively sold more than 100% of their entire output in May as the value of bitcoin tumbled 45%, an analysis by Arcane Research https://tmsnrt.rs/3nhYdHA found.

“The plummeting profitability of mining forced these miners to increase their selling rate to more than 100% of their output in May. The conditions have worsened in June, meaning they are likely selling even more,” said Arcane analyst Jaran Mellerud.

Bitcoin sales by public miners

Bitcoin miners, who run networks of computers to earn tokens by validating transactions on the blockchain, are typically staunch crypto “HODLers” and collectively own around 800,000 bitcoins, according to CoinMetrics data.

«

If they really get squeezed – which could happen as electricity bills for the quarter come due in the next few weeks – then you could see quite a lot of sales, pushing the price down further, prompting more sales, pushing the price down…
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Autopilot group at Tesla has been cut by hundreds, perhaps signalling that the product won’t ever arrive in full CC-licensed photo by Rosenfeld MediaRosenfeld Media 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. Supremely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Instagram hides some posts that mention abortion • AP News

Amanda Seitz:

»

Instagram is blocking posts that mention abortion from public view, in some cases requiring its users to confirm their age before letting them view posts that offer up information about the procedure.

Over the last day, several Instagram accounts run by abortion rights advocacy groups have found their posts or stories hidden with a warning that described the posts as “sensitive content.”

In one example, Instagram covered a post on one page with more than 25,000 followers that shared text reading: “Abortion in America How You Can Help.” The post went on to encourage followers to donate money to abortion organisations and to protest the Supreme Court’s decision to strip constitutional protections for abortion in the US.

The post was slapped with a warning from Instagram that covered the post, reading “This photo may contain graphic or violent content.”

Instagram’s latest issue follows an Associated Press report that Facebook and Instagram were promptly deleting posts that offered to mail out abortion pills in states that restrict their use. The tech platforms said they were deleting the posts because they violated policies against selling or gifting certain products, including pharmaceuticals, drugs and firearms.

«

OK so what happened to Instagram/Facebook’s “free speech is much more important than content moderation” policy?
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Facebook brands Jane’s Revenge as terrorists • The Intercept

Sam Biddle:

»

The brief internal bulletin from Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Instagram and Facebook, was titled “[EMERGENCY Micro Policy Update] [Terrorism] Jane’s Revenge” and filed to the company’s internal Dangerous Individuals and Organizations rulebook, meaning that the abortion rights group, which has so far committed only acts of vandalism, will be treated with the same speech restrictions against “praise, support, and representation” applied to the Islamic State and Hitler.

The memo, circulated to Meta moderators on June 25, describes Jane’s Revenge as “a far-left extremist group that has claimed responsibility on its website for an attack against an anti-abortion group’s office in Madison, Wisconsin in May 2022. The group is responsible for multiple arson and vandalism attacks on pro-life institutions.” Terrorist groups receive Meta’s strictest “Tier 1” speech limits, treatment the company says is reserved for the world’s most dangerous and violent entities, along with hate groups, drug cartels, and mass murderers.

Although The Intercept published a snapshot of the entire secret Dangerous Individuals and Organizations list last year, Meta does not disclose or explain additions to the public, despite the urging of scholars, activists, and its own Oversight Board. Speech advocates and civil society groups have criticized the policy for its secrecy, bias toward US governmental priorities, and tendency to inaccurately delete nonviolent political speech.

«

Certainly Jane’s Revenge is prone to making a mess – the photo accompanying the article shows the Wisconsin Family Action headquarters apparently after a small fire was started there. But it’s strange how white supremacists are given such latitude before going on to the banned list.
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Tesla lays off about 200 Autopilot workers in latest cuts • BNN Bloomberg

Ed Ludlow and Dana Hull:

»

Tesla Inc. laid off hundreds of workers on its Autopilot team as the electric-vehicle maker shuttered a California facility, according to people familiar with the matter, one of the larger known cuts amid a broad workforce reduction.

Affected employees were notified Tuesday, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Teams at the San Mateo office were tasked with evaluating customer vehicle data related to the Autopilot driver-assistance features and performing so-called data labeling.

About 200 workers were let go, according to one of the people. Many of the staff were data annotation specialists, and the roles included salaried and contract positions. The office had about 350 employees, some of whom were transferred to a nearby facility. 

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The cuts are part of an effort to trim the ranks of salaried staffers as Tesla pulls back from a surge in hiring in the recent years. The company, now headquartered in Austin, Texas, had grown to about 100,000 employees globally as it built new factories in Austin and Berlin.

Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk caught workers by surprise earlier this month when he said layoffs would be necessary in an increasingly shaky economic environment. He clarified in an interview with Bloomberg that about 10% of salaried employees would lose their jobs over the next three months, though the overall headcount could be higher in a year.

«

Makes sense to cut Autopilot, though, because it’s going to be years before that’s actually A Thing. Automated Lane Keeping Systems? Sure. Autopilot? Not just with those cameras. (Imagine an autopilot system trying to figure out a roundabout in, say, France.)
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Top Gun: Maverick shows Hollywood can survive without China • Quartz

Adario Strange:

»

The uneasy relationship between Hollywood and China took a major turn in the past year, highlighted now by the success of Top Gun: Maverick, which crossed the $1bn mark in ticket sales last weekend.

Like many Hollywood productions in recent years, part of the film’s $170m budget had partial backing from a major Chinese investor, in this case, Tencent. However, the company pulled out due to reported concerns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials would not appreciate its affiliation with a film framing the US military in a positive light.

Political tensions tied the film first surfaced in 2019, when the initial trailer for Top Gun: Maverick showed Tom Cruise’s character wearing a flight jacket without the flag patches of Japan and Taiwan, which were shown in the 1986 original, and instead had different graphics in their place. [In Maverick, Cruise’s character does wear the original.]

Critics noticed the omission, with some taking it as sign that the film’s US producers were bending to the will of the Chinese government, which does not officially recognize Taiwan as a country. Similar concerns were voiced in 2021, when the actor John Cena made an unusual public apology to the people of China for calling Taiwan “a country” during a promotional interview for an installment of the Fast and Furious film franchise. 

The two recent instances are just the latest in a long series of moves by Hollywood to comply with China’s censors in order to maintain access to its 1.4 billion moviegoers, the largest film market in the world. Chinese investors, meanwhile, have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into US film studios.

Despite Hollywood’s efforts to work with the Chinese government to get its films into the market, the Chinese Communist party’s censors regularly block major films for a wide range of specific and sometimes unexplained reasons. For example, Spider-Man: No Way Home was banned in China due to what the government thought were images of the US that were too patriotic, according to some sources familiar with Sony’s dealings on the matter. The offending patriotic material in question: New York City’s Statue of Liberty, which appears near the end of the film. 

Likewise, superhero films including Marvel’s Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness have all been banned in China.

«

I think they’re lucky to have avoided the latter film. (Gave up after half an hour.) But it feels as though we’re moving back towards a new Cold War in so many ways.
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Twitter officially rolls out its long-form content ‘Notes’ feature • TechCrunch

Aisha Malik:

»

A small group of writers in the United States, Canada, Ghana and the United Kingdom now have access to Notes as part of the initial testing phase. Twitter says Notes can be read on and off Twitter by people in most countries. Users who are part of the testing phase will get access to a new “Write” tab, which is where they can write and access all of their Notes. These users will also have a new “Notes” tab in their profile that holds their published work to make it easy for their followers to find their long-form content.

With the new feature, users will be able to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media, which can then be tweeted and shared with followers upon publishing. Users will have the option to embed photos, videos, GIFs and tweets into their Notes. Like tweets, Notes will have their own link and can be tweeted, retweeted, sent in DM’s, liked and bookmarked.

Twitter Notes has the potential to change how some people use Twitter to share their more in-depth thoughts and ideas. The new feature could be particularly useful for those users who infrequently publish article-length content and don’t want the hassle of setting up and maintaining their own blog or website. It’s also worth noting that the feature marks one of Twitter’s more significant changes since doubling the character count from 140 to 280 characters.

«

Cannot see the point of this at all. Twitter’s adding Blogger to itself? Doesn’t it already have enough totally pointless things, including Spaces and Twitter Blue (the latter at least paid-for)?
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Mugged for my phone, then locked out of my life • The Sunday Times

James Ball:

»

In the minutes after being mugged, I staggered home, worked out how to freeze my bank cards from my laptop but not my phone —the site was “down for maintenance” — and put myself to bed. Shortly before 8am, I was woken by two friends, Scott and Alex, who, after checking my physical wellbeing, began the Kafkaesque process of sorting my life out.

Because I’d been forced to give over passwords and PINs, it turns out just freezing a card isn’t enough: you have to block the accounts too, which takes a whole set of extra calls to the bank.

One particular customer service high spot came as the presumably well-intentioned HSBC call-centre lady in India sternly told me: “You must not share your PIN with third parties, sir.” Attempts to explain to her that I was being punched and threatened with stabbing at the time came to nothing. “Have a great day now, sir,” she concluded, as Alex asked me today’s date for the third time, to check I wasn’t concussed.

Things were made even more difficult because my phone was essential to log in to most of my accounts. The best advice now says to use “two-factor” security for your online shopping, email and social media. Instead of just using a password, you get sent a text with a security code, or use an authenticator app, all of which relies on your phone.

It may be more secure against hackers, but it means your phone is a back door to your Amazon, Apple, eBay and social media accounts. If you can’t lock the thieves out, they may fake your presence online to either rob or scam your friends — so all of those details need changing, at a time when you don’t have the two-factor code generator — your phone — to hand.

«

Definitely a challenge, which is why I use Authy, which syncs across platforms, for 2FA codes; it also allows you to lock out devices. I guess you’d just have to hope the thieves didn’t lock you out before you locked them out.
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FSInsight accuses Three Arrows Capital of running a ‘Madoff-style Ponzi scheme’ • Coindesk

Will Canny:

»

The crypto industry was “brought to its knees” in recent weeks by an “old-fashioned Madoff-style Ponzi scheme” wrapped in a trade that was similar to the positions that sunk Long Term Capital Management (LTCM),” research firm FSInsight said in a report Friday that looked at the implications of the implosion of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which is also known as 3AC.

Madoff in this scenario would be the founders of 3AC, Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, who used their reputation to “recklessly borrow from just about every institutional lender in the business,” resulting in pain for some high-profile firms in the industry, including Voyager Digital, Babel Finance and BlockFi, Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy at FSInsight, wrote in the report. Bernie Madoff was an American financier who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in US history.

At its peak, 3AC had supposed assets under management (AUM) of over $18bn, the note said. But given that the amount of debt that is now known to have been loaned to the firm, it is unclear how much actual equity was at risk. It is likely that Zhu and Davies were simply “using borrowed funds to repay interest on loans issued by lenders, while ‘cooking their books’ to show massive returns on capital,” the note added.

«

Eighteen. Billion. Dollars. It’s just mindboggling how much money has been handed over to these people. Then again, Madoff’s Ponzi scheme totalled $64.8bn, out of 4,800 clients. Chumps are eternal.
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How the crypto crash has impacted each Premier League club • The Athletic

Joey D’Urso:

»

According to one highly experienced club takeover expert, cryptocurrency companies love sponsoring football clubs because they have worked out that it is the cheapest way to find new customers — especially young men.

Of last season’s 20 Premier League clubs, all of them but one — we’ll get to that — have at least one cryptocurrency sponsor and some have several.

This list builds on several original investigations by The Athletic into the relationship between cryptocurrency and football and analyses the 2021-22 season rather than the upcoming one because many sponsorship deals have not been signed or announced yet.

Oh yes: despite the plummeting value of cryptocurrency, there is no sign yet that Premier League clubs’ love affair with it is slowing down.

Just about every club in last season’s top flight played some part in promoting volatile unregulated financial assets to its fans, virtually all of which have crashed on a spectacular scale in recent weeks.

English clubs are desperate for cash as the cost of running a competitive team constantly spirals upwards.

Cryptocurrency sponsorship is certainly a lucrative, and entirely legal, way of generating cash right now. Yet it remains to be seen whether that can continue in the light of the huge crash.

«

Faintly depressing that young men are the easy meat for so much cryptocurrency nonsense. The graphs in the story show tokens which have all headed downwards recently. (The Athletic has a paywall, though unfortunately I couldn’t see it when the Javascript on my browser broke.)
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How green steel made with electricity could clean up a dirty industry • MIT Technology Review

Casey Crownhart:

»

Fossil fuels are essential to today’s steel production. Most steelmaking starts in a blast furnace, where a coal-derived material called coke, which is almost pure carbon, reacts with iron ore, a mixture of iron oxides and other minerals. The reaction pulls out the oxygen, leaving behind liquid iron. The carbon and oxygen are then released together as carbon dioxide.

Boston Metal’s solution is an entirely new approach, called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE). Instead of using carbon to remove oxygen, the process relies on electricity, which runs through a cell filled with a mixture of dissolved iron oxides along with other oxides and materials. The electricity heats the cell up to about 1,600 °C (nearly 3,000 °F), melting everything into a hot oxide soup.

In addition to heating things up, electricity drives the oxygen-removing chemical reactions. Molten iron gathers at the bottom of the reactor, and oxygen gas is emitted instead of carbon dioxide.

Because the impurities largely stay out of the reaction, the MOE process can handle low-quality iron ore, which could be a major benefit of the technology…

One estimate from researchers at Columbia University found that if global steel production in blast furnaces were all converted to Boston Metal’s MOE process, it would take over 5,000 terawatt-hours of electricity to run them—about 20% of global power consumption in 2018. Producing steel with hydrogen would also come with high electricity requirements.

If that electricity comes from fossil fuels, switching steelmaking to electricity would be trading one source of emissions for another. But if it comes from renewables or other carbon-free sources, it could make a significant dent in carbon pollution.

«

Lots of efforts going on to decarbonise steelmaking; this may be one of the most promising. It’s a huge prize, if won.
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We’re the Supreme Court and, honestly, we just want you all to die • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Jessica Goldstein:

»

We understand that you’ve been watching some of these latest rulings come down—overturning a New York law limiting gun use in public, all but stripping away your Miranda rights—and are wondering… what the hell? We realize that we’ve failed to communicate a crucial piece of information to you, one that would make all of our decisions make a whole lot more sense. So here goes: We’re actually trying to kill you.

That’s it. That’s our whole deal. We here at the Supreme Court just love watching people die. Americans, specifically. But also people from other countries. Pretty much everyone. In this and only this arena, we don’t discriminate. We didn’t think we’d need to spell it out for you. We haven’t exactly been subtle about it. Have you seen our outfits? We’re fully cosplaying as the Grim Reaper.

To be honest, we’ve sort of always been this way, but lately, we’ve been taking it to the next level. Probably because we got into Squid Game during quarantine. Brett thought it was a documentary. And we were like, why not?

«

The best satire is when you’re not entirely certain it’s satire. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s been 40 years since the film Blade Runner came out, and its messages still resonate – now more than ever. CC-licensed photo by big-ashbbig-ashb 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 8 links for you. What do you mean, you’ve never heard the Arctic Monkeys? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Also, separately, on Substack, on the topic of social warming. Sign up! It’s free and less regular than this one!

The #1 period tracker on the App Store will hand over data without a warrant [update: says it won’t] • Motherboard

Samantha Cole:

»

Stardust, an astrology-focused menstrual tracking app that launched on the App Store last year, is one of Apple’s top three most-downloaded free apps right now. From sometime around Sunday evening until Monday mid-morning, it was in the number one spot. It’s also one of very few apps that has put in writing that it will voluntarily—without even being legally required to—comply with law enforcement if it’s asked to share user data.

After the fall of Roe on Friday, ending the Constitutional right to an abortion and making abortion illegal in more than a dozen states, many people used Twitter to urge others to delete their period tracking apps for privacy and security reasons. A widely-shared concern is that law enforcement can use personal data created in apps against people who’ve sought or gotten abortions illegally.

Despite this, more people are downloading Stardust—which combines astrology with menstrual cycle tracking— right now than some of the most-downloaded apps in history. As of Monday morning, on the iOS App Store, Stardust was ranking above hugely popular apps including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. It was ranking above BeReal and NGL, two apps that have recently gone viral with teens.

«

For obvious reasons, I’ve never used iOS’s built-in Health app to track periods, but as John Gruber points out, the advantage it has is that the data remains on the phone, or is encrypted in iCloud – it’s not accessible by Apple.

Until now, the question of whether an app leaks data has been mostly theoretical. Who cares, right? Now it has become a matter that might put some users in jail. After the story appeared, Stardust changed its privacy policy to leave out a phrase about cooperating with law enforcement “whether or not legally required”. But that’s still data being handed over if required, rather than being unable to hand the data over.
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How China is policing the future • The New York Times

Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao and John Liu:

»

The more than 1.4 billion people living in China are constantly watched. They are recorded by police cameras that are everywhere, on street corners and subway ceilings, in hotel lobbies and apartment buildings. Their phones are tracked, their purchases are monitored, and their online chats are censored.

Now, even their future is under surveillance.

The latest generation of technology digs through the vast amounts of data collected on their daily activities to find patterns and aberrations, promising to predict crimes or protests before they happen. They target potential troublemakers in the eyes of the Chinese government — not only those with a criminal past but also vulnerable groups, including ethnic minorities, migrant workers and those with a history of mental illness.

They can warn the police if a victim of a fraud tries to travel to Beijing to petition the government for payment or a drug user makes too many calls to the same number. They can signal officers each time a person with a history of mental illness gets near a school.

It takes extensive evasive maneuvers to avoid the digital tripwires. In the past, Zhang Yuqiao, a 74-year-old man who has been petitioning the government for most of his adult life, could simply stay off the main highways to dodge the authorities and make his way to Beijing to fight for compensation over the torture of his parents during the Cultural Revolution. Now, he turns off his phones, pays in cash and buys multiple train tickets to false destinations.

«

It truly is out of any number of dystopian SF novels. And yet, it’s real life, right now. Including this echo of a scene from 1984:

»

The technology has encoded power imbalances. Some bidding documents refer to a “red list” of people whom the surveillance system must ignore.

One national procurement document said the function was for “people who need privacy protection or V.I.P. protection.” Another, from Guangdong Province, got more specific, stipulating that the red list was for government officials.

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“You can turn it off!” said Winston, amazed.
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‘Blade Runner’ at 40: why it’s still the greatest sci-fi film of all-time • Esquire

Tom Ward:

»

In terms of performances, there’s an argument that Harrison Ford always plays Harrison Ford, but here he loses the swagger of Han Solo and the self assuredness of Indy to become a world-beaten man (replicant?) who’d really rather be at home drinking whiskey from beautiful futuristic tumblers. As replicant and love interest Rachael, Sean Young is given little to do, but still manages to make the character live and breathe.

But as any Blade Runner fan knows, it’s Rutger Hauer’s replicant anti-hero Roy Batty who steals the show. Not only does Batty show how cool bleached hair, a grey t-shirt and a leather trench-coat can look, he’s a synthetic being of dualities. One moment he’s menacingly pushing nails through his ailing robot hands, the next he’s cradling a dove whilst delivering a heartfelt monologue on the fleeting nature of existence. As the replicant who has seen things us people wouldn’t believe, Batty delivers one of the greatest speeches in cinematic history in his ‘Tears in rain’ soliloquy. Hauer himself took a hands-on approach to the speech, amending and cutting back screenwriter David People’s original words. Reportedly, after the first take some crew members were moved to tears themselves.

Visually and sonically assured, intelligent and moody, there is much to be admired in Blade Runner. But why has its legacy endured to such a degree? Perhaps in its gloomy portrayal of environmental catastrophe, social divide and oppressive authority we recognise our own world. Or perhaps it’s because, despite all of its foreboding, Blade Runner offers a chance of hope. Hope of a love between two people not meant to love. Hope of freedom, however impossible.

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Which is an appropriate message just now. Another reason why it’s an eternally great film.
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Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes • Science

Elizabeth Pennisi:

»

Andrew Moeller, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, was one of the first to show that gut bacteria and humans have built these relationships over a very long time. Six years ago, he and colleagues reported the work showing human gut microbes are very similar to those in other primates, suggesting their intestinal presence predates the evolution of humans.

But his follow-up studies, and work by others, also indicate the human gut microbiome has, in a general sense, become less diverse than the gut microbes in our current primate cousins. One study found 85 microbial genera, such as Bacteroides and Bifidobacterium, in the guts of wild apes, but just 55 in people in US cities. Splitting the difference, people in less developed parts of the world have between 60 and 65 of those bacterial groups, an observation that ties the decrease in microbial diversity to urbanization.

Changes in diet as humans moved on from their hunter-gatherer past and then into cities, antibiotic use, more life stresses, and better hygiene are all possible contributors to the loss of human gut microbes, says Reshmi Upreti, a microbiologist at the University of Washington, Bothell. Several prominent researchers have argued that this lower diversity could contribute to increases in asthma and other inflammatory diseases.

«

We really don’t understand much about the biome. But this is an interesting finding. And that’s quite a rapid change if it’s linked only to urbanisation.
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More hedge funds are betting against Tether as crypto melts down • WSJ

Vicky Ge Huang:

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Short sellers have been ramping up their bets against Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, amid a broad market selloff that has called into doubt the financial health of some crypto companies.

In the past month, more traditional hedge funds have executed trades to short Tether through Genesis Global Trading, one of the largest crypto brokerages for professional investors. These trades are worth “hundreds of millions” of dollars in notional value, said Leon Marshall, Genesis’s head of institutional sales. He declined to be more specific.

“There has been a real spike in the interest from traditional hedge funds who are taking a look at Tether and looking to short it,” Mr. Marshall said in an interview.

…Genesis, which doesn’t take a view on Tether, said the short trades are almost exclusively put on by traditional hedge funds in the US and Europe, while crypto firms—especially those based in Asia—have been happy to facilitate the other side of the transactions.

A number of investors have been betting against tether for at least 12 months. But more hedge funds got interested in shorting Tether after the collapse in May of another stablecoin, TerraUSD, according to Genesis.

…Some short sellers say they believe that most of Tether’s commercial-paper holdings [corporate bonds] are backed by debt-ridden Chinese property developers, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Tether said in a blog post this month that “these rumors are completely false.” The company added that it has been reducing its portfolio of commercial paper.

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Well, somebody’s going to make some good money out of this. The big question is when the short options will get called in.

Possibly related:

»

The crypto broker Voyager Digital issued a notice of default Monday to the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital for failing to make the required payments on a loan worth more than $665m, the latest sign of financial turmoil that has rocked the world of cryptocurrencies as the value of tokens across the market has plummeted.

Voyager said it intends to recover the funds, which was loaned as 15,250 bitcoin and $350m in the stablecoin USDC, a digital token whose value is pegged to the dollar.

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The other big lessons that the US Army should learn from Ukraine • War on the Rocks

David Barno and Nora Bensahel are visiting professor of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:

»

Since February 24, Russian forces in Ukraine have become bright butterflies pinned to the world’s display board. The explosion of open-source intelligence — the vast array of social-media posts, smartphone photos, commercial drone videos, and cheap commercial satellite imagery — has revealed the precise locations of Russian military forces in ways that are unprecedented in the annals of warfare. Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are using cell-phone videos, social media, and a wide range of private networks to report on Russian movements. Anyone with a smartphone or a laptop can now follow real-time information about Ukrainian attacks on Russian troop movements.

A transparent battlefield poses immense challenges for the U.S. Army. For decades, the Army has been organized around massive, hard-to-conceal military formations that include tanks as well as infantry combat and fighting vehicles. These formations closely resemble the types of units the Russians are employing in Ukraine. Moreover, advanced sensors can increasingly penetrate the cover of darkness, which would strip away a major battlefield advantage that the United States has enjoyed for decades. And this problem will only intensify in the future, as the rapidly expanding use of artificial intelligence to track and target subtle patterns of military movements promises even more deadly detectability.

Furthermore, the intricate web of U.S. reinforcements and logistics extending from the United States and nearby friendly bases is also becoming dangerously transparent. Army units rely heavily on complex logistics that flow through overseas staging bases and are delivered by long transport convoys, often involving unsecured commercial supply chains. These vast networks will all become visible to America’s most capable adversaries — and if they can be seen, they can be targeted. In fact, a determined adversary might find that it is both easier and more effective to render U.S. Army units inoperable by destroying these vital logistics pipelines instead of targeting fighting units directly.

The future transparency of this expansive web of support should be nothing short of terrifying to U.S. military planners.

«

It’s actually a big advantage for the US that it can participate in the latest war without actually having to fight in it. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Air travel is a disaster right now: here’s why • The Atlantic

Derek Thompson spoke to Scott Keyes, who writes the Cheap Flights newsletter:

»

Thompson: The industry is so woefully understaffed that whenever there’s a storm, or a pilot who calls in sick, there’s no redundancy or resiliency in the system, and you get these cascading cancellations. But wasn’t it obvious 18 months ago that we’d have vaccines? Wasn’t it obvious six months ago that Americans wanted to get out of the house? Why is all this mayhem happening now?

Keyes: There’s a labour-supply issue, not just for airlines but also the TSA. If you live in Milwaukee and you’re looking for an entry-level job, you could become a transportation security officer for $19.41 an hour, or you could go on Amazon’s website and see that there’s a job in the area for $19.50. Would you rather help load and unload bags outside in the dead of winter in Milwaukee, or work in a climate-controlled environment in a warehouse for Amazon? That’s the trade-off a lot of folks are making. Labour shortages cause delays and cancellations. In normal times, airlines might have a reserve crew of pilots or flight attendants that they can call in. But now there is not the reserve in place to bridge the gap. The result is a huge swath of delays and cancellations.

Thompson: Laurie Garrow, a professor at Georgia Tech, directed me to FlightAware, a website that tracks airline-industry statistics. On any given day, it seems normal to have a cancellation rate of about 1 percent—or one cancellation for every 100 scheduled flights. Last Thursday, JetBlue canceled 14% of its flights. Last Thursday and Friday, American canceled 10% of its flights. On Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Delta canceled 8% of its flights. Meanwhile, Frontier and Spirit canceled just 1% of their flights in that time. Why are the major carriers having these major problems right now?

Keyes: Today’s airline that gloats about not having cancellations is tomorrow’s airline that’s experiencing a meltdown.

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A friend of mine works as aircrew, and points out that another factor in hiring someone to work airside (ie past the security barriers) is all the enhanced security checks before they can even be considered for a job. Sure, Amazon will do checks too, but probably don’t have to consider the chance their employee might try to bring down a plane.
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Company behind Trump’s Truth Social deal hit with federal grand jury subpoenas • Raw Story

Brad Reed:

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As flagged by New York Times business reporter Matthew Goldstein, Digital World Acquisition said in a recent 8-K filing that earlier this month it “became aware that a federal grand jury sitting in the Southern District of New York has issued subpoenas to each member of Digital World’s board of directors.”

The filing went on to state that the subpoenas are seeking “requests relating to Digital World’s S-1 filings, communications with or about multiple individuals, and information regarding Rocket One Capital,” a Miami-based hedge fund.

The filing warns that these grand jury subpoenas “could materially delay, materially impede, or prevent the consummation” of the merger that’s needed to fund Truth Social.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the Truth Social deal, with a particular focus on whether illegal negotiations occurred prior to Digital World Acquisition went public.

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Oh no what if they don’t get the funding for it? They’ll probably have to send out a mailshot saying the lyin’ SEC is preventing them getting going and soliciting money, and consequently rake in millions, some of which will be siphoned off for legal fees. (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you’re past middle age and can balance on one leg for an extended period, good news! You’re not likely to die soon. CC-licensed photo by Jakub Michankow 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. Finely balanced. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

(Oh, and I’ve got a Substack too, about Social Warming. Weekly posts. Free membership.)

The rise of the internet’s creative middle class • The New Yorker

Cal Newport on how former Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s idea that you could make a living by finding “a Thousand True Fans” has panned out:

»

Some creative professionals can get by without even having to sell anything in particular to their 1,000 True Fans. Maria Popova, for example, makes a living publishing essays on literature, art, and science on her site, the Marginalian. Most of Popova’s income comes from asking fans to help support her work directly, without expecting anything extra in return. “If this labor has made your life more livable in the past year (or the past decade),” she writes, “please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation.”

A shining example of the 1,000 True Fans model is the podcasting boom. There are more than 850,000 active podcasts available right now. Although most of these shows are small and don’t generate much money, the number of people making a full-time living off original audio content is substantial. The key to a financially viable podcast is to cultivate a group of True Fans eager to listen to every episode.

The value of each such fan, willing to stream hours and hours of a creator’s content, is surprisingly large; if sufficiently committed, even a modest-sized audience can generate significant income for a creator. According to an advertising agency I consulted, for example, a weekly podcast that generates 30,000 downloads per episode should be able to reach Kelly’s target of generating a $100,000 a year in income. Earning a middle-class salary by talking through a digital microphone to a fiercely loyal band of supporters around the world, who are connected by the magic of the Internet, is about as pure a distillation of Kelly’s vision as you’re likely to find.

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(With podcasts, there’s also now direct monetisation where you subscribe directly to get a specific feed.) But Newport points out that just as the Thousand True Fans idea didn’t work for a while, and now is working, that won’t necessarily remain the case.
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Google Analytics is losing track of millions of users as EU regulators ban the service • Android Police

Jules Wang:

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a growing number of countries in the [European] union are going after the use of Google Analytics for violations against the General Data Protection Regulation.

Italy is the third and latest country to prohibit the service which lets webmasters track and analyze their site traffic. The government stated in its decision that rafts of information, including IP addresses, are collected via cookies and transmitted to the United States and could potentially be seen by third parties and the government there, violating the GDPR as users aren’t ensured due process for redress. Italy’s competition authority has cited domestic web services provider Caffeina Media, giving the firm 90 days to transfer its account away from Google Analytics.

In a blog post, Google Analytics competitor Simple Analytics notes two other member states taking similar action. France’s national commission on the freedom of liberation or CNIL announced a ban for the same reason back in February while Austria’s Data Protection Authority put down its block in January (via noyb).

Google’s appeals and defenses in response to these rulings are generally being dismissed. The company would not be able to satisfactorily demonstrate that it could anonymize user data from Europe before transmitting it to the US. Encryption in this process also doesn’t matter if Google holds onto the keys.

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If the US can tell Google to hand over the data – which it will do for data anywhere in the world, because Google is American, which means it doesn’t matter if the data centre is in Europe – then the EU feels it’s not safe under GDPR.
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Apple’s AR/VR headset will arrive in January 2023, analyst projects • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

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Tech industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has offered the most specific prediction about a release date for an Apple augmented reality/virtual reality headset yet: January 2023.

Kuo has often made accurate, informed predictions about Apple’s plans in the past, based partly on information from sources in the company’s supply chain. On Thursday, he published a lengthy analysis of the VR headset industry and predicted that Apple’s device will “likely” arrive in January.

Kuo called the headset “the most complicated product Apple has ever designed,” noting that many current Apple suppliers are involved in the supply chain for the product. He also supported other recent leaks and speculation that the upcoming headset will not be exclusively or primarily focused on augmented reality (which places virtual options in real-world space) rather than virtual reality (which immerses the wearer in an entirely virtual space).

Kuo echoed other recent reports and noted that the device would support “video see-thru,” and allow for switching between modes. Thus, he predicted the headset would be a boon for the immersive game industry.

The analysis was not exclusively about Apple’s headsets and covered other parts of the VR/AR industry. It pointed out several weaknesses in the mixed reality business at Meta (which owns Oculus headsets, as well as Facebook and Instagram). He wrote that Meta is slowing down its investment, creating an opportunity for upcoming competitors like Apple. He further suggested that Meta’s practice of selling VR headsets at a loss is unsustainable, a fact that could contribute to Apple’s opportunity.

«

Kuo’s post isn’t quite as certain about some of these points as people are making out: he thinks it will offer augmented and virtual reality, but doesn’t state it will. From his own numbers, the VR headset market is really pretty small – a few million per quarter – after many years of effort. It really doesn’t feel like the portable music player market in summer 2001, awaiting an iPod.

If Apple has made something Google Glass-like for augmented reality, I’m interested. But I’ve tried many bulky headsets down the years, and they’re a non-starter.
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Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely: what does the future hold? • Nature

Nicola Jones:

»

An ongoing La Niña event that has contributed to flooding in eastern Australia and exacerbated droughts in the United States and East Africa could persist into 2023, according to the latest forecasts. The occurrence of two consecutive La Niña winters in the Northern Hemisphere is common, but having three in a row is relatively rare. A ‘triple dip’ La Niña — lasting three years in a row — has happened only twice since 1950.

This particularly long La Niña is probably just a random blip in the climate, scientists say. But some researchers are warning that climate change could make La Niña-like conditions more likely in future. “We are stacking the odds higher for these triple events coming along,” says Matthew England, a physical oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. England and others are now working to reconcile discrepancies between climate data and the output of major climate models — efforts that could clarify what is in store for the planet.

More La Niña events would increase the chance of flooding in southeast Asia, boost the risk of droughts and wildfires in the southwestern United States, and create a different pattern of hurricanes, cyclones and monsoons across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as give rise to other regional changes.

La Niña and its counterpart, El Niño, are phases of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) that occur every two to seven years, with neutral years in between. During El Niño events, the usual Pacific winds that blow east to west along the Equator weaken or reverse, causing warm water to gush into the eastern Pacific Ocean, increasing the amount of rain in the region. During La Niña, those winds strengthen, warm water shifts west and the eastern Pacific becomes cooler and drier.

The impacts are far reaching.

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Always worth repeating: climate change/global heating doesn’t make specific events happen. It makes things that happen when it’s warmer more likely to happen.
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Meagre savings of Pompeii victims suggest they were slaves or city’s poorest • History First

Mark Bridge:

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The eyewitness Pliny the Younger described a “black and dreadful” cloud rising above Vesuvius in this interval, and cinders, pumice and burning rock raining down on panic-stricken crowds. 

A silver denarius of the emperor Vespasian, predating the destruction of Pompeii in 79AD. Photo: Shutterstock
Now a study of the coins found on around 200 of the 1,150 bodies excavated at the site — which was preserved under ash and rock as if frozen in time — offers new clues to the victims’ identities and the reason for their deaths. 

Archaeologist Kimberly Bowes, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, studied groups of coins found alongside bodies, as well as coins in savings boxes, for an article on Roman savings habits in the Journal of Roman Archaeology. 

The dataset, drawn from the publication of a detailed inventory of Pompeiian coins finds, the Rinvenimenti monetali a Pompei, comprised 431 different hoards: 206 from skeletons and 225 from savings boxes in homes and shops, with a total of 25,430 coins.

She reckoned that the coins found on individuals would be a good proxy for their liquid savings, as it was likely they would have sought to gather all their portable wealth ahead of fleeing, or in case they later had to flee.

Bowes found that most people were carrying sums of money that were “astonishingly low” and there was a large gulf between this majority and a minority carrying significantly larger sums. Nevertheless, even these sums were trivial relative to the price of assets such as property, land and slaves. 

“Most of the people had very, very little. When you start looking at where these very poor people are found, it’s surprising, because they’re found in the largest houses. That led me to speculate that these were enslaved people, which makes a lot of sense, given who would be asked to stay behind over the 17 hours that it took for Pompeii to be destroyed? You asked your slaves to stay behind.”

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Gruesome. Imagine the doubts for those tasked with staying behind: there probably weren’t that many ways out, so defection could be discovered quickly. But what would staying behind be like? Would you feel briefly safer inside the house?
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This 10-second test could measure middle-age people’s risk of death, study says • BGR

Joshua Hawkins:

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A new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine posits that a 10-second balance test could help measure your overall risk of dying.

The study was conducted by several scientists using a pool of 1,702 people aged between 51 to 75 years. They examined data about the participants taken between 2008 and 2020 and measured how well they could perform a 10-second one-legged balance test. The results, they say, could allow doctors to better measure your risk of death.

The 10-second test requires the participant to stand on one leg, with the free leg resting on the back of the standing leg. They then place their hands at their side and try to stay still. During the study, the participants were given three chances to complete the balance test. Around 20% were unable to complete the test. The number of people unable to complete it also increased with age.

Of participants age between 51 and 55, 5% failed, while 8% between 56 and 60 failed. From there, 18% of people aged 61 to 65 failed, and then 37% of those 66 to 70 years of age. Finally, 54% of people between 71 and 75 years of age failed the test to measure their risk of death.

The researchers found that most who failed the balance test tended to have higher body weights, or suffered from cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes, or high cholesterol. Additionally, after they adjusted the findings for age, sex, and existing health conditions, the scientists believe those who failed had an 84% increased risk of death over the next seven years.

But how does it work? …Balance is an important aspect of our body. And many doctors believe that balance can be a good indicator of how healthy a person is. Since the test only takes 10 seconds to complete it isn’t a bad way to measure the possible risk of death. However, it also isn’t going to tell you any in-depth information about your risk of any diseases or other issues.

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The “limitations” part of the study (at the end) allows that much more work needs to be done, but it may be indicative. I think that British doctors have been doing a form of this test for quite some time, though possibly it was only a cohort study tracking people as they aged. Anyhow, I tried it: seems you’re stuck with me for a while yet.
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Goldman Sachs leading investor group to buy Celsius assets: sources • Coindesk

Tracy Wang:

»

Goldman Sachs is looking to raise $2bn from investors to buy up distressed assets from troubled crypto lender Celsius, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The proposed deal would allow investors to buy up Celsius’ assets at potentially big discounts in the event of a bankruptcy filing, the people said.

Goldman Sachs appears to be gauging interest and soliciting commitments from Web3 crypto funds, funds specializing in distressed assets and traditional financial institutions with ample cash on hand, according to a person familiar with the situation. The assets, most likely cryptocurrencies having to be sold on the cheap, would then likely be managed by participants in the fundraising push.

Celsius has tapped restructuring advisory firm Alvarez & Marsal, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday afternoon.

Goldman Sachs did not respond to a request for comment.

Celsius, which had more than $8bn lent out to clients and $12bn in assets under management as of May of this year, abruptly announced on June 12 that it would stop withdrawals from its platform, citing “extreme market conditions.” The disclosure exacerbated those conditions, briefly sending bitcoin’s price below $20,000.

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No customers’ yachts. Not even customers’ apes. No indication whether those who put their money in will get any part of it back.
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How period tracking apps and data privacy fit into a post-Roe v. Wade climate • NPR

Rina Tochinsky:

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Millions of people use apps to help track their menstrual cycles. Flo, which bills itself as the most popular period and cycle tracking app, has amassed 43 million active users. Another app, Clue, claims 12 million monthly active users.

The personal health data stored in these apps is among the most intimate types of information a person can share. And it can also be telling. The apps can show when their period stops and starts and when a pregnancy stops and starts.

That has privacy experts on edge because this data — whether subpoenaed or sold to a third party — could be used to suggest that someone has had or is considering an abortion.

“We’re very concerned in a lot of advocacy spaces about what happens when private corporations or the government can gain access to deeply sensitive data about people’s lives and activities,” says Lydia X. Z. Brown, a policy counsel with the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “Especially when that data could put people in vulnerable and marginalized communities at risk for actual harm.”

At least 26 states were “certain or likely” to ban abortions if the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. Now, it’s a reality.

…The Flo app has come under fire for sharing data before.

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with the popular fertility and period-tracking app amid allegations that it misled users about the disclosure of their personal health data. The settlement followed a 2019 Wall Street Journal investigation that found the app informed Facebook when a user was having their period or if they informed the app that they intended to get pregnant.

Under the settlement, the FTC said Flo must undergo an independent review of its privacy policy and obtain user permissions before sharing personal health information. Flo did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

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Lot of app deletions going on. Lot of Filofaxes being bought.
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Meta clamps down on internal discussion of Roe v. Wade’s overturning • The New York Times

Mike Isaac and Ryan Mac:

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Meta told its workers on Friday not to openly discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion on wide-reaching communication channels inside the company, people with knowledge of the situation said.

Managers at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, cited a company policy that put “strong guardrails around social, political and sensitive conversations” in the workplace, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. They said managers had pointed employees to a May 12 company memo, which was issued after a draft opinion on potentially overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked from the Supreme Court.

In the May 12 memo, which was obtained by The New York Times, Meta said that “discussing abortion openly at work has a heightened risk of creating a hostile work environment,” so it had taken “the position that we would not allow open discussion.”

The policy has led to frustration and anger, the people said. On Friday, some contacted colleagues and managers to express their dissent with the company’s stance. Managers were advised to be empathetic but neutral on the topic, while messages that violated the policy in team chats were removed, two people said. In the past, Meta employees often used internal communication forums to discuss sociopolitical issues and current events.

Ambroos Vaes, a Meta software engineer, said in a post on LinkedIn that he was saddened that employees were “not allowed” to widely discuss the Supreme Court ruling.

«

Not widely known that internally, Facebook uses (a form of) Facebook, which means that things that get a reaction get amplified. Which logically means that if discussion about this obviously polarising topic were allowed to run rampant, it would lead to the sort of strife internally that, well, you see externally on Facebook.

Can’t really disagree with this one.
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How will TV and streaming adapt to TikTok? • Vox

Peter Kafka:

»

The people who bring you video entertainment could be in for a rough time: A looming recession could hurt their advertising revenue and consumer spending on subscription TV streaming services. But they’re also facing a foe that has nothing to do with the economic cycle: TikTok is coming for their eyeballs.

The free, Chinese-owned video-sharing service sometimes gets described as a social network, but that description masks what it really is: a colossally powerful entertainment app that keeps viewers glued to an endless stream of clips.

And TikTok is getting bigger every day: It now says it has 1 billion monthly users, but even that number likely understates its importance, because TikTok users spend a lot of time on TikTok — a year ago, the company was telling advertisers its users were spending nearly 90 minutes a day on the app. By contrast, US TV and streaming watchers were spending nearly five hours a day watching their shows and movies — but TV skews very old, and TikTok is very young. You can’t ascribe TV’s long-running viewer losses to a new app, but it’s very easy to see how it’s going to make it harder than ever to train young would-be viewers to watch traditional TV or even streaming.

“It is safe to say that TikTok has rapidly grown to be one of — if not the — largest social/communication/video apps in America in terms of time spent,” analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in a report last week.

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Ignore TikTok at your peril.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified