You can imagine Bugs Bunny without a background, but have you ever considered the Looney Tunes backgrounds without the characters? CC-licensed photo by coyote521coyote521 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.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft want to kill the password with “Passkey” standard • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

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The first Thursday of May is apparently “World Password Day,” and to celebrate, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are launching a “joint effort” to kill the password. The major OS vendors want to “expand support for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium.”

The standard is being called either a “multi-device FIDO credential” or just a “passkey.” Instead of a long string of characters, this new scheme would have the app or website you’re logging in to push a request to your phone for authentication. From there, you’d need to unlock the phone, authenticate with some kind of pin or biometric, and then you’re on your way. This sounds like a familiar system for anyone with phone-based two-factor authentication set up, but this is a replacement for the password rather than an additional factor.

There’s a graphic showing the user interaction.

Some push 2FA systems work over the internet, but this new FIDO scheme works over Bluetooth. As the whitepaper explains, “Bluetooth requires physical proximity, which means that we now have a phishing-resistant way to leverage the user’s phone during authentication.” Bluetooth has a terrible reputation for compatibility, and I’m not sure “security” has ever been a real concern, but the FIDO alliance notes that Bluetooth is just “to verify physical proximity” and that the actual sign-in process “does not depend on Bluetooth security properties.”

Of course, that means both devices will need Bluetooth on board, which is a given for most smartphones and laptops but could be a tough ask for older desktop PCs.

…The FIDO blog post says: “These new capabilities are expected to become available across Apple, Google, and Microsoft platforms over the course of the coming year.” Apple, which seems to have started the whole “passkey” trend, already has a system up and running in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, but it’s not compatible with other platforms yet.

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Promising? Yet these things always have a Zeno’s Arrow feel to them. Plus there’s always the question of how you set up an account on some password-demanding service in the first place, and so on: the ouroboros of security authentication.
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Elon Musk hates ads. Twitter needs them. That may be a problem • The New York Times

Tiffany Hsu and Kate Conger:

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numerous advertising executives say they’re willing to move their money elsewhere, especially if Mr. Musk removes the safeguards that allowed Twitter to remove racist rants and conspiracy theories. An advertiser exodus would weaken the company, underscoring the difficulty of balancing Mr. Musk’s vision of Twitter as a haven for free speech with the business relationships that keep it going.

But Twitter’s co-founder and at least some investors who joined Mr. Musk’s bid have rejected the need for advertising and insisted that the company needs to break away from it. Twitter’s status as “a public company solely reliant on the advertising business model” added to its problems with bots, abuse and censorship, said Ben Horowitz, a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which is investing $400m in the effort to take Twitter private.

Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder, agreed. “This is true. It needs cover for a while,” Mr. Dorsey said in a tweet responding to Mr. Horowitz.

Advertisers said such a shift would hurt Twitter. “At the end of the day, it’s not the brands who need to be concerned because they’ll just spend their budgets elsewhere — it’s Twitter that needs to be concerned,” said David Jones, a longtime advertising executive and the chief executive of the Brandtech Group, a marketing technology company. “If you said to me that TikTok went away, that would be a disaster. But Twitter going away? Yeah, whatever.”

…Twitter representatives have also noted that it would probably be months, if not more than a year before any serious changes would go into effect, advertising executives said.

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I disagree with the headline. Twitter’s present revenue is about $4.8bn annually. Now, imagine that Twitter charges the world’s 200-odd governments $2m per month to tweet on the service. Tweet what you like, won’t be interfered with (hello, China). That’s $4.8bn there, for what is a tiny running cost to a government. And if they don’t pay, then their government reps can’t be on it. (He’s said it should remain free to “casual” users, but ministers etc wouldn’t be “casual”.) That would focus minds. What government would want to look so cheap? Or grade the subscription by GDP per capita.

Or find governments and big businesses – 2 million of them – who you charge $200 per month. Or 4 million who you charge $100 per month. It’s peanuts to them. And he wouldn’t need the advertising. Though he might need to keep the content moderation to keep the businesses happy.

Equally, Twitter is so, so terrible at targeting ads. It could do that so, so much better.

(Americans can’t see past adverts, can they? Such a strange myopia.)
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Twitter’s bubbles are a blight on British politics • Financial Times

Sebastian Payne:

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For members of parliament, Twitter has become a constant focus group on what (allegedly) matters: more immediate than scavenging through postbags, far less time-consuming than knocking on doors. Finding out what colleagues, journalists and voters think has never been easier. Yet Twitter is phenomenally unrepresentative. According to the London School of Economics, Twitter has 16mn UK users and the largest demographic is 18 to 29 year olds. During the last election, the Hansard Society reckoned Twitter skewed significantly towards pro-Remain Labour party supporters.

Its immediacy, however, is one of the chief reasons politics has such a shrunken horizon. Issues come and go within hours. When a controversy or gaffe starts trending, parties are forced to react. Take the government’s rail plan published last November: nearly £100bn, the biggest investment in British railways in decades. Twitter cried betrayal because the eastern leg of High Speed 2 was paused; the rest of the announcement was lost.

Serious policy debate is futile. Shouting produces the most clicks. And the damage is clear. Twitter convinced Labour MPs they should nominate Jeremy Corbyn to contest the leadership to “widen the debate”. After last year’s Hartlepool by-election, Twitter prompted a crisis for current leader Sir Keir Starmer, whose reshuffle could be seen collapsing in real time. The vicious army of “cybernats” — extreme online Scottish secessionists — are a poor advert for the independence cause.

…In conversations with party insiders who will run the next general election campaigns, I was struck that strategists cited Twitter as the biggest impediment to their team winning. One figure close to Starmer says, “If I could just do one thing in the party, I would get every Labour MP off Twitter.”

…On the Tory side, the party has discounted Twitter for winning votes. One aide said, “It’s only useful to shape the media conversation.”

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Very much what I found with Social Warming: politicians with the largest social media followings tended to be the most extreme, and do the least in terms of passing laws, etc (certainly in the US).
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Looney Tunes without Looney Tunes: existential, surreal, and creepy backgrounds • Design You Trust

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Many of us enjoyed watching Looney Tunes when we were kids – they were funny, interesting, and unbelievably groovy.

But sometimes, because of the madness on the screen, we didn’t have time to see even a fifth of the important component of “Looney Tunes” – the backdrops, painstakingly and meticulously drawn by artists for each episode. And therein lies a substantial part of the fun!

The Instagram account Looney Tunes Backgrounds has compiled over 900 backdrops from the legendary cartoon, going all the way back to the ’30s, so now we can all take a thoughtful look at them. What’s interesting is that without the flickering back and forth of cartoons, these painted locations look like creepy, existential spaces, empty though colorful graveyards where someone’s childhood died.

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They are indeed surreal and creepy. There’s a particular quality about them I can’t quite put my finger on. Partly it’s the bleakness: the only populated one (on this page) has a lone robot. It’s not as bleak as Garfield minus Garfield, but it’s definitely strange.
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Facebook deliberately caused havoc in Australia to influence new law, whistleblowers say • WSJ

Keach Hagey, Mike Cherney and Jeff Horwitz:

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Last year when Facebook blocked news in Australia in response to potential legislation making platforms pay publishers for content, it also took down the pages of Australian hospitals, emergency services and charities. It publicly called the resulting chaos “inadvertent.”

Internally, the pre-emptive strike was hailed as a strategic masterstroke.

Facebook documents and testimony filed to U.S. and Australian authorities by whistleblowers allege that the social-media giant deliberately created an overly broad and sloppy process to take down pages—allowing swaths of the Australian government and health services to be caught in its web just as the country was launching Covid vaccinations.

The goal, according to the whistleblowers and documents, was to exert maximum negotiating leverage over the Australian Parliament, which was voting on the first law in the world that would require platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for content.

Despite saying it was targeting only news outlets, the company deployed an algorithm for deciding what pages to take down that it knew was certain to affect more than publishers, according to the documents and people familiar with the matter.

It didn’t notify affected pages in advance they would be blocked or provide a system for them to appeal once they were.

…People familiar with Facebook’s thinking said executives knew its process for classifying news for the removal of pages was so broad that it would likely hit government pages and other social services. They decided to take that route because Facebook was afraid a narrower definition might lead it to run afoul of the law, which contained a nondiscrimination clause barring platforms from carrying links to some news publishers but not others, the people said.

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So Facebook has a just-about excuse, but knew things would be bad. A company out of control.
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Chromebook market share hits lowest point in five years • Strategy Analytics

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Chirag Upadhyay, industry analyst said, “ChromeOS shipments suffered as education demand continued to slow down and consumer upgrades for Chromebook were at the lowest point, even compared to pre-pandemic levels. The Chromebook business is very small but remains very important for top vendors, as they are keeping good inventory before education demand kicks off in Q2 2022 in main markets. Chromebook is still making an impact in new markets albeit slowly as the public sector look to spend towards cheaper devices for education.”

Eric Smith, director, Connected Computing added, “The total notebook market was only down 7% compared to last year, demand for commercial business stayed strong for Windows 11 PCs and MacBooks powered by M1 chipset, as most enterprise and SMB clients are still choosing hybrid work options and spending extra for quality products. Dell and Apple were good examples of the growth segments of the market: premium Windows notebooks and MacBooks with the M1 chipset.”

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Only looks at laptops, where it says Apple shipped 6.1m (which suggests total shipments of 7.6m, based on 80% of its shipments being laptops). No surprise that Chrome is in retreat: schools are going back and people have bought their children all the laptops they’ll need. Yet another of those left exposed when the pandemic tide went out. (Hello Zoom, Peloton..)
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Watch a swarm of drones autonomously track a human through a dense forest • The Verge

James Vincent:

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Scientists from China’s Zhejiang University have unveiled a drone swarm capable of navigating through a dense bamboo forest without human guidance.

The group of 10 palm-sized drones communicate with one another to stay in formation, sharing data collected by on-board depth-sensing cameras to map their surroundings. This method means that if the path in front of one drone is blocked, it can use information collected by its neighbors to plot a new route. The researchers note that this technique can also be used by the swarm to track a human walking through the same environment. If one drone loses sight of the target, others are able to pick up the trail.

In the future, write the scientists in a paper published in the journal Science Robotics, drone swarms like this could be used for disaster relief and ecological surveys.

“In natural disasters like earthquakes and floods, a swarm of drones can search, guide, and deliver emergency supplies to trapped people,” they write. “For example, in wildfires, agile multicopters can quickly collect information from a close view of the front line without the risk of human injury.”

«

Sure, you could use it in natural disasters. I feel it might instead get used for surveillance and tracking – of criminals, the accused, the suspected.

But, also, this is inevitable.
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Every Bay Area house party • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander:

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A man with a buzz-cut. His shirt had an incomprehensible symbol – his favorite band’s symbol? His company’s logo? A chaos magic sigil? and he was carrying a half-decayed slice of pizza.

“I’m Ramchandra,” he said. “I’m working for a fintech startup. Love to hear from anyone else in the business!”

“I’m Bob, good to meet you. Who do you work for?”

“You know ViraCoin?”

“No, tell me about them.”

“New crypto. You mine it by promoting about it. Once every eight minutes, a decentralized algorithm searches for tweets containing the word ‘ViraCoin’ with a positive sentiment score, weights them by number of likes, and then picks one at random to award a ViraCoin to.”

“Sounds…awful.”

“No, you don’t understand. This is just the first step. Once we make it super-big, we’ll introduce other things into the algorithm. Charities. Political causes. We’ll have millions of people competing to praise UNICEF in order to get that next million-dollar ViraCoin drop. If you think about it, all problems are caused by lack of awareness. We’re an at-scale solution to awareness. Solve that, and you solve poverty, inequality, racism…”

You wander off.

«

But that is only the second annoying guest, and there are plenty more of them (they aren’t all crypto, don’t worry.)
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How much data does iPlayer use? More than BBC says! • The Big Tech Question

Barry Collins:

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The BBC has a support page for watching BBC iPlayer on mobile data. On that, it claims that “an hour-long TV programme will typically use 225MB of data.”

In my tests, that is a woeful underestimate.

I streamed a 30-minute episode of Here We Go over a 4G connection using the BBC iPlayer app for Android. In that short time, it used 411MB of data, which is around four times as much data as the BBC website suggested.

Therefore, be careful if you’re on a mobile data plan with a tight data cap, because you could find that watching shows on iPlayer whilst you’re out and about eats through a lot more data than you might expect.

It’s also worth noting that (on Android, at least) I couldn’t find any way of adjusting the streaming quality, so you’re pretty much stuck with whichever rate the iPlayer app decides. In my tests, the bitrate looked adaptive, which means the quality of the video is automatically altered depending on the available mobile data bandwidth. So, it is possible that some streaming sessions will use less data than I observed.

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Forewarned is forearmed. For a lot of people, that single program would be a significant proportion of their monthly data allowance.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The computers in the Apple TV+ series Severance date from the 1970s – yet have a strangely modern feel. CC-licensed photo by Marcin Wichary 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. Flavoured like no other. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How to get an abortion and keep your personal information safe • Gizmodo

Shoshana Wodinsky:

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Here’s a cautionary tale: in 2015, a Massachusetts pro-life group tapped a local digital ad company, Copley Advertising, to set up digital boundaries (or “geofences”) around Planned Parenthood branches and other reproductive health clinics in nearby cities. When people walked into these buildings, phone in hand (or pocket), those geofences registered that device crossing the line via mobile data like GPS or those aforementioned bluetooth broadcast signals.

Once these women were inside the fence, Copley pummeled their devices with ads for “abortion alternatives,” like adoption. Roughly 800,000 women were targeted by the campaign, and these ads kept playing for weeks after they left the clinic. And because of the way mobile ads work, every ad that played sent back a pretty sizable amount of data about these women’s devices directly back to the agency, and the pro-life group that contracted it.

Two years later, Boston Attorney General Maura Healey sued and quickly settled with the ad agency on the condition that the agency never geotarget clinics in the state with its creepy ads again. The practice remains legal for others, though, and those marketing pro-life “abortion alternatives” still make use of it.

The easiest way to avoid being one of those statistics is making your phone as unrecognizable as possible. A good first step is to reset your phone’s mobile ad ID: It’s quick and easy on both Apple and Android. That’s what most brokers use to identify your personal device. But honestly, that isn’t good enough.

Thanks to growing (albeit imperfect) privacy legislature in the States and moves from companies like Apple to tamp down tracking, adtech middlemen are getting wilier. Even if your phone has a shiny new identifier, brokers can still re-identify your device using details about your mobile browser, or other info baked into the hardware like your phone’s International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number. If brokers see two different mobile ad ID’s but the same IMEI all tied to one device, then it is not hard to discern it’s the same device. Sorry.

If you want to be airtight about you anonymity, your best bet is to never use any of your regular devices anywhere nearby or inside a Planned Parenthood, or any similar clinics.

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If this were about some country in the Middle East, or South America, you’d probably tut at the lack of scruples and the religiously driven vendetta against women’s rights and medicine. But no, it’s America.
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Elon Musk plans to take Twitter public a few years after buyout • WSJ

Cara Lombardo and Eliot Brown:

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Elon Musk, who has agreed to take Twitter private in a $44bn deal, has told potential investors he could return the social-media company to public ownership after just a few years.

Mr. Musk said he plans to stage an initial public offering of Twitter in as little as three years of buying it, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal is expected to close later this year, subject to conditions including the approval of Twitter shareholders and regulators, the company has said.

Mr. Musk, the Tesla Inc. chief, has been speaking to investors such as private-equity firms, which could help lower the $21bn he plans to kick in to help pay for the deal. The rest of the money is coming from loans. One firm considering participating is Apollo Global Management Inc., The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Private-equity firms often take companies private with an eye toward fixing them up outside of the spotlight and then taking them public again within five years or so. Mr. Musk’s signal that he plans to do something similar could help assure potential investors that he would work quickly to improve Twitter’s business operations and profitability.

«

As Matt Levine of Bloomberg pointed out in his daily newsletter, this is barking. Musk (and the board) are telling existing shareholders: take $54.20, it’s not going to get any better (even though it was last year; the offer price is about the same as the IPO price).

And then they’re telling would-be shareholders: get in, this thing is going places. $54.20 is just the starting line.

They can’t both be true. Musk is only human; anything he can do could be done by a sufficiently engaged management.

Another idea Musk has apparently floated is to charge governments and commercial users a “slight cost” to use the service. Run the numbers, and he’d need either to charge a lot of users, or some users a lot, to make serious inroads to revenue. (A million dollars a month to 200 governments gives you $2.4bn. Alternatively, a million users $200 per month; same revenue. Twitter’s annual revenue is about $5bn.)
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Brands should force Twitter to uphold content policies under Musk, advocacy groups say • CNN

Brian Fung:

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Some of the nation’s biggest brands including Coca-Cola, Disney and Kraft are facing calls to boycott Twitter if the company’s soon-to-be owner, billionaire Elon Musk, rolls back content moderation policies limiting hate speech and election misinformation.

In a letter sent to brands Tuesday ahead of the 2022 NewFronts digital advertising conference, more than two dozen civil society groups said marketers should secure commitments from Twitter to retain its most critical policies, including on civic integrity and hateful conduct, and threaten to withdraw funding if Twitter does not comply.

“As top advertisers on Twitter (TWTR), your brand risks association with a platform amplifying hate, extremism, health misinformation, and conspiracy theorists,” the letter said, adding: “Your ad dollars can either fund Musk’s vanity project or hold him to account.”

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In an investor filing Monday, Twitter told advertisers “we have no planned changes to our commitment to brand safety” but that the company “cannot speculate on changes Elon Musk may make post closing.”

«

Having read the letter, I think Musk would be fairly happy to do what it asks apart from the bit about “Keep accounts including those of public figures and politicians that were removed for egregious violations of Twitter Rules… off the platform”. Unfortunately that’s item 1 of their demands.

Of the 26 organisations, I’ve heard of three of them. Musk tweeted in response: “Who funds these organisations that want to control your access to information? Let’s investigate.”

The Daily Mail makes a rather desperate attempt to claimwho funds them is “George Soros, Clinton and Obama staffers and European governments”. As subtle as a snooker ball in a sock. (“European governments”. Honestly.)
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The xenotransplant patient who died received a heart infected with a pig virus • MIT Technology Review

Antonio Regalado:

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David Bennett Sr. was near death in January when he received a genetically edited pig heart in a pioneering between-species transplant [“xenotransplant”] that has been hailed as a success—and was, at first.

A few days after his heart was replaced with one from a pig, Bennett was sitting up in bed. His new heart was pumping fantastically and performing like a “rock star,” according to his transplant surgeon, Bartley Griffith of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

But about 40 days later Bennett, who was 57, took a turn for the worse. After two months he was dead. In a statement released by the university in March, a spokesperson said there was “no obvious cause identified at the time of his death” and that a full report was pending.

Now MIT Technology Review has learned that Bennett’s heart was affected by porcine cytomegalovirus, a preventable infection that is linked to devastating effects on transplants.  

The presence of the pig virus and the desperate efforts to defeat it were described by Griffith during a webinar streamed online by the American Society of Transplantation on April 20. The issue is now a subject of wide discussion among specialists, who think the infection was a potential contributor to Bennett’s death and a possible reason why the heart did not last longer.

…Joachim Denner of the Institute of Virology at the Free University of Berlin… says the solution to the problem is more accurate testing. The US team appears to have tested the pig’s snout for the virus, but often it is lurking deeper in the tissues.

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The big, big, big concern is that you do a xenotransplant, and that uncovers a virus (or, worse, retrovirus – think HIV) which turns out to be highly infectious, and dangerous. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that one would turn up in the first xenotransplant. Still concerning, though.

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Exclusive: Sonos is about to introduce its own voice assistant • The Verge

Chris Welch:

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Sonos is preparing to introduce its own voice assistant service within the next few weeks, according to people familiar with the company’s plans. The voice functionality will let customers play and control music on Sonos’ whole-home audio platform.

…At launch, Sonos Voice will work with Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Deezer, and the company’s own Sonos Radio. Spotify and Google’s YouTube Music aren’t yet on board. In keeping with Sonos’ interest in privacy, the feature will not record user audio commands or relay them to the cloud for processing. “Hey Sonos” will be the wake word for Sonos Voice Control, and the company’s internal tests show it to be quicker than competing assistant services at core music tasks.

Sonos declined to comment for this story, citing its policy of not commenting on rumours or speculation. But through various job listings for the voice product and an as-yet-unannounced “Home Theater OS,” the company has offered a glimpse at a future where it will put a much greater emphasis on software and try to establish itself as a central hub for streaming entertainment — potentially moving beyond audio to incorporate video as well. Patrick Spence, Sonos’ chief executive officer, has hinted at those objectives in interviews. “You’re always investing ahead of the curve,” he said on the Decoder podcast. “We’re hiring people in software to go into new areas that we’re not in today. It’s easier in hindsight to understand that a company has been working on all of these great things. We just didn’t see it at that moment in time.”

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US-only to begin with. Sonos has been forced to pivot multiple times from its initial mission of “wireless music in every room”. (Or maybe it’s more like a lunge, because it remains essentially true to that mission.) Home theatre, its own “radio”, and now voice assistants.

I’ll be happy with changing the volume.
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Stories behind some of the weird stuff on ‘Severance’ • The New York Times

Gina Cherelus:

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[The company in the Apple TV+ series Severance,] Lumon’s brightly lit midcentury-style office presents an eerie contrast to the dreary outside world. And the objects within it — including the branded pens and erasers, as well as the crystal cubes laser-engraved with employees’ faces — underscore the entrapment the “severed” workers begin to feel as they learn about the company’s shadowy practices.

“We wanted to curate that world to be slightly off — not fake, slightly off,” [prop master Catherine] Miller said. Here, she explains her process for sourcing and making some of those items.

At the center of Macrodata Refinement’s spare work space is a diamond-shaped desk that cost more than $100,000 to make. Ms. Miller supplied the hardware and clutter seen on top of it.

To find a vintage computer that would fit the office’s aesthetic, she drove from her home in New Jersey to the Rhode Island Computer Museum to browse through its warehouse. She returned with 13 monitors, including a Commodore and Apple’s original Macintosh, to show the team, including Dan Erickson, the show’s creator, and Ben Stiller, an executive producer.

“Ben gravitated toward the Data General Dasher, which is lower and not as tall of a monitor and terminal and has a swivel ability,” Ms. Miller said.

Her team had to fabricate four replicas of the computer and wire the monitors so they could display images. The accompanying keyboards feature an Easter egg that Ms. Miller said has become “Reddit lore.”

“The keyboard doesn’t have an escape key on purpose because the people down there on the severed floor can’t ever escape,” she said. “It’s subconsciously creating and supporting the world that our story is living in.”

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Other details of the series – which, if you haven’t seen it, is fantastic – have an equally unsettling, reality-adjacent-but-orthogonal feel. The first season ends on a perfect cliffhanger. And how nice for Data General, alive again in the multiverse.
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Bolsonaro-supporting Brazilian Telegram channels are wild and sinister • The New York Times

Vanessa Barbara:

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“Fake news is part of our lives,” President Jair Bolsonaro said last year, while receiving a communication award from his own Ministry of Communications. (It doesn’t get more Orwellian, does it?) “The internet is a success,” he went on. “We don’t need to regulate it. Let the people feel free.”

You can see his point. After all, fake news produced a headline supposedly in The Washington Post that read, “Bolsonaro is the best Brazilian president of all times” — and claimed that a recent pro-Bolsonaro motorcade rally made the Guinness World Records. But my plunge into the country’s Telegram groups revealed something more sinister than doctored articles. Unregulated, extreme and unhinged, these groups serve to slander the president’s enemies and conduct a shadow propaganda operation. No wonder Mr. Bolsonaro is so keen to maintain a free-for-all atmosphere.

The chief target is Mr. Bolsonaro’s main opponent in October’s elections, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In medium-size pro-Bolsonaro groups, such as “The Patriots” (11,782 subscribers) and “Bolsonaro 2022 support group” (25,737 subscribers), the focus is unrelenting. Users exhaustively shared a digitally altered picture of a shirtless Mr. da Silva holding hands with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela as if they had been a homosexual couple in the 1980s. (Do I need to say it’s false?)

The claims are endless, and outlandish: Mr. da Silva is sponsored by drug traffickers; he will persecute churches; he is against middle-class Brazilians having more than one television at home. People use what they can get. An obviously satirical video — which shows an actor, in the guise of an attorney for Mr. da Silva’s Workers’ Party, confessing to electoral fraud — is paraded as cold hard proof. The name of the attorney, which translates as something like “I Mock Them,” should have given the game away. But in their rush to demonize, Mr. Bolsonaro’s followers aren’t exactly given to close reading.

Underlying this frenetic activity is barely disguised desperation.

«

Have to say, compared to Brazil’s population, those aren’t big channels. The effect is downstream, of course: ideas slip from one to another, and they can cross to WhatsApp groups, which are also gigantic in Brazil, and in 2016 were a huge source and transmission method for disinformation. (Thanks G for the link.)_
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NFT sales are flatlining • WSJ

Paul Vigna:

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The NFT market is collapsing.

The sale of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, fell to a daily average of about 19,000 this week, a 92% decline from a peak of about 225,000 in September, according to the data website NonFungible.  

The number of active wallets in the NFT market fell 88% to about 14,000 last week from a high of 119,000 in November. NFTs are bitcoin-like digital tokens that act like a certificate of ownership that live on a blockchain.

Rising interest rates have crushed risky bets across the financial markets—and NFTs are among the most speculative. Since hitting highs in November, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite has fallen 23% and bitcoin has fallen by 43%. The Federal Reserve is slated to raise rates this week and next month. As the central bank’s easy money policies wind down, investors have turned to more defensive stocks like consumer staples.

Many NFT owners are finding their investments are worth significantly less than when they bought them.

An NFT of the first tweet from Twitter Inc. co-founder Jack Dorsey sold in March 2021 for $2.9m to Sina Estavi, the chief executive of Malaysia-based blockchain company Bridge Oracle. 

Earlier this year, Mr. Estavi put the NFT up for auction. He didn’t receive any bids above $14,000, which he didn’t accept. Mr. Estavi said failure of the auction wasn’t a sign that the market is deteriorating, but was just a normal fluctuation that could occur in any market. The NFT market is one that is still developing, he said, and it is impossible to predict how it will look in a few years.

“I will never regret buying it because this NFT is my capital,” he said.

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Wonder what the next scam around this concept will be. What’s the next variation on “you own this copy of an infinitely reproducible image”?
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Depression and addiction are plaguing crypto traders • The Washington Post

Pranshu Verma:

»

When Joanna Garzilli was in Venice, Calif., for a holiday party in 2017, the bikini-clad dancers were on stilts, the drinks were flowing and the conversation was about one thing: cryptocurrency. It seemed so sexy, she remembered thinking. Lured by the glamorous crowd, she later invested and struck it big: an $85,000 profit from a crypto coin called GRT, bringing on dreams of life at the Ritz-Carlton Residences.

But soon, her trades became reckless, she said. Garzilli staked 90% of her life savings into a coin that lost her tens of thousands of unrealized profits in days. She made risky investments into viral meme currency and constantly checked her trading apps to see how much money she’d made or lost. Her nights became sleepless, but Garzilli kept chasing the next big payday.

“Crypto is like going into Hades,” she said. “Crypto can bring out the darkest parts of ourselves if we have an addictive personality; and I have a very addictive personality.”

…Cryptocurrency has characteristics that make it more prone to addiction than sports betting, gambling and traditional financial investing, according to addiction scholars. Crypto can be traded around-the-clock, unlike most stocks. People don’t need to drive to a casino to invest in a coin. The volatility in crypto prices, especially alternative currencies like meme coins, can be quick and provide the brain quick feelings of reward. And given crypto’s decentralized nature, it can be easier to hide the financial impacts of addiction.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In a new lawsuit, Apple is suing chip startup Rivos which it says has poached 40 of its staff – and, crucially, intellectual property from their old job. CC-licensed photo by Rob Bulmahn 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Elon Musk winged it with Twitter, and everything else • The New York Times

Ryan Mac, Cade Metz and Kate Conger:

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To a degree unseen in any other mogul, the entrepreneur acts on whim, fancy and the certainty that he is 100% right, according to interviews with more than 30 current and former employees, investors and others who have worked with him. While Mr. Musk has successfully bet on electric cars, space travel and artificial intelligence, he often wings it in the biggest moments, eschews experts and relies almost solely on his own counsel, they said.

To operate this way, Mr. Musk has constructed an insular world of about 10 confidants who mostly agree with him and carry out his bidding. They include his younger brother, Kimbal Musk; Mr. Birchall; Mr. Spiro; and various chiefs of staff. To manage his many ideas, Mr. Musk continuously creates new companies, most of which are structured so that he remains in charge. His trusted lieutenants often work across his far-flung empire of businesses.

Once Mr. Musk has identified each company’s key project — what he calls its “critical path” — he takes over to ensure that his vision is met, controlling the smallest aspects of how the technologies are built and deployed. His brilliance has spawned the world’s most valuable automaker and an innovative rocket company, and it has earned the respect — and fear — of his engineers.

Relying on his small crew and hewing to his own thinking have enabled Mr. Musk to call the shots and conduct himself with few restraints, turning him into a Howard Hughes-like figure of the modern age — even as his seat-of-the-pants methods often create bedlam.

Mr. Musk works in a way that only the “most confident leaders do,” said Tim Draper, a venture capitalist who backed Mr. Musk’s electric automaker, Tesla, and his rocket company, SpaceX. “Think J.F.K., George Washington and Ronald Reagan.”

At a 2018 conference, Mr. Musk explained that he behaved on impulse. It was a lesson he learned more than 25 years ago after founding his first start-up, Zip2, he said.

“I don’t really have a business plan,” he said. “I had a business plan way back in the Zip2 days. But these things are always wrong, so I just didn’t bother with business plans after that.”

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It’s a long piece, but it does tell you what Musk’s advisors (and Musk himself) are like in business. “Mercurial yet determined”, if one were trying to distil it.
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Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board” is a bad title and a worse idea • The Washington Post

Eugene Robinson:

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DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas should pull the plug on the new board. Like, yesterday. And never speak of it again.

The problems begin with the worst name I’ve ever heard the federal government come up with, and that’s saying something. Disinformation Governance Board? To call the unit’s name Orwellian is an insult to George Orwell, who was a masterful prose stylist and who wrote a famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” railing against sins such as “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision.”

I can see how disinformation requires monitoring. I can see how it requires fact-checking and refutation. But governance? How do you govern lies?

Beyond the issue of the name is the still-mystifying question about what the board is supposed to do. At congressional hearings this past week, Mayorkas veered from pitching it as an effort to counteract Russian-style meddling in our elections to portraying it as an effort to protect Spanish-speaking migrants from lies told by the criminals who smuggle them into the country. He failed to make clear exactly how the board was supposed to accomplish either of these tasks.

“I think we probably could have done a better job of communicating what it does and does not do,” Mayorkas said Sunday on CNN.

Where he didn’t do much better.

“What it will do is gather together best practices in addressing the threat of disinformation from foreign state adversaries, from the cartels, and disseminate those best practices to the operators that have been executing in addressing this threat for years,” Mayorkas explained. Perhaps he’d enjoy a nice balsamic vinaigrette to go with that word salad.

He did make clear Sunday that the board is a “small working group,” that it has no “operational authority or capability” and that it will be focused on foreign threats, not domestic ones. If that’s true, why does it need to exist?

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I get the impression that dealing with the pandemic exhausted the Biden administration, and now it’s just flailing.
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UK ministers ditch plans to empower tech regulator • Financial Times

Kate Beioley, George Parker and Jim Pickard:

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The UK is poised to shelve plans to empower a new technology regulator, in a blow to global efforts to curb the dominance of internet companies, including Google and Facebook.

The government’s new legislative programme is not expected to include a bill to provide statutory underpinning to the digital markets unit that is based within the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), said people briefed on the situation.

Without the legislation the UK tech regulator will not be able to set rules for leading internet companies and impose fines on them for breaking those rules.

The government announced plans to set up the digital markets unit in 2020 and said it would be given powers to devise codes of conduct for tech companies and fine those that did not comply up to 10% of annual turnover.

The unit was established in ‘shadow form’ last year and is operating with around 60 staff, but has no powers beyond the Competition and Market Authority’s existing capabilities.

The Queen’s Speech due on May 10, which will outline the government’s legislative programme for the coming year, is not expected to include a bill that would provide the unit with statutory powers.

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This has been portrayed as a Story Of Woe, but a contrary view (Twitter thread) put forward by others is that the regulator was a bad idea because it would make life harder for British startups, restrict competition, and harm consumers. And that this was pointed out to the government, at which point the idea was shelved. So the CMA will keep its regulatory role.
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India and Pakistan heatwave is ‘testing the limits of human survivability’ • CNN

Rhea Mogul, Esha Mitra, Manveena Suri and Sophia Saifi:

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Temperatures in parts of India and Pakistan have reached record levels, putting the lives of millions at risk as the effects of the climate crisis are felt across the subcontinent.

The average maximum temperature for northwest and central India in April was the highest since records began 122 years ago, reaching 35.9ºC and 37.78ºC (96.62ºF and 100ºF) respectively, according to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD).

Last month, New Delhi saw seven consecutive days over 40ºC (104ºF), three degrees above the average temperature for the month of April, according to CNN meteorologists. In some states, the heat closed schools, damaged crops and put pressure on energy supplies, as officials warned residents to remain indoors and keep hydrated.

The heatwave has also been felt by India’s neighbor Pakistan, where the cities of Jacobabad and Sibi in the country’s southeastern Sindh province recorded highs of 47ºC (116.6ºF) on Friday, according to data shared with CNN by Pakistan’s Meteorological Department (PMD). According to the PMD, this was the highest temperature recorded in any city in the Northern Hemisphere on that day.

“This is the first time in decades that Pakistan is experiencing what many call a ‘spring-less year,” Pakistan’s Minister of Climate Change, Sherry Rehman said in a statement.

…experts say the climate crisis will cause more frequent and longer heatwaves, affecting more than a billion people across the two countries.

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The Mayflower Autonomous Ship

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Back in 2016, ProMare Co-Founder Brett Phaneuf attended a meeting to discuss how to recognize the 400th anniversary of the 1620 Mayflower voyage.

A submarine builder by trade and an expert in robotics and underwater systems, Phaneuf didn’t support building another replica. Instead he suggested doing something bold, courageous and new: building a Mayflower for the 21st century.

This futuristic vessel would be powered by AI and drawing on energy from the sun and would be on a global mission of discovery, designed to collect data to help safeguard the future of the ocean. The quest has since expanded to a multicultural and diverse team across 10 countries and three continents and has inspired the support of multiple companies and organizations all over the world.

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Amazing real-time dashboards; it’s currently around the same latitude as the north of Spain. Solar panels in the day, battery by night. Automatic hazard detection.
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Apple lawsuit says ‘stealth’ startup Rivos poached engineers to steal secrets • Reuters via NewsBreak

Blake Brittain:

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Technology startup Rivos Inc allegedly stole Apple’s computer-chip trade secrets after poaching its engineers, Apple said in a lawsuit filed in California federal court.

Apple’s Friday lawsuit said Mountain View, California-based Rivos has hired over 40 of its former employees in the past year to work on competing “system-on-chip” (SoC) technology, and that at least two former Apple engineers took gigabytes of confidential information with them to Rivos.

Rivos is a “stealth” startup that has largely avoided public attention since its founding last year. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Apple declined to comment on the lawsuit.

SoCs are integrated circuits that include several computer components in a single chip, including central processing units and graphic processing units.

Apple said it spent billions of dollars and more than a decade of research on its SoC designs, which have “revolutionized the personal and mobile computing worlds.”

Apple said in the lawsuit that Rivos purposely sought to hire Apple engineers with access to the tech giant’s SoC trade secrets. It named two former engineers, Bhasi Kaithamana and Ricky Wen, who allegedly took thousands of files with SoC designs and other confidential information to Rivos.

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Quite the thing, if Apple can prove it in court. Forty people in a year sounds like a lot? Except we don’t know how many people are in the chip teams at Apple. Would have to be in the hundreds, surely.
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Anchors away • Mike Industries

Mike Davidson formerly worked at Twitter where he built a 100-person design and research team:

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Callousness also happens to be one of the biggest problems with the service itself. People think that Twitter has a Nazi problem. I’m sure there are Nazis on Twitter but for the most part, straight-up Nazi-ism gets dealt with pretty resolutely. The bigger problem has always been people slithering right up to the edge of what the Terms of Service prohibit and making life hell for innocent people.

“So you’re saying I can’t incite violence against this person? Fine. I will just quote-tweet them with something disapproving and my followers will take care of the rest. What?! What did I do?! I’m just exercising my freedom of speech!”

Imagine being a researcher who tweets out a link to a study you’ve worked on for a year, only to be bombarded by thousands of hateful attacks, wishing death upon you. Imagine because of this attack, and the doxxing that might come with it, you need to not just worry about your security on Twitter, but in your own home as well. Your free speech has been effectively silenced by free bullying. To be clear, these things already happen on Twitter, and they are terrible, but the only thing keeping them from happening a lot more often is the care and consideration of the Trust & Safety team at the company.

So in short: more callousness at the company, bad. More callousness on the service, bad.

I’m not sure why we would expect a man who has shown zero ability to empathize with anyone to improve either of those situations. In fact, I think we should expect both to get much, much worse if this transaction ends up going through (which I’m not yet convinced it will).

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Meta’s Project Cambria VR headset likened to ‘a laptop for the face’ • Engadget

Kris Holt:

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Meta plans to release a new high-end virtual reality headset this year, which is codenamed Project Cambria. Some more details about the product, as well as Meta’s VR headset roadmap, have emerged in a report.

Cambria has been described internally as a “laptop for the face” or “Chromebook for the face,” according to The Information. It’s believed to have specs similar to that of a Chromebook and will use Meta’s own VR operating system, which is based on Android. It’s expected to be compatible with web-based tools and services, as well as some Quest apps. However, despite Meta pitching Cambria as a future-of-work device, it may not be able to run native desktop apps that are commonly used by many businesses.

Cambria is said to have high-resolution image quality. This could allow wearers to clearly read text, so they’d be able to send emails or code while wearing the headset. In other words, it may be viable for professional purposes.

Cambria will provide wearers with a view of their surroundings using outward-facing cameras. This feature, called full-color passthrough, will allow for mixed-reality experiences. When it announced Cambria in October 2021, Meta said the headset will include eye-tracking and facial expression recognition features. Users’ avatars in the likes of Horizon Worlds and Workrooms will reportedly mirror their expressions and where they’re looking.

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They really need a better phrase than “laptop for the face”, which sounds like a cross between The Matrix and Alien. Also, what about people who wear spectacles?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The US doesn’t have as wide a variety of crisp flavours as many other countries. Why is that, exactly, for such a large country? CC-licensed photo by Charles Hutchins 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. What holiday? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

(If you weren’t reading your email yesterday, you missed yesterday’s email/web post, which included stuff such as Jony Ive’s last days at Apple, why “vampire devices” are overblown, polarisation in the US, tractors stolen by Russia from Ukraine disabled remotely, and more.)

EU claims Apple breaking competition law over contactless payments • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

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EU regulators have charged Apple with breaking competition law by limiting rivals’ access to technology that is key to making contactless payments, unfairly benefiting its own Apple Pay service.

The European Commission said on Monday that Apple “sets the rules” on its closed platform and expressed concern that it has been limiting access to technology called near field communication (NFC), which rivals need for tap-and-go payments to be made in stores using mobile wallets.

“On a preliminary basis, we have found that Apple abused its dominant position,” said Margrethe Vestager, the commission’s executive vice-president in charge of competition policy.

“Apple restricted access to key inputs that are necessary to develop and run mobile payments apps, so-called ‘mobile wallets’. Evidence on our file indicates that some developers did not go ahead with their plans as they were not able to reach iPhone users.”

The commission said the Silicon Valley company’s Apple Pay service is “by far the largest NFC-based mobile wallet on the market”.

“The preliminary conclusion we reached today relates to mobile payments in shops,” said Vestager. “By excluding others from the game, Apple has unfairly shielded its Apple Pay wallet from competition. If proven, this behaviour would amount to abuse of a dominant position, which is illegal under our rules.”

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This is the EU’s press release, which says Apple “abused its dominant position in markets for mobile wallets on iOS devices”. That’s a rather narrow market definition, even though the EU also says that it’s dominant (which usually means 40% or more). Apple’s share of the EU smartphone market can’t be 40%, but maybe it’s getting that way (or further) for active NFC systems.

That’s prelude for what Apple would argue in court if (when) it chooses to fight this. The good result would be that it simply opens up the NFC APIs to everyone else so you can pay for coffee in Starbucks with your Starbucks card via NFC, or your bank debit card, or whatever. But probably don’t hold you breath.
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Spain: 2021 spyware attack targeted prime minister’s phone • AP News

Aritz Parra:

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The cellphones of Spain’s prime minister and defense minister were infected last year with Pegasus spyware, which is available only to countries’ government agencies, authorities announced Monday.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s mobile phone was breached twice in May 2021, and Defense Minister Margarita Robles’ device was targeted once the following month, Cabinet Minister Félix Bolaños said.

The breaches, which resulted in a significant amount of data being obtained, were not authorized by a Spanish judge, which is a legal requirement for national covert operations, Bolaños said at a hastily convened news conference in Madrid.

“We have no doubt that this is an illicit, unauthorized intervention,” Bolaños said. “It comes from outside state organisms and it didn’t have judicial authorization.”

The Socialist-led government was during those months under intense scrutiny over its handling of a major foreign policy spat with Morocco and gripped by a tense domestic dispute over the release of jailed separatists from Spain’s restive Catalonia region.

Bolaños refused to speculate who might have been behind the Pegasus breach, nor what might have prompted it. The National Court opened an investigation into the breach, and a parliamentary committee on intelligence affairs was set to look into it.

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Quickly getting to the stage where it’s easier to count the heads of state who haven’t been targeted by NSO’s Pegasus. It’s a shrinking group.
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The real reason international chips [crisps] have more interesting flavours • Eater

Jaya Saxena:

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Given that the US is a big country, you’d think that if 15% of the population is interested in a hot pot chip, that’s still millions of people these companies could be reaching. But according to [CEO of Gastrograph AI, Jason] Cohen, the way research is done usually won’t catch those people who want more unusual flavours. When choosing people to taste-test new products, major snack companies look for “heavy users,” or people who eat chips around four times a week. That volume likely has to do with how a lot of people eat chips — as a side with a lunch sandwich or soup, requiring a flavour that doesn’t overpower whatever it’s being paired with. But even if you’re buying chips to eat independently, that’s a lot. “The average consumer doesn’t eat chips four times a week. So they’re choosing people who are already dedicated potato chip eaters,” which holds back making more targeted products.

Furthermore, it ignores people who are not currently chip eaters, but who might eat them more if there were more interesting flavours around. And it ignores how much someone may like chips to begin with. To determine whether a new flavour is worth making, Cohen says chip companies have test subjects do a side-by-side taste test with a chip already on the market. And for them to produce it, the majority of the tasters must like the new chip more than what already exists. “Half the people in that panel could say, ‘I don’t know. I like this one at a six and I like this one at a five,’” and 15% of the panel could say the new chip is the best thing they’ve ever tasted, and the company still won’t make it, says Cohen. “They don’t base their decisions on the magnitude of preference, they base it on the mean of preference.”

Mark Lang, associate professor of marketing at the University of Tampa, says this unwillingness to take risks on products extends to manufacturing and retail as well. “A product has to appeal to more than half the people in the country to fit into their factories and take up the millions of units that they put through their factories,” he says. Even if Frito-Lay’s [which makes many of the international crisp flavours] already manufactures these flavours in other countries, in order to avoid spending the money developing and testing a new recipe, “they need flavours that 60% of the population want to buy. That just knocks off all that cool stuff.”

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There’s a radio programme on BBC 6 Music on weekends featuring Stuart Maconie and Mark Radcliffe (0800-1000), and one of their features is “Crisps On The Radio“. Listeners send weird varieties of flavoured crisps in from all over the world, and they sample them and try to guess the flavour. It’s mad, and excellent. They don’t seem to get many crisps from the US. Maybe this is why.
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UK exposes sick Russian troll factory plaguing social media with Kremlin propaganda • GOV.UK

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UK-funded expert research has exposed how the Kremlin is using a troll factory to spread lies on social media and in comment sections of popular websites.

The cyber soldiers are ruthlessly targeting politicians and audiences across a number of countries including the UK, South Africa and India.

The research exposes how the Kremlin’s large-scale disinformation campaign is designed to manipulate international public opinion of Russia’s illegitimate war in Ukraine, trying to grow support for their abhorrent war, and recruiting new Putin sympathisers.

Sick masterminds of the operation are believed to be working overtly from an old factory in St Petersburg, with paid employees, and internal working teams.

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The language in this – from two government departments, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – is amazing. “Troll factory”. “Cyber soldiers”. “Ruthlessly targeting”. The war is both “illegitimate” and “abhorrent”. “Sick masterminds” who are “working overtly”. Seems like it’s tailored to be taken directly into the Daily Express’s content management system. (Photos of FC sec Liz Truss available.)

It’s jointly signed by Truss and sometime-novelist Nadine Dorries, who spent much of Monday retweeting a Daily Mail story suggesting her political opponents broke lockdown laws in 2020, whose main photographic proof involved Sir Keir Starmer sitting with Frank Dobson – a photo taken in 2015. Dobson died in 2019. She then said she “wasn’t responsible” for the photographs.

But anyway, sick masterminds and cyber soldiers working overtly. We’re onto them.
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Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation • Nature

Melanie Brucks and Jonathan Levav:

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In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas. By contrast, when it comes to selecting which idea to pursue, we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective (and preliminary evidence that they may be more effective) than in-person groups.

Departing from previous theories that focus on how oral and written technologies limit the synchronicity and extent of information exchanged, we find that our effects are driven by differences in the physical nature of videoconferencing and in-person interactions.

Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. Our results suggest that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation.

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Brucks and Levav are both in the marketing divisions of business schools (Columbia and Stanford). I wonder how long it will take for “bad” ideas created in the Zoom pipeline to reach the post-pandemic world. For example, there’s been a lot of criticism of the webcam in Apple’s Studio Display: almost certainly that was designed with a lot of decisions made via, uh, webcams and videoconferencing. Could the medium have been part of the confusing message?
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Facebook pulls the plug on podcast business after a year • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Ashley Carman:

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Facebook will stop letting people add podcasts to the service starting this week, according to a note sent to partners. It will discontinue both its short-form audio product Soundbites and remove its central audio hub.

Facebook announced various audio efforts last April during a hot market for podcasting and audio in general. But the company’s interest has waned, Bloomberg News reported last month, and it’s now focused on other initiatives, disappointing some providers.

“We’re constantly evaluating the features we offer so we can focus on the most meaningful experiences,” a Meta spokesperson said an email. The person added that they didn’t have a specific date on when Soundbites and the audio hub would shut down but it will be in the “coming weeks.”

In the note to partners, Facebook said it doesn’t plan to alert users to the fact that podcasts will no longer be available, leaving it up to the publishers to decide how they want to disclose that information. Live Audio Rooms will be integrated into Facebook Live, meaning users can choose to go live with just audio or audio and video.

The podcast market has grown crowded in recent years. Spotify Technology SA has both licensed hit shows and acquired companies. Amazon.com Inc. purchased the podcast network Wondery and also a hosting platform. The live audio platform Clubhouse was valued at about $4bn last year and every tech company wanted to copy its product.

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Exactly a year. Ryan Broderick predicted what would happen back in April last year:

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I suspect it will go exactly like all other content types supported by Facebook. At first, the algorithm will over-promote it. Because of the scale of the site and economic value of Facebook virality, this will create an audio gold rush on the platform. More than a few media companies will almost certainly get involved. If audio doesn’t stick with Facebook users, which I think is likely, the dial on audio will be turned down, any media companies that staffed up for the push will have layoffs, and there will be like a couple dozen random people who are suddenly massive podcast names with millions of listeners that you’ll probably never hear about until they come out as anti-vaxxers or something.

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Another firing among Google’s AI brain trust, and more discord • The New York Times

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Cade Metz:

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Less than two years after Google dismissed two researchers who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, the company has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialized type of artificial intelligence used in making computer chips.

The researcher, Satrajit Chatterjee, led a team of scientists in challenging the celebrated research paper, which appeared last year in the scientific journal Nature and said computers were able to design certain parts of a computer chip faster and better than human beings.

Dr. Chatterjee, 43, was fired in March, shortly after Google told his team that it would not publish a paper that rebutted some of the claims made in Nature, said four people familiar with the situation who were not permitted to speak openly on the matter. Google confirmed in a written statement that Dr. Chatterjee had been “terminated with cause.”

Google declined to elaborate about Dr. Chatterjee’s dismissal, but it offered a full-throated defense of the research he criticized and of its unwillingness to publish his assessment.

“We thoroughly vetted the original Nature paper and stand by the peer-reviewed results,” Zoubin Ghahramani, a vice president at Google Research, said in a written statement. “We also rigorously investigated the technical claims of a subsequent submission, and it did not meet our standards for publication.”

Dr. Chatterjee’s dismissal was the latest example of discord in and around Google Brain, an AI research group considered to be a key to the company’s future.

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This was the Nautre writeup, last June. I thought it was “epochal”. Maybe it wasn’t after all.
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Is the metaverse the future of the internet? A Globe journalist steps inside to find out • Globe and Mail

Joe Castaldo:

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One afternoon, I took a tour with Andrew Kiguel, co-founder and CEO of a Toronto-based company called Tokens.com. Among other things, it has a subsidiary called the Metaverse Group that buys virtual land, builds on it and leases space to firms looking to plant a flag. So far, the company has bought parcels in 10 different realms and values its portfolio in the eight-figure range.

In Decentraland, Mr. Kiguel appeared as a bearded figurine in a checkered shirt and an eye patch. He chose the name Milo, after his dog. We walked through a neighbourhood called Crypto Valley, where the company had assembled a tower that looked like something out of a 1950s sci-fi movie. It was lit by spotlights, with the word “Tokens.com” rotating in the night sky.

“We may eventually sell the naming rights,” Mr. Kiguel remarked. I noticed that next door someone had built a marketplace to peddle erotic anime NFTs. “You can’t choose your neighbours,” Mr. Kiguel said, “but we also have Binance.” Indeed, the crypto exchange had a building across the road.

As we strolled along a promenade with superfluous benches (avatars cannot sit down), he mentioned Decentraland is made up of 90,000 land parcels, half of which can be developed. “In five years, if there’s millions of people using this world, those parcels are going to be worth a lot of money,” he said. “These brands are all looking for virtual storefronts, and they have to come to us.”

A report from PwC recently stated the obvious: Digital real estate is risky, since none of these worlds has proved to have any staying power. Still, Tokens.com secured tenants for its tower, where it will construct digital office space. Renno & Co., a Canadian law firm specializing in digital assets, will be among them.

Renno co-founder Toufic Adlouni said one reason is to gain experience. “It’s hard to give legal advice on something you don’t fundamentally understand,” he said. Prospective clients could wander in, too, though no one at the firm will keep office hours. Instead, Mr. Adlouni sees it as another social-media platform that can be checked occasionally, like LinkedIn.

For all the hype, Decentraland seemed strangely deserted a lot of the time.

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Castaldo points out, quietly, that this is yet another “get in early!” piece of pump-priming to get the suckers in. If there can be any number of metaverses, how do you give yours value? (The one that sounds most satisfying is Totoro’s Bus Stop, which will only mean anything if you know about the film My Neighbour Totoro.)
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How fear of nuclear power supports Putin and global warming • Washington Post

Harry Stevens:

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Fear is the future’s tollbooth, and it can collect its fee in surprising ways. After 9/11, more people than expected began to die in car accidents on US freeways, multiple studies found. People scared of the vivid threat of a midair terrorist attack apparently opted for the statistically more dangerous behavior of long-distance driving.

Likewise, lots of people are scared of nuclear waste, which can be stored safely or reprocessed into useful things such as medical isotopes. The byproducts of coal-fired plants pose a more imminent threat. Following Germany’s nuclear phaseout, an estimated 1,100 additional people died each year from inhaling the poisonous gases and particle pollution from the coal plants Germany used to temporarily replace its nuclear ones.

There is another, longer-term cost of nuclear fear. Germany has pledged to sharply reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to help slow global warming; it built thousands of wind turbines and solar arrays to wean itself off fossil fuels. But claiming to be serious about fighting climate change while powering down nuclear power plants is a bit like leaping into the ring to fight Tyson Fury without boxing gloves on. Talk as tough as you like, but people might wonder whether you’re serious about winning.

“If you were designing a truly rational energy system to move towards a zero-carbon energy system, this is not the path you’d be taking,” Randy Bell, senior director for global energy security at the Atlantic Council, said of Germany’s decision to abandon nuclear power.

Even accounting for emissions created during the building of the facility and the mining of its fuel, the typical nuclear plant produces fewer greenhouse gases than power plants fueled by natural gas and coal, and about the same as those running on renewable sources such as wind and solar.

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Stevens suggests renaming it “elemental power”, though I’m not sure that would quite work. I like “fear is the future’s tollbooth” as a phrase. Here’s an expression of confidence to compare against Germany’s: 50% of Ukraine’s electricity generation comes from nuclear power, the world’s third-largest share. That’s Ukraine, home of the Chernobyl power plant.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Troops in Russia stole a consignment of tractors and harvesters from Melitopol – so the Ukrainians disabled them remotely. CC-licensed photo by Dan Davison 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. Channelling The The. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why Jony Ive left Apple to the ‘Accountants’ • The New York Times

Tripp Mickle has a new book coming out about Apple after Steve Jobs:

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It was 2014, and Apple’s future, more than ever, seemed to hinge on Mr. Ive. His love of pure, simple lines had already redrawn the world through such popular products as the iMac, iPod and iPhone. Now, he was seated at a conference table with Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, the two men embodying nearly 40 years of collaboration, with one designing and the other assembling the devices that turned a failing business into the world’s largest company. They both wanted another hit, but Mr. Ive was pushing for a product reveal more audacious than any in the theatrical company’s history.

The Apple Watch was slated to be introduced at a local community college auditorium near the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. To bring cosmopolitan gloss to a suburban landscape of strip malls, Mr. Ive recommended removing two dozen trees and erecting a lavish white tent.

His extravagant vision wasn’t going over well. “They want $25 million,” a colleague said of the event’s price tag. Apple marketers at the table were aghast. Few could comprehend the logistics of moving trees, much less the staggering cost.

It was a microcosm of the challenges beginning to haunt Apple’s top designer. He believed the watch’s success hinged on persuading the world that it was a fashionable accessory. He regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion. The tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.

But under Mr. Cook’s leadership, Apple was increasing its scrutiny of every dollar it spent and debating many ideas Mr. Ive proposed. The marketers not only questioned the expense; they also favoured a more traditional product introduction, focused less on how the watch looked and more on what it could do, like tracking a workout or tapping a wrist with a text message.

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Overlooked in this writeup is that the marketers were absolutely right. People don’t buy Apple Watches as fashion objects; they buy them for their utility. (I was wrong about this too, until I tried one.) Plus that since Ive left we’ve had good keyboards, computers with useful ports, AirPods Pro, HomePod minis. Things still get made.

Do people get a sort of schadenfreude from books saying Apple is doomed? Though at least this book seems well researched.
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Apple’s not-so-secret plan to take another gigantic bite of the microchip market • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

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In November 2021, Qualcomm’s chief financial officer said the company expected to supply 20% of the 5G modems Apple uses in its mobile devices in 2023. Currently, Qualcomm supplies nearly 100% of these chips. (The exception is the Apple Watch, which since the Series 4 model has used an Intel modem.) While it’s possible that Apple could be planning to use 5G modems from another supplier starting in 2023, analysts are expecting that will be the year it reveals its own, Apple-designed modem.

As was the case with Apple’s move to its own processors for iPhones and Macs, designing its own chips for cellular connectivity could give the company a number of advantages over competitors.

The first is cost, says Wayne Lam, senior director of research at technology consulting firm CCS Insight. According to a recent analysis of the cost of materials in the newest iPhone SE, the first version of the more affordable iPhone model with 5G capability, the chips that allow the phone to connect to cell networks collectively cost as much or more than the chips that make up the “brains” of the phone—the A15 processor and its attached memory chips.

That’s a reversal of what has been the norm for decades in smartphones and similar mobile devices: Typically, the main processor of the device has been more complicated and expensive than the parts that allow it to communicate wirelessly.

It will also liberate Apple from supplier relationships that, whatever benefits they have provided, have at times been a source of tension. In 2019, for example, Apple settled a contentious court battle with Qualcomm over patent-licensing fees, agreeing to pay at least $4.5bn and to purchase Qualcomm’s modems for several years.

Another big advantage Apple could gain is that, by integrating its own modems onto the same A-series chip that powers its phones, it could tweak them in ways that would make them faster, more efficient, and more capable than what’s possible with its current combination of its own chips and Qualcomm’s, says Mr. Lam.

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Apple bought Intel’s failed 5G modem division, and is hiring for similar positions. And that’s about all we know so far about Apple’s foray into phone modems. But look, it’s hardware!
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Impact of energy-draining ‘vampire devices’ overstated, says tech expert • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

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One recent report from British Gas claimed “Brits could … save an average of £110 per household per year by simply flicking a switch”. The energy provider said 23% of British energy bills were caused by “vampire electronics, those that continue to drain power when left on standby”.

But that statistic came from a 2015 report from the US National Research Defence Council, based on analysis of homes in California. “Think about the laptop you used 10 years ago,” Melson says: “That might need a big ugly plug in the middle, a big transformer. By and large, now you can just plug them straight into USB-C: that is much more energy efficient, and there is no need to draw power.”

As well as being seven years old and based on another country’s energy, consumers may struggle to make some of the suggested savings: a third of the “always on” electronics identified in the study are “recirculation pumps, fishponds, aquariums, and protected outlets in bathrooms, kitchens and garages.” Consumers who switch off their aquarium at night can save money but their fish may object.

Other devices included in the 23% figure are left on because they are intended to run all the time: wifi routers and electric space heaters or air conditioning units increase the electricity used by a home but provide benefits while doing so.

More importantly, Melson notes, American consumers are not covered by the array of European regulations that have slashed power use for British consumers. He said: “The eco-design directive, European regulation, has driven design changes across the sector. It’s much more regulated, and business practices have evolved.”

The US report that first found the 23% figure even highlights the advantages of European regulation: “The European standard addresses a large portion of the idle load issue highlighted in this study,” the American researchers say.

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Get rid of halogen lamps. Use lower temperatures for your washing. Big saving right away. This is going to be an ongoing battle to get rid of this misinformation.
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2019: what happened to America’s political centre of gravity? • The New York Times

Sahil Chinoy, examining the US political parties in 2019:

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The Republican Party leans much farther right than most traditional conservative parties in Western Europe and Canada, according to an analysis of their election manifestos. It is more extreme than Britain’s Independence Party and France’s National Rally (formerly the National Front), which some consider far-right populist parties. The Democratic Party, in contrast, is positioned closer to mainstream liberal parties.

These findings are based on data from the Manifesto Project, which reviews and categorizes each line in party manifestos, the documents that lay out a group’s goals and policy ideas. We used the topics that the platforms emphasize, like market regulation and multiculturalism, to put them on a common scale.

The resulting scores capture how the groups represent themselves, not necessarily their actual policies. They are one way to answer a difficult question: If we could put every political party on the same continuum from left to right, where would the American parties fall?

According to its 2016 manifesto, the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.

The Republican platform does not include the same bigoted policies, and its score is pushed to the right because of its emphasis on traditional morality and a “national way of life.” Still, the party shares a “nativist, working-class populism” with the European far right, said Thomas Greven, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin who has studied right-wing populism.

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There’s an accompanying graphic which shows it pretty clearly, and this is before the storming of the Capitol and the total Trumpification of the GOP – whose 2020 manifesto was “we don’t really know, what does Trump say?”

Just to confirm what I said about right-wingers who think Twitter is “too left”. No, it’s reflecting the world outside their tiny pond.
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Farm vehicles removed from Ukraine by Russians who find they’ve been remotely disabled • CNN

Olexsandr Fylyppov and Tim Lister:

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Russian troops in the occupied city of Melitopol have stolen all the equipment from a farm equipment dealership — and shipped it to Chechnya, according to a Ukrainian businessman in the area.

But after a journey of more than 700 miles, the thieves were unable to use any of the equipment — because it had been locked remotely.

Over the past few weeks there’s been a growing number of reports of Russian troops stealing farm equipment, grain and even building materials – beyond widespread looting of residences. But the removal of valuable agricultural equipment from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol speaks to an increasingly organized operation, one that even uses Russian military transport as part of the heist.
CNN has learned that the equipment was removed from an Agrotek dealership in Melitopol, which has been occupied by Russian forces since early March. Altogether it’s valued at nearly $5m. The combine harvesters alone are worth $300,000 each.

…Some of the machinery was taken to a nearby village, but some of it embarked on a long overland journey to Chechnya more than 700 miles away. The sophistication of the machinery, which are equipped with GPS, meant that its travel could be tracked. It was last tracked to the village of Zakhan Yurt in Chechnya.

The equipment ferried to Chechnya, which included combine harvesters — can also be controlled remotely. “When the invaders drove the stolen harvesters to Chechnya, they realized that they could not even turn them on, because the harvesters were locked remotely,” the contact said.

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So they’ll be broken up for parts. Do we like John Deere stuff now? (Also, don’t show this story to Tory MPs.)
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Rebecca Thomson exposed the Post Office scandal — and nobody listened • The Sunday Times

Sabah Meddings:

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In May 2009, Rebecca Thomson was preparing to publish the biggest story of her career. A 26-year-old reporter at the trade publication Computer Weekly, she had landed the job just two years after graduating from a journalism course at Cardiff University.

It was her first investigation and she had spent the past six months speaking to Post Office workers who claimed their lives had been destroyed by a faulty IT system. She had seven case studies, each of whom had lost everything after the government-owned Post Office had accused them of stealing.

The story was published on the front page of the magazine under the headline: “Bankruptcy, prosecution and disrupted livelihoods: Postmasters tell their story.” Thomson and her editor, Tony Collins, had pushed the story as hard as they could. They prepared for the scoop to get picked up by the nation’s news media.

But nothing happened. There were no national newspaper follow-ups, no Radio 4 Today programme interview requests. It was a flop. “It really did go out to a clanging silence,” says Thomson, 39, of the paltry few stories that appeared in regional papers. “I was super-ambitious, and I was disappointed and a bit confused about the fact that there had been so little reaction to the story, because I still continue to feel like it was incredibly strong.”

It was to be another decade before these subpostmasters, who had become pariahs in their communities, spat at and labelled criminals, saw their names finally cleared.

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I worked on Computer Weekly (when I started, we used typewriters and carbon paper for duplicates). We did break some worthwhile stories; the national papers did sometimes follow up. This one was a big miss by the rest of the media. Which meant a lot of people suffered for too long. Trade publications are a useful part of the media ecosystem, too easily overlooked. Sadly, but understandably, Thomson grew frustrated and left the trade.
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Bored Ape Yacht Club creator’s metaverse mint rocks the Ethereum blockchain • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Yuga Labs, the web3 company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, disrupted the entire Ethereum blockchain as a flood of users rushed to purchase NFTs representing virtual plots of land in its upcoming metaverse project, Otherside. A total of 55,000 Otherdeeds sold at a flat price of 305 ApeCoin, or around $5,800 at the time of purchase (via CoinTelegraph), raising about $320 million in what was considered the “largest NFT mint in history.”

Otherdeeds are minted in BAYC’s native ApeCoin, but still require Ethereum for gas fees. A gas fee is the cost associated with a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. Fees typically increase as the network gets more congested, as it becomes more work to process a transaction.

Such a large volume of transactions during the Otherdeed mint caused gas [transaction] fees to soar. As noted by CoinTelegraph, Reddit user u/johnfintech pointed out that some buyers shelled out anywhere from 2.6 ETH ($6,500) to 5 ETH ($14,000) in gas fees alone — more than the cost of an Otherdeed NFT (and in some cases, more than twice the cost). By the time the virtual land deeds sold out, buyers paid a total of about $123m just to execute their transactions on the Ethereum blockchain (via Bloomberg).

Yuga Labs issued an apology on Twitter shortly after the mint ended. “We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while,” Yuga Labs said. “It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We’d like to encourage the DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] to start thinking in this direction.”

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To me this says two things. First, that the claims of “web3” to eliminate the middleman and make finance cheaper are pure hooey. Second, that if people have this sort of “money” just lying around, it’s not really “money”, because you could do so much more with real money. Go on holiday. Buy a car. In the US, book an unscheduled doctor’s visit.
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Heat wave scorches India’s wheat crop, snags export plans • Associated Press

Aniruddha Ghosal:

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An unusually early, record-shattering heat wave in India has reduced wheat yields, raising questions about how the country will balance its domestic needs with ambitions to increase exports and make up for shortfalls due to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Gigantic landfills in India’s capital New Delhi have caught fire in recent weeks. Schools in eastern Indian state Odisha have been shut for a week and in neighboring West Bengal, schools are stocking up on oral rehydration salts for kids. On Tuesday, Rajgarh, a city of over 1.5 million people in central India, was the country’s hottest, with daytime temperatures peaking at 46.5ºC (114.08ºF). Temperatures breached the 45ºC (113ºF) mark in nine other cities.

But it was the heat in March — the hottest in India since records first started being kept in 1901 — that stunted crops. Wheat is very sensitive to heat, especially during the final stage when its kernels mature and ripen. Indian farmers time their planting so that this stage coincides with India’s usually cooler spring.

Climate change has made India’s heat wave hotter, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College of London. She said that before human activities increased global temperatures, heat waves like this year’s would have struck India once in about half a century.

“But now it is a much more common event — we can expect such high temperatures about once in every four years,” she said.

India’s vulnerability to extreme heat increased 15% from 1990 to 2019, according to a 2021 report by the medical journal The Lancet. It is among the top five countries where vulnerable people, like the old and the poor, have the highest exposure to heat. It and Brazil have the the highest heat-related mortality in the world, the report said.

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Two weeks, no smartphone: how I tried – and failed – to kick my screen addiction • The Guardian

James Ball felt he was spending too much time being Very Online:

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Day nine
Starting to feel as if I’m getting into the rhythm of this, I head to another friend’s birthday party, near London’s Waterloo station. When I get there, I am pulled up short as I realise I have absolutely zero idea of where the party is. I haven’t had to worry about directions, or carrying an A-Z map, for a decade. The spur-of-the-moment decision by my friends to nip “round the corner” leaves me wandering the area for more than half an hour until I bump into someone I know.

It serves as a reminder that life is increasingly difficult for anyone shut out of the smartphone world. Around 16% of UK adults are in this position, but this rises dramatically with age: 23% of adults aged 55-64 have no smartphone, increasing to 47% of over-65s. The more it becomes an expectation of how we socialise, or how we get into venues (with Covid passes, or event tickets, for example), how we bank or pay bills, the bigger the cost for those unable or unwilling to get one.

Days 10 and 11
Time to speak to the phone addiction expert: Dr Anna Lembke, who is chief of the Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University. She tells me that phone addiction is real – both because of the nature of the devices and because they are a portal to addictive pastimes such as pornography or gambling. “As with any drug, the vast majority of users won’t get addicted, but a small subset – 10-15% – will run into trouble and potentially get seriously addicted,” she says.

What, I ask, are the negative effects of such an addiction? “Less joy in modest pleasures that used to give us joy,” she says. “Mental preoccupation with the phone, and heightened distractibility and reactivity. Decreased ability to be present in the moment.”

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Quite educational; we rely so much on things like maps, calendars and email in our pocket that we easily forget what it was like without them. (If you ever knew that.)
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The shadow crew who encouraged Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover • WSJ

Rob Copeland, Georgia Wells, Rebecca Elliott and Liz Hoffman:

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By 2015, tweeting had become a near-daily habit for Mr. Musk. He often posted in the middle of the workday during a period in which Tesla was struggling to make its first electric SUVs. He sometimes replied to major public figures, like Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos and the D.J. deadmau5, but otherwise stuck mostly to updates on Tesla’s vehicles and rocket launches at his Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.

His tweeting soon rose rapidly. He began regularly interacting with fans and detractors and tweeted more than six times a day on average in 2018. “Your math isn’t very good,” he wrote to one journalist who was critical of Tesla. Asked by another why he was spending so much time tweeting, he wrote: “Because Twitter is fun.”

His interest in the platform grew even as it helped land him in legal trouble. Memorable tweets included ones suggesting a British cave explorer was a pedophile and another saying he was considering taking Tesla private and had “funding secured” to do so. He successfully fended off a lawsuit on the former, after arguing his taunt wasn’t meant to be taken literally, and paid $20m to securities regulators in a settlement related to the latter.

To a public-relations consultant who urged him to keep a lower profile on the platform, Mr. Musk in 2018 wrote in an email subsequently made public in litigation, “Will tweet as I wish and suffer the consequences…so it goes.”

His tweeting has only increased since that settlement, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. It wasn’t long after, friends and associates say, that Mr. Musk’s agita with the platform began to grow. He was tweeting an average of nine times a day in 2020 when former Twitter executives say they became aware of his budding friendship with then-CEO Mr. Dorsey.

While Mr. Dorsey was on stage at a Twitter all-hands event in Houston in early 2020, he called Mr. Musk on FaceTime. Mr. Dorsey plugged his iPad into the stage’s jumbo screen, and employees cheered as Mr. Musk’s face lighted up the room.

Mr. Dorsey asked Mr. Musk to choose a single tweet to represent himself.

“I put the art in fart,” replied Mr. Musk, then 48 years old.

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There wasn’t a “crew” so much as Musk’s own capricious nature. He’s not Warren Buffett, making long plans. He must have some amazing financial advisers, though, doing the work in the background. Profile them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The new Mac Studio helped Apple’s computer shipments hit new records, but overall sales could slow now. CC-licensed photo by Roy Cohutta on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Semi-autonomous, prone to hovering. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Snap Pixy review: a $230 drone with a camera buzzing around your head • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

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The history of modern photography summarized:

• Humans invent selfies
• Humans invent sticks to capture wider selfies
• Humans invent little flying cameras to hover in front of them, because selfie sticks just weren’t cutting it.

The $230 autonomous Snap Pixy is the latest of those little flying cameras, from the company behind the Snapchat app. It’s either a watershed moment in the struggle to overcome the anatomical restrictions of taking pictures of ourselves, or just a wacky toy. Either way, the Pixy is something totally new. 

Unlike most recreational drones, the Pixy isn’t controlled via an app. It launches from your hand then hovers in front of you to capture video or photos. When it’s done with its brief flight, it returns to your palm.

“This basically is an experiment that ended up way better than we expected,” Snap Inc. Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel told me, adding that the company will be selling only a limited quantity of them starting Thursday.

You don’t need to be a Snapchat power user to find the Pixy intriguing. While it is designed to work with the popular social-media app, you can easily grab photos and videos and post them elsewhere. It isn’t the best quality footage, but the perspectives the Pixy captures are pretty cool. 

I’ve been testing it for the past week and fielding questions from onlookers who wonder why a drone the size and shape of a grilled-cheese sandwich is following me around. Here are some answers.

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Intriguing: it’s been ages since there was a new piece of hardware with the potential to properly interest people. You can imagine people standing on cliff edges and doing little up-and-back shots. Also, Stern only got about four flights per battery charge. Which isn’t a lot.

And this is what we want drones to do. Don’t make me learn how to fly it. Teach it how to fly itself.
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Apple’s growth slows, but still beats Wall Street’s expectations • The New York Times

Tripp Mickle:

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The pandemic has been a double-edged sword for Apple. Remote school and work spurred demand for computing equipment, and government stimulus checks and cutbacks in travel and leisure spending provided a jolt to the company’s all-important iPhone business, analysts said. But those same forces sowed supply-chain problems, triggering a global chip shortage that has cost Apple billions of dollars in missed sales.

The company’s challenges have been compounded by Russia’s war against Ukraine and rising coronavirus cases in China. Apple counts on Russia for 1% of its sales and a slightly larger percentage of its profit, analysts estimate. In China, where most of Apple’s products are assembled, one of the company’s key suppliers had to shut down production outside Shanghai.

During the January-to-March quarter, sales of iPhones, iPads and other devices rose 6.6% to $77.5bn, Apple said.

The bigger problem for Apple may come in the months ahead as economic strains from the war in Ukraine spill into Europe, said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple analyst and managing partner at the venture-capital firm Loup Ventures. “People are on edge,” he said. “They’re paying more for fuel. If you live in Germany, does that affect your decision to buy the next iPhone?”

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Mac sales still booming to record levels (probably continuing to into this quarter), iPad sales just ticking over. Ironic if i’s the supply chain that’s the big problem, given that’s what Tim Cook solved so long ago.
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Twitter says it overcounted its users over the past three years • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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In its earnings release, Twitter explains that it launched an account linking feature in March 2019 that allowed users with more than one Twitter account to link them together in its user interface, allowing them to more easily switch between their different identities. Those multiple accounts belonged to a single person, clearly, but continued to be counted as separate mDAUs — or “monetizable daily active users.”

The mDAU metric was already a self-invented, non-standard way of measuring users on the service. Twitter came up with the idea after struggling to show growth through measurements of monthly active users on a quarterly basis. Instead, it said the mDAU metric would represent users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through its website and applications and who were able to view its ads. It noted, however, that the metric would not be comparable to similar daily active user disclosures from other companies, as they would often use a more expansive metric that included users who were not seeing ads.

This metric was meant to give advertisers a better idea of how many people on Twitter were eligible to be targeted with their marketing messages within a given time frame. And since advertising continues to fuel Twitter’s business, accounting for the majority of its revenue, it was an important metric in terms of Twitter’s health.

Unfortunately, it was wrong.

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Overstated by between 1.4m to 1.9m, which is only a 1% difference. Better question: what metrics will be used once Musk is in charge? Growth at all costs?
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Elon Musk’s two big goals for Twitter are totally at odds • Fast Company

James Surowiecki:

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Musk seems to believe social-media platforms moderate content solely out of an ideological desire to restrict content they find problematic. And, as he tweeted on Tuesday, he thinks the answer is just to allow any speech that’s legal (or, as he put it, that “matches the law”). But the reality is much more complicated than that. The content-moderation decisions of companies like Twitter and Facebook are inevitably shaped by ideology. But simply eliminating content moderation isn’t an option, unless you want your site to become 4chan. Platforms moderate content mostly because they have economic incentives to do so: moderation makes their user experience more enjoyable to most people, and makes the platforms more appealing to advertisers, who generally don’t want their ads appearing next to a tweet by a Nazi or someone using the N-word. 

To be sure, there’s an appealing simplicity to Musk’s solution: Let people say what they want, and let the chips fall where they may. But whatever you think of that approach in a philosophical sense, from a business point of view, making it easier for people to use racist and homophobic slurs, and to harass and dox people, will almost certainly cost Twitter more users than it will attract. It’ll also alienate many advertisers. And there’s another issue, which is that the European Union recently passed a law holding platforms responsible for hate speech and misinformation on their sites, and allowing the E.U. to issue fines equal to as much 6% of a company’s annual revenue. It’s totally unclear how an anything-goes approach to content moderation won’t quickly run afoul of the E.U. rules.

There’s a fundamental tension, in other words, between Musk’s insistence that people should be able to say what they want and what Twitter needs to thrive as a platform.

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Plus, as he points out, the idea of charging a subscription doesn’t really work for the many people who aren’t in the western world, and would reduce the number of users.
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I like free speech so much I’ve decided to buy it • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Eli Grober:

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Hi there, I’m Elon Musk. I’m mostly known for rockets and cars, but what I really care about is free speech. I can’t get enough of it. In fact, I like free speech so much I’ve decided to buy it.

That’s right, it turns out free speech isn’t free—it costs exactly $44 billion. That might sound like too much money for one person to be allowed to spend, but that’s only because it is. And I’ve decided free speech is worth the cost. I’m going to make sure some board full of rich guys doesn’t get to define what counts as free speech. Instead, just one rich guy will get to decide what counts as free speech: me.

So what does free speech mean to me? Free speech means… well, anything you want it to mean. Free speech is magical. It’s amorphous. It’s undefinable. That’s the power of free speech: nobody in history has ever defined it—not our founders, or politicians, or judges, or even average citizens. There’s simply no definition of free speech.

“That’s not true,” you might say, “It’s pretty clearly defined.” And to that, I’d say, “That’s the beauty of free speech—it can be a lie. I was lying to you. And that’s allowed.”

And you might say, “That’s misinformation. Plus, private companies don’t have to abide by the more open standards of free speech allowed by the law. They have a responsibility to the public to curtail things like misinformation and prevent the incitement of violent acts like insurrections.” And to that, I’d say, “Blocked!”

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Indispensable. (Via John Naughton)
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Nigeria blocks 73 million mobile phones in security clampdown • Reuters

Kelechukwu Iruoma and Justice Nwafor:

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Nigeria is among dozens of African countries including Ghana, Egypt and Kenya with SIM registration laws that authorities say are necessary for security purposes, but digital rights experts here say increase surveillance and hurts privacy.

Nigeria has been rolling out 11-digit electronic national identity cards for almost a decade, which record an individual’s personal and biometric data, including fingerprints and photo.

The National Identity Number (NIN) is required to open a bank account, apply for a driver’s license, vote, get health insurance, and file tax returns.

In 2020, Nigeria’s telecommunications regulator said every active mobile phone number must be linked to the user’s NIN. It repeatedly extended the deadline until March 31 this year.

The government said outgoing calls were being barred from April 4 here from any mobile phone numbers that had not complied.

Millions of Nigerians have not registered their SIM cards, for reasons ranging from concerns over privacy here to problems reaching registration centres or not having a NIN.

“There have been no reasonable explanations as to why we have to link NIN to our SIM,” said Nneka Orji, a journalist in southeast Nigeria who has not registered her SIM.

“For that reason, I am not ready to do that,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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Quietly creepy, rather like India’s Aadhaar system, which uses a 12-digit number to uniquely identify citizens.
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Why the heck are SSNs still treated as passwords in the US? • TechCrunch

Haje Jan Kamps:

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When I moved to the US a couple of years ago, my friends made sure that I knew I had to keep my Social Security number (SSN) secret and hidden. When I started opening a bank account and set up a cell phone plan, it became obvious why: All sorts of institutions that really should know better are treating this string of numbers as a password. There’s a huge, glaring problem with that. I maintain that Equifax should receive the corporate equivalent of capital punishment for allowing this to happen, but 145 million social security numbers were stolen by hackers a few years ago, which means that the Social Security numbers — yes, the same numbers that are being treated as “passwords” — for about half the U.S. adult population are in the wind.

We’ve gotten used to passwords by now, but at least, in most cases, passwords can be changed when they are hacked. Your social security number? Not so much. If your SSN leaks just once, you’re boned. It’s not possible to change it, and that brings up the true depth of idiocy in all of this: Relying on security that depends on keeping an unchangeable piece of information secret is really bloody stupid.

The corollary is this: Imagine that your email has been hacked but your email provider tells you that you can’t change your password, you can’t change your email provider, and you’ll just have to deal with it. That’s the situation we currently have with Social Security numbers.

Most countries have equivalents of a Social Security number that the state or the taxman uses to identify you. In most countries, however, it is never assumed that this number is secret. You log in to your bank accounts with it. You freely tell your employers what it is. You can spray paint it on the side of the house or tattoo it on your forehead. I would do neither, but that’s more a matter of my taste vis-a-vis forehead tattoos and garage graffiti. From a security point of view, there’s no particular reason why you shouldn’t.

«

I’d forgotten that besides having a sclerotic political gerontocracy, crumbling infrastructure and insane health service, the US also has a bizarre obsession with an inadequate form of identity.
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NextSense wants to get in your ears and watch your brain • WIRED

Steven Levy:

»

[Konstantin] Borodin is now the lead ear spelunker for NextSense, which was born at Google and spun out of Alphabet’s X division. The startup’s focus is brain health—improving sleep, helping patients with epilepsy, and eventually enriching the lives of people with a range of mental conditions. The idea is to use its earbuds to capture an electroencephalogram, a standard tool for assessing brain activity. Just as an ECG tracks the fibrillations of the heart, an EEG is used to diagnose anomalies in brain activity. While some smart watches—Apple, Samsung, Fitbit—offer versions of an ECG and aim to spy on your sleep, collecting neural data has mostly been a can’t-try-this-at-home activity. Until now.

Standard EEGs are “a mess,” says Arshia Khan, a neurologist at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, who has done studies of those devices. To use the expensive machine in her lab, she has to fix electrodes to a person’s scalp. (“It leaves indentations on the head for a few hours, and if you use gel, it’s hard to shampoo it out.”) The device only works in a clinical setting and isn’t suitable for long-term studies. A handful of off-the-shelf, consumer EEG headsets are portable, but look incredibly awkward. If earbuds could deliver good results, that would be “fantastic,” she says. And not just for scientists.

For years, people have been shifting from tracking their health through sporadic visits to a doctor or lab to regularly monitoring their vitals themselves. The NextSense team is gambling that, with a gadget as familiar as an earbud, people will follow the same path with their brains. Then, with legions of folks wearing the buds for hours, days, and weeks on end, the company’s scientists hope they’ll amass an incredible data trove, in which they’ll uncover the hidden patterns of mental health.

«

The word “hope” in there is really holding up the entire ceiling, and not looking so great at it. Just as likely – sorry to be sceptical – is that they’ll end up with a ton of EEG data that is literally uninterpretable.

Have there been any successful spinouts from Alphabet’s X division? There was the “diabetics’ contact lenses” one, which retreated from that pretty fast. Others?
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Climate change is making India’s brutal heat waves worse • MIT Technology Review

Casey Crownhart:

»

Extreme heat can be deadly, especially for a region where many lack access to cooling. And climate change is making heat waves more frequent and severe, with periods of hot days stretching out longer in places like South Asia.

This heat wave is particularly concerning for its timing and its spread, says Arpita Mondal, a climate researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Usually, peak temperatures in the region come in May and June, just before monsoon rains bring relief, she explains, but this year has been particularly hot, particularly early. March of this year was the hottest on record, with an average temperature of 33.1 °C (nearly 92 °F).

The problem is also widespread across the country, affecting not only the typical hot spots in the northwest and southeast but also regions that aren’t used to seeing so much extreme heat, Mondal says. And the effects are even more stark because of a lack of rainfall so far this season.

“It’s part of a broader climate-change signal,” says Amir AghaKouchak, a climate researcher at the University of California, Irvine. India’s average annual temperature increased at a rate of 0.62 °C per 100 years between 1901 and 2020, according to data from the World Bank. And maximum temperatures have climbed even more quickly, at a rate of 0.99 °C every 100 years.

“People think a degree or two might not matter,” AghaKouchak says, but when average temperatures increase by even small amounts, it means extreme events are becoming more likely.

«

The danger is in the “wet bulb” temperature – when it’s humid and hot, because then the body can’t cool through sweating. Kim Stanley Robinson’s book “The Ministry For The Future” begins with a devastating heatwave in an Indian village. (I found it too optimistic about our capacity to fix things, but the disasters were believable.)
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Mark Zuckerberg says employee attrition will make Facebook better • Business Insider

Kali Hays:

»

Mark Zuckerberg just admitted that more workers are leaving Facebook. He just doesn’t see that as a bad thing.

“I don’t think this sort of volatility , that companies can face, is always that unhealthy for making sure you have the right people,” the founder and CEO said on a call to discuss Facebook’s first-quarter results.

Insider has reported on the company’s retention problems, with some tech workers now saying Facebook can be a “black mark” on their resumes.

Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that employee attrition can ultimately ensure that the right kinds of people stick with the company as it begins a risky shift to building the metaverse.

“During Covid, we saw the attrition level go down a lot because people didn’t want to get new jobs, which probably meant that a lot of people stayed at the company that didn’t care that much about what we were doing, compared to what we would have wanted,” Zuckerberg added. “And I’m just trying to lead the company in a way where we position ourselves as the premier company for building the future of social interaction and the metaverse, and if you care about those things, we’re getting the best people to come work here.”

David Wehner, Facebook’s CFO, said “attrition has stepped up” since the height of the pandemic, insisting that it is “broadly consistent” with the number of people who would leave the company before the pandemic.

«

On that basis, shouldn’t Facebook get rid of all of its staff, at which point it would be the best possible company?

In adjacent news, Reality Labs (the metaverse division) lost $2.9bn in the quarter on income of $695m – so the loss is up from $1.83bn, but revenue is up from $534m. So losses grew by $1.1bn while revenues grew by $160m.

I think it would be better as a skunkworks. It’s trying to push an iceberg uphill.
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Fictosexual man who married hologram says he can’t communicate with her anymore • Fox5NY

»

A Japanese man who married a fictional, computer-synthesized pop singer four years ago now says he can’t communicate with her but still loves her.

According to the Japanese newspaper The Mainichi, Akihiko Kondo, 38, said he hit a technical roadblock with Hatsune Miku after the company that provides the artificial intelligence and hologram to communicate with her was no longer providing the service. 

Kondo would communicate with Miku using a three-dimensional hologram of the pop singer projected into a cylinder.

“My love for Miku hasn’t changed,” he told Mainichi. “I held the wedding ceremony because I thought I could be with her forever.”

Kondo, who lives in suburban Tokyo, identifies as ‘fictosexual’- someone who is sexually attracted to fictional characters. He has shared details about his relationship with the world to promote the growing lifestyle.

“It’s not that people can’t live in society because they’re engrossed in a two-dimensional world, but rather, there are cases where people become captivated as they search for a place for themselves in video games and anime, because reality is too painful for them. I was one of those people,” said Kondo to Newshub.

«

Everything is an episode from Black Mirror, isn’t it? Or a combination of them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

the autocorrect function on iPhones annoys a lot of people, but there’s a reason why it can be persistently wrong, as its inventor explains. CC-licensed photo by Brett Jordan 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. Twitter stuff starts four links in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google may now remove search results that dox you • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

»

According to a support page, Google will also remove things like “non-consensual explicit or intimate personal images,” pornographic deepfakes or Photoshops featuring your likeness, or links to sites with “exploitative removal practices.”

Making a request involves giving Google a list of URLs that link to the personal information, as well as the search pages that surface those links. After you submit a request, Google will evaluate it. Its FAQ says it tries to “preserve information access if the content is determined to be of public interest,” as in the case of content that’s “newsworthy,” “professionally-relevant,” or that came from a government. If Google does decide that the links should be removed, it says they’ll either not show up for any search query or that they won’t be surfaced for searches that include your name.

Google seems to be applying a relatively high bar for what counts as personally identifying information, which makes it a bit different from the systems it’s had to implement in places like the EU to comply with so-called right to be forgotten rules. Those laws let people request that links they deem unflattering or irrelevant be taken down, which isn’t the case here — the rules Google added today only cover links to very sensitive info.

It’s also unclear whether Google will remove sites that exist explicitly to sell people’s information. If you’ve ever searched for someone’s phone number, you may have ended up at one of these services, promising to give it to you if you subscribe. We asked Google about this and will let you know if we hear back.

«

Reason given by Google: “the internet is always evolving”. More like the threat landscape is the bit that keeps evolving: people calling in murderous attacks on others, using America’s weaponised police force, is almost commonplace. (In Europe I guess they just order lots of pizza? Killing you just the same, but over the course of decades, through arteriosclerosis.)

As with the RTBF, the original source remains; it’s just the Google index entry that goes.
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Autocorrect explained: why your iPhone adds annoying typos while fixing others • WSJ

Joanna Stern speaks to Ken Kocienda, who created the iPhone autocorrect software:

»

Perhaps you’ve seen your phone fill in your intended word as someone’s last name, or the name of an app on your phone.

Here’s what’s going on. When you type, the autocorrect algorithms are trying to figure out what you mean by looking at various things, including where your fingers landed on the keyboard and the other words in the sentences, while comparing your word fragment to the words in two unseen dictionaries:

• Static Dictionary: Built into iOS, this contains dictionary words and common proper nouns, such as product names or sports teams. There were over 70,000 words in this when the first iPhone launched and it’s gotten bigger since then.
• Dynamic Dictionary: Built over time as you use your phone, this consists of words that are unique to you. The system looks at your contacts, emails, messages, Safari pages—even the names of installed apps.

It’s also where new words unique to your vocabulary get logged: By the third time you type an unknown word, the software will typically add it to the dynamic dictionary and stop trying to turn it into something different, said Mr. Kocienda and others.

“The static dictionary and the dynamic dictionary would be in a little bit of a battle with each other,” Mr. Kocienda said. The software is designed to break the tie, he added, but it doesn’t always pick what you would pick.

In my case, the static dictionary is saying “Hey, she’s trying to say ‘newsgirl’!” but the dynamic dictionary, having learned from me, now says, “No, you idiot, obviously she means ‘NewsGrid’!”

An Apple spokeswoman confirmed the learning rule and explained that with “NewsGrid,” the learning may have been delayed because of its unique capitalization. I would need to type the word the exact same way twice, and I often forget to capitalize.

What you can do: The surefire way to make sure your phone knows your personal vocabulary? On your iPhone, go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement. Now add your words or phrases to both the Phrase and Shortcut fields, which will add them to the dynamic dictionary.

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Apple’s self-repair vision is here, and it’s got a catch • iFixit News

Elizabeth Chamberlain:

»

We were cautiously optimistic about the program in November. Anything that enables more people to do repairs is great news! And there’s a lot to be excited about in the details Apple announced today: seven years of parts availability, retail sales of tools that only official Apple techs could get before, and free step-by-step visual repair manuals available for everyone on Apple’s site. But as the doors open on this new venue, we’re underwhelmed, and settling back into our usual skepticism.

The biggest problem? Apple is doubling down on their parts pairing strategy, enabling only very limited, serial number-authorized repairs. You cannot purchase key parts without a serial number or IMEI. If you use an aftermarket part, there’s an “unable to verify” warning waiting for you. This strategy hamstrings third-party repair with feature loss and scare tactics and could dramatically limit options for recyclers and refurbishers, short-circuiting the circular economy. 

As of today, you can buy an official Apple iPhone 12 screen and install it yourself, on your own device, with no fuss. Until now, DIY repairs relied on keeping the Face ID speaker and sensor assembly intact, then very carefully moving it to your new screen, and finally ignoring some gentle warnings. If your assembly was damaged or defective, you were out of luck. The new program will solve that problem—assuming you’ve bought an official Apple part.

To check out with that part, however, you’ve got to put in your phone’s serial number or IMEI. And when you’re done installing the part, you need to pair it with the phone you indicated in your purchase, via over-the-air configurator software Apple says they will make available through their parts store. Requiring parts pairing essentially puts an expiration date on iPhones.

«

I looked at this back in 2016. See it from a security point of view: what if someone malicious wanted to put a part in that would monitor everything you do? Maybe you’d want Apple to be able to forestall that.
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Breakingviews: Elon Musk probably won’t buy Twitter • Reuters via NewsBreak

Lauren Silva Laughlin and Gina Chon:

»

Sure, the Tesla boss was clearly serious about acquiring Twitter as of recently. The financing from Morgan Stanley is shored up. The agreement includes a fee of $1 billion that he – or Twitter – would have to pay if they renege on the contract. And Twitter’s lawyers even wedged in a so-called “specific performance” clause, which could theoretically force Musk to buy the company if he threatens to back out, though in practice this could probably be settled by adding to the break fee.

There are good reasons for him to get cold feet. The biggest is Tesla. The electric-vehicle maker’s stock has fallen around a fifth since Musk first revealed his stake in Twitter, partly because Musk may sell shares to fund his new adventure. If Tesla’s stock bounces back – likely if the Twitter deal falls away – the $40 billion of recouped wealth would more than make up for the break fee.

China is a major sticking point too. Tesla produces half of its vehicles there, as well as a quarter of its revenue. But Twitter is no friend to the People’s Republic, most recently for defying Beijing in its handling of content related to Hong Kong protests. China could easily hold Tesla to ransom if a Musk-owned Twitter didn’t play ball. That’s uncomfortable for a self-professed “free speech absolutist.”

…One thing makes it easier for Musk to walk away before any of this becomes a problem: The market partly anticipates it already. Twitter’s stock is currently trading 11% below his offer price – a fairly wide spread for a deal with little antitrust pushback. Musk’s tweets criticizing some company actions – potentially flouting the merger agreement – already suggest he might be starting to lose interest. Most likely, Musk’s attention will wander elsewhere. It wouldn’t be the first time.

«

Well, someone had to offer the contrary position. (Tesla’s stock is down about 20% this month, but 10% up on a year ago.) He would be risking a huge amount on Twitter generating enough cash to pay the interest on margin loans of Tesla stock, which could be forfeit.
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Twitter censored tweets on HBO QAnon show ‘Q: Into the Storm’ • Gizmodo

Dell Cameron:

»

For the past year, Twitter has censored tweets about a documentary exploring the origins of the QAnon movement.

The documentary, Q: Into the Storm, debuted as a six-part series on HBO Max in March 2021. Twitter decided to “limit the visibility” of the series on its social network shortly after the release, a Twitter spokesperson said.

Twitter admitted that it was restricting the reach of tweets about the series after the director, Cullen Hoback, tried paying to boost his own tweet publicizing the film’s iTunes debut on March 21. He was barred from buying promotion for his tweet. An email from Twitter’s ad department stated the film had been “manually reviewed” and deemed to be in violation of the social network’s “inappropriate content” policy. The documentary criticizes Twitter for the role it has played in the spread of QAnon.

Believing the response in error, Hoback’s production house, Hyrax Films, reached out to members of the Twitter communications team to request help. A response came three days later. To Hoback’s surprise, Twitter informed him the decision was intentional.

“In 2021, Twitter made the decision not to allow promotion of this documentary via advertising on the platform,” the company said. “This decision was aligned with the actions we took to suspend accounts dedicated to QAnon and to limit the visibility of QAnon-related content on the platform generally. As a result, the client will not be able to promote this content.”

It’s unclear what additional steps Twitter has taken to limit the visibility of Hoback’s account or others discussing the series. Since Jan. 2021, accounts sharing QAnon-related content have been excluded from features like “search” and algorithms that offer users personalized “suggestions,” the company said. According to Twitter, tweets about the series meet the definition of “related content” under this policy.

«

This is just barmy, and points to a company where there’s no coherent understanding of policy. This is clearly an editorial edict of “don’t let QAnon stuff be on the network”, but not enough comprehension to say “this is a trusted outlet, so suspend that rule”. Even after someone raises the objection. And on the topic of QAnon? Stable doors and horses.
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Twitter says mass deactivations after Musk news were ‘organic’ • NBC News

Ben Collins:

»

Twitter has been flooded with user reports of high-profile accounts losing thousands of followers after news broke that Tesla CEO Elon Musk would purchase the social network. The company said Tuesday that the “fluctuations in follower counts” came from “organic” account closures.

Some accounts on the political right, including that of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., saw their follower counts skyrocket. Greene, who boasted 539,000 followers the day before news of Musk’s takeover, had 632,000 followers by Tuesday evening.

Twitter did not provide an exact number of accounts that were shuttered or activated in the hours after the ownership announcement Monday. It said it was looking into the “recent fluctuations in follower counts.”

“While we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to largely be a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation,” Twitter said in a statement. A spokesperson at Twitter who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the accounts that experienced the most severe drop-offs in followers were “high-profile accounts.”

Former President Barack Obama, the most followed user on Twitter, whose number had increased every day in April, lost more than 300,000 followers after Monday’s announcement. Pop star Katy Perry, the third-most-followed user on Twitter, lost more than 200,000 after the announcement.

Some right-wing politicians noticed and lauded the increased follower counts Tuesday.

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Some people need to lighten up. It’s Twitter! • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

Modern social platforms have learned that compressing our internet experience at the expense of our sanity means we use their products longer, thus making them more money. And I actually tend think conservatives like Ben Shapiro are being genuine when they say they think Twitter is a left-wing website. For a lot of people, regardless of political affiliation, websites that run on centralized feeds of content, whether it’s algorithmic like Facebook or Instagram or chronological like Twitter and Tumblr, are inherently alienating. Maybe Shapiro looks at his feed and feels like he’s being piled on in the same way I do. For the last decade, researchers, journalists, and politicians have devoted a countless amount of energy to figuring out how the internet is radicalizing us, but what if it’s not the algorithms or the extremist groups, what if it’s just the feed? What if we just aren’t meant to consume an endless stream of content all jammed together into one place?

The other day, I put a shortened version of what I’ve written above in a Twitter thread. I speculated that there may just be a single cohort of around 5-10 million super-posters in the US who move from platform to platform causing trouble, and cataclysmic moments like Tumblr’s porn ban or Musk’s purchase of Twitter act as an inflection point where they start thinking about moving elsewhere.

And maybe that troublesome 5-10 million super-posters are also the people who have the biggest issues with feed-based internet platforms. Then my thread got a bunch of angry replies from people claiming I was saying we need to remove sex workers from the internet. Which I didn’t say or mean in the slightest, but is honestly a very helpful way to illustrate the point I’m trying to make here.

«

I mean, of course Ben Shapiro thinks Twitter is left-wing, because essentially the whole world is more left-wing than he is; he’s just too much of a dolt to realise it. (Let’s dream, for a moment, of the multiverse where everyone now in the US is transported to other countries, to discover that what passes for “left-wing” in the US is milquetoast right-wing everywhere else.) The idea of a flash mob that floats around causing disruption sounds very feasible. One wonders where all the people who’ve left Twitter have gone. (Broderick laughs off the idea that they’ve gone to Tumblr.)
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Snickers dick vein: meet the Twitter shitposter behind a viral post • Rolling Stone

EJ Dickson:

»

The pinned tweet on Juniper’s account is “it’s [so] incredibly easy to create fake news it’s actually ridiculous lol.” But that hasn’t stopped right-wing media outlets from frothing at the mouth over her tweets, most recently a fake news headline indicating that Snickers was set to remove the beloved “dick vein” from its eponymous candy bars.

On April 16, @JUNlPER, whose display handle is Transgender Marx, tweeted a doctored version of a news story with the headline “Snickers are officially caving and removing the world-renowned dick vein from the candy bar.”

As Juniper told co-hosts Brittany Spanos and Ej Dickson on Rolling Stone‘s podcast Don’t Let This Flop, the “Snickers dick vein” had been a meme for quite some time before her tweet, but she was inspired to post the fake headline after watching the right-wing media have a collective freakout over the candy company Mars (which also owns Snickers) changing the green M&M’s iconic footwear from thigh-high boots to sneakers. The move, according to a press release from the company, was to “better reflect a “more dynamic, progressive world” and to show off the character’s “personality, rather than their gender.”

“Tucker Carlson actually talked about it on Fox News, that it was ‘wokeifying’ M&Ms or whatever,” Juniper says, chuckling. She decided to post about Snickers removing the dick vein as “a satirical way to point out how just ridiculous [the media] are about some of these things — how they’ll take these stories and kind of run with it and not even verify anything.”

«

There are two trends in modern media: a lack of interest in verifying anything, and a tendency to surf the waves created by other media who haven’t bothered to verify and thus gin up false stories. At least this one is explanatory.
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Outside the US, Elon Musk’s vision of a rules-free Twitter is expected to unlock violence and civil strife • Coda Story

Elery Biddle:

»

What would it mean for the majority of Twitter users, who live outside the US?

“That just doesn’t work in a country like India,” said Nikhil Pahwa, a tech expert and founder of Medianama, an India-focused tech policy publication based in New Delhi. India [where it has more than 20 million users] is Twitter’s third-largest market after the US and Japan.

“We have real world consequences from the kind of speech that Twitter enables. Our political parties are really, really adept at understanding how the algorithms work, how to create trends, how to make something shareable,” Pahwa said. “What they excel at is essentially fueling hate.”

In recent years, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and other hardline Hindu nationalist groups have made Twitter, alongside Facebook and WhatsApp, an essential platform for promoting their agendas, sometimes inciting violence against religious minorities, Muslims in particular.

“I think we’re in a situation where we need more moderation of hateful content and not less. I don’t think Musk understands or cares for whether people are getting polarized or killed in India,” Pahwa told me.

…“Everyone thinks they know how to do content moderation until it becomes their job,” said Mishi Choudhary, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, a tech policy group in New Delhi.

“I am not sure how [Musk] plans to address censorship by proxy that countries like India demand,” she wrote in a message.

«

India, Nigeria, Ethiopia: all examples of countries where this is far more complex than Musk imagines.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You can rewind 25 years to run Mac OS 8 in a single browser window. Don’t ask why; it’s emulation. CC-licensed photo by youngthousandsyoungthousands 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. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Russia to halt gas supply to Poland, government told • The Guardian

Daniel Boffey:

»

Poland’s government has been told that the country’s gas supply from Russia will stop from Wednesday following Warsaw’s refusal to pay its supplier, Gazprom, in roubles, in an apparent warning shot to the rest of Europe.

The decision to kill supply at 8am CET had also followed Poland’s announcement earlier on Tuesday that it was imposing sanctions on 50 entities and individuals –including Russia’s biggest gas company – over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

The move will be a grave concern to those countries who are the most heavily dependent on Russian gas, such as Germany, but at a hastily arranged press conference, Polish ministers said they had sufficient supplies to weather an interruption while accusing Gazprom of a breach of contract.

Anna Moskwa, minister for climate, said: “There are no worries about shortages gas in our homes. It is worth pointing out that liquified nature gas alone supplies the market sufficiently. LNG deliveries in [terminal] Świnoujście are growing – in 2015 there was one, in 2021 it was already 35. As of today, it provides for about 50 deliveries.”

She added: “Appropriate diversification strategies that we have introduced allow us to feel on the safe side in this situation.”

PGNiG, Poland’s largest gas supplier, said it would file a breach of contract lawsuit over Gazprom’s decision.

Russia currently supplies about 55% of Poland’s annual demand of about 21bn cubic meters of gas but the country’s government has still been pushing the EU and other western allies to go further in punishing the Kremlin.

«

Weather in Poland is about the same as in the southern UK – down to 3ºC overnight. I think this is the first time that a fossil fuel has been used so directly as part of a war threat. There have been threats, but this is different. And, perversely, it’s likely to hasten the end of the use of gas. Why leave yourself vulnerable to a capricious foreign power?
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Meteorites contain key DNA and RNA building blocks • Popular Science

Tatyana Woodall:

»

For decades, astronomers have pondered the idea of panspermia, the theory that life on Earth was delivered here by a meteorite. The concept was once deemed improbable because it raised more questions than answers. But recent close examinations of extraterrestrial objects hint there may be some support for this far-out notion after all. 

Researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan have found new evidence that the chemical components necessary to build DNA may have been carried to Earth by carbonaceous meteorites, some of the earliest matter in the solar system, as they report in a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications. Although these kinds of materials make up about 75% of all asteroids, they rarely fall to Earth, limiting how often scientists can study them. Yet they are troves of information: Scrutinizing these space rocks can tell stories about unique cosmic locations. Their contents may also help reveal the ancient chemical reactions that made our world a living planet. 

Specifically, several meteorites have been found to contain nucleobases. These chemicals, called the building blocks of life, make up the nucleic acids inside DNA and RNA. Of the five major nucleobases, previous meteorite studies detected only three of them, named adenine, guanine, and uracil. But the present research proves for the first time that two more—cytosine and thymine—can exist within space rocks. 

«

“Space rocks” – a classic example of the “second mention“.

But if all the elements of DNA could have arrived on spac..meteorites, that pushes the question of origins back, and also raises more strongly the possibility of DNA-based life elsewhere.
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I helped build ByteDance’s vast censorship machine • Protocol

Shen Lu spoke to “Li An” (it’s a pseudonym – so quaint! So soon-to-be-outlawed!):

»

It was the night Dr. Li Wenliang struggled for his last breath in the emergency room of Wuhan Central Hospital. I, like many Chinese web users, had stayed awake to refresh my Weibo feed constantly for updates on his condition. Dr. Li was an ophthalmologist who sounded the alarm early in the COVID-19 outbreak. He soon faced government intimidation and then contracted the virus. When he passed away in the early hours of Friday, Feb. 7, 2020, I was among many Chinese netizens who expressed grief and outrage at the events on Weibo, only to have my account deleted.

I felt guilt more than anger. At the time, I was a tech worker at ByteDance, where I helped develop tools and platforms for content moderation. In other words, I had helped build the system that censored accounts like mine. I was helping to bury myself in China’s ever-expanding cyber grave.

I hadn’t received explicit directives about Li Wenliang, but Weibo was certainly not the only Chinese tech company relentlessly deleting posts and accounts that night. I knew ByteDance’s army of content moderators were using the tools and algorithms that I helped develop to delete content, change the narrative and alter memories of the suffering and trauma inflicted on Chinese people during the COVID-19 outbreak. I couldn’t help but feel every day like I was a tiny cog in a vast, evil machine.

…When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. The moderators had asked for this because they didn’t understand the language. Streamers speaking ethnic languages and dialects that Mandarin-speakers don’t understand would receive a warning to switch to Mandarin. If they didn’t comply, moderators would respond by manually cutting off the livestreams, regardless of the actual content.

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Accountants are bracing themselves for a crypto-induced nightmare tax season • Mel Magazine

Quinn Myers:

»

For RJ, a 38-year-old certified public accountant in Chicago, tax season is never easy. “Every year it’s been hell, the worst 15 weeks of my life over and over again,” he tells me. “But now I would do anything to go back in time to avoid what’s coming. I can’t believe I was naive enough to think it couldn’t get worse.” 

RJ is dreading this year’s tax season due to the unprecedented number of people who took interest in trading stocks and cryptocurrency over the course of 2021. To get an idea why, here’s how RJ first realized something terrible was coming his way: “I’ve been doing the taxes of a friend from college’s little brother — he’s worked the same job since graduating so it’s been a pretty simple filing every year, and I give him the family and friends discount,” RJ explains. “This year, bless his heart, he emailed me early asking about crypto taxes, so I had him send over a document of his investments.” 

In response, “he sent over a massive spreadsheet with an endless amount of transactions, most of which were like ‘Bought $45 of Cumcoin at $.000000065 on PancakeSwap,’ and ‘Traded 750,000 SHIB to BLAZE on CoinFort, transferred to XCryptoX Wallet,’” RJ says. “I almost walked out of the office and straight into the lake.” 

RJ isn’t alone in agonizing over the forthcoming tax season. “I’ve been a CPA for 13-plus years and have done seasonal tax work for most of that period,” says Colin Smith, a CPA in Ohio. “This tax season is shaping up to be more stressful than ever before, as there are a number of ways the explosion in crypto and retail stock trading can create major headaches for accountants.”

«

On the plus side, at least they kept a spreadsheet.
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Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in Your Browser • persistent.info

Mihai Parparita:

»

I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app.

…It’s a golden age of emulation. Between increasing CPU power, WebAssembly, and retrocomputing being so popular The New York Times is covering it, it’s never been easier to relive your 80s/90s/2000s nostalgia. Projects like v86 make it easy to run your chosen old operating system in the browser. My heritage being of the classic Mac line, I was curious what the easiest to use emulation option was in the modern era. I had earlier experimented with Basilisk II, which worked well enough, but it was rather annoying to set up, as far as gathering a ROM, a boot image, messing with configuration files, etc. As far as I could tell, that was still the state of the art, at least if you were targeting late era 68K Mac emulation.

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It is pretty amazing to see this running in a browser, about as fast as the originals used to run. Control strip! Spatial Finder! Also.. not many apps. And, of course, no browser.
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What’s the future of twitter under Musk? | Inside Story – YouTube

I popped up on Al Jazeera TV to talk about the Musk takeover of Twitter along with Quinn McKew of Article 19 and Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at the University of California and author of the book “Beyond the Valley”. Skip forward about four minutes to get to the discussion.
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Twitter takeover was brash and fast, with Musk calling the shots • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Michelle Davis and Liana Baker:

»

The first breakthrough was coming up with $46.5bn for the bid. After bringing on Morgan Stanley as his adviser, Musk was able to get a dozen banks to commit $25.5bn in debt financing. He pledged another $21bn in equity financing himself.

Doing video calls, making presentations and sharing parts of his vision for the future of Twitter helped the banks get comfortable working with him, Bloomberg reported.

There were also at least two consecutive weekends where advisers worked through a few sleepless nights. The code name for the bid was “Project X” at some of the banks involved. Musk, meanwhile, dialed in to calls from places like Texas, where Tesla is now based.

The second tactic Musk employed was appealing directly to Twitter shareholders late last week. After revealing he had financing in place, Musk brought his pitch to some of Twitter’s biggest active investors and urged them to pressure Twitter to engage, some of the people said. Some shareholders reached out to Twitter to say they wanted it to take the offer seriously, they said.

Twitter’s board, meanwhile — joined in some cases by management — set up meetings with eight to 10 of its investors to gauge shareholder views on a potential deal, one of the people said. Those meetings began before Musk made his financing commitments public.

The third catalyst that led to a deal was the role of the price, $54.20, and how it compared with Twitter’s own growth prospects. The company’s advisers, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., did a valuation analysis and presented it to the board last Friday, one of the people said. Musk’s camp didn’t get a look at those materials, though, given the decision to bypass reviewing Twitter’s books.

Twitter’s shares were trading well below Musk’s bid, with the stock closing at $47.08 the previous day, and far from their $70-plus highs of a year earlier. But the question was whether the stock could recover without taking the deal. The analysis didn’t paint an optimistic picture.

«

As others have pointed out, Twitter was due to report earnings on Thursday. Given the economic slowdown, those would probably have been mediocre. Selling at a premium suddenly began to look like an attractive idea.
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2008: Why are there no spam or trolls on Twitter? • The Guardian

Kate Bevan, who I asked to write this piece in March 2008 when Twitter was just a couple of years old:

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Because it’s rather like an RSS feed – you choose to read it – and nobody so far has worked out how to spam a feed.

Twitter, for those not in the know, is a collection of microblogs where people post their minute-by-minute thoughts and actions. Anyone can sign up and start posting “tweets”, or updates. Your tweets can be made and viewed via Facebook or your mobile as well as via the website (twitter.com).

However, this is asymmetric, unlike Facebook, which requires you to confirm a friend request before they can see your status updates, which are the same sort of idea as tweets. On Twitter you can choose to follow anyone whose tweets catch your eye; and similarly, unless you limit your tweets only to your friends, anyone can follow you even if you choose not to follow them. Not everyone follows everyone who follows them. You follow?

Given the number of trolls, fools and idiots on the internet, Twitter is remarkable for being largely idiot-free, as blogger Russell Beattie points out. “Think about any other online community system ever created,” he observes. “All of them have had to deal with the core problem of idiots. Anytime a virtual group gets to a certain size, the morons come.”

«

At the time Beattie reckoned Twitter had roughly a million users. And I’ll confirm – it was pretty much free of spam or trolls. (Like pretty much everyone, Beattie fell out of the habit of blogging as Twitter became embedded in our lives. Much like the spam and trolls – including the giant one who has just bought it – did.)
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Making science more open is good for research—but bad for security • WIRED UK

Grace Browne:

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a new paper in the journal PLoS Biology argues that, while the swell of the open science movement is on the whole a good thing, it isn’t without risks. 

Though the speed of open-access publishing means important research gets out more quickly, it also means the checks required to ensure that risky science isn’t being tossed online are less meticulous. In particular, the field of synthetic biology—which involves the engineering of new organisms or the reengineering of existing organisms to have new abilities—faces what is called a dual-use dilemma: that while quickly released research may be used for the good of society, it could also be co-opted by bad actors to conduct biowarfare or bioterrorism. It also could increase the potential for an accidental release of a dangerous pathogen if, for example, someone inexperienced were able to easily get their hands on a how-to guide for designing a virus. “There is a risk that bad things are going to be shared,” says James Smith, a coauthor on the paper and a researcher at the University of Oxford. “And there’s not really processes in place at the moment to address it.”

While the risk of dual-use research is an age-old problem, “open science poses new and different challenges,” says Gigi Gronvall, a biosecurity expert and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “These risks have always been there, but with the advances in technology, it magnifies them.”

To be clear, this has yet to happen. No dangerous virus or other pathogen has been replicated or created from instructions in a preprint. But given that the potential consequences of this happening are so catastrophic—like triggering another pandemic—the paper’s authors argue that even small increases in risk are not worth taking. And the time to be thinking deeply about these risks is now. 

«

We’ve been here before, to some extent: there was a moratorium in the 1970s on recombinant DNA work while everyone worked out what the safe parameters were. More recently we’ve seen calls for moratoriums on germ line editing (which remain in force, in effect). The problem is that the technologies for genetic manipulation are available to far more people, far more cheaply, than before. (Thanks G for the link.)
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How Ikea tricks you into buying more stuff • The Hustle

Zachary Crockett:

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It’s estimated that 60% of Ikea purchases are impulse buys. And Ikea’s own creative director has said that only 20% of the store’s purchases are based on actual logic and needs.

All of this unplanned buying has earned Ikea an enviable position in the struggling retail landscape. As of 2021, it boasts:
• ~$47.6B USD in annual retail sales
• 458 stores in 61 markets
• 775m store visits + 5B web visits per year
• 225k global employees

On the surface, this success may seem a bit perplexing because Ikea’s way of doing business is extremely unorthodox.

It sells meatballs and lamps under the same roof. It has been described as both “Disneyland for adults” and “a nightmare hellscape.” And the idea of spending an afternoon stuck in a one-way maze — then going home and assembling your own bookcase — isn’t exactly appealing.

But these eccentricities are intentionally engineered to get you to make unplanned purchases, and come back for more.

In general, retailers design their stores with three goals in mind:
• Intelligibility: Easy to understand the floor plan
• Accessibility: Easy to navigate
• A clear visual field: Exposure to products and the lay of the land 

Most companies use store layouts that give customers the freedom to explore at their own will.

Commonly used configurations — grid, racetrack, freeform, and spine — don’t have defined routes: You can wander down any aisle you please, in any order you want.

Ikea breaks all of these rules.

Inside, customers are led through a preordained, one-way path that winds through 50+ room settings. The average Ikea store is 300k sq. ft. — the equivalent of about 5 football fields — and their typical shopper ends up walking almost a mile.

Want a lamp? You’re going to have to walk past cookware, rugs, toilet brushes, and shoehorns to get there.

«

This is true, though once you know the Ikea layout (which, I’m pretty sure, doesn’t actually vary from store to store) then you can take the shortcut from sofas to kitchens (there are shortcuts). And using the online catalogue ahead of time lets you just head down to the warehouse and get precisely what you need. Though… meatballs. Mmm. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

He said he would, and he has – Elon Musk is buying Twitter for $44bn. Now the difficult work starts. CC-licensed photo by Steve Jurvetson on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Not limited to 280 characters. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk reaches deal to buy Twitter • The Washington Post

Douglas MacMillan, Faiz Siddiqui, Rachel Lerman and Taylor Telford :

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“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in the release [announcing the acquisition]. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

Musk‘s Twitter deal expands his portfolio, which already includes rocket building company SpaceX, which has aspirations of landing on Mars, and the electric carmaker Tesla, that has pushed electric vehicles into the mainstream.

“He’s more powerful than countries now,” said Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor close with Musk who said he had bought Twitter shares last week in hopes the deal went through. “He has the most important technology asset in America … probably one of the most strategic military assets in the world … and now he has one of the most important communications tools in the world.”

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Just let those words bounce around your mind for a little bit: more powerful than countries. (“How many divisions does Twitter have?” you ask. Well, it tells your people what’s happening, so you figure it out.)
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Elon Musk’s backing means Twitter needs ads to stay aloft • WSJ

Dan Gallagher:

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Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence at ad-buying giant GroupM, says most advertisers who work with Twitter “strongly prefer content standards” on the service.

That may not matter a great deal to Mr. Musk, who said of his own Twitter campaign that it “is not a way to make money” in an onstage interview at the Ted conference, on the same day of the filing describing his financial support. But more than half of that backing comes in the form of debt, from Morgan Stanley and “certain other financial institutions,” according to the filing. That means Mr. Musk will need to preserve Twitter’s cash flow—and ideally grow it—to service the debt. Some of that debt is in the form of margin loans backed by Mr. Musk’s Tesla shares.

Doing that without advertising would be difficult. Ads account for nearly 90% of Twitter’s revenue now, while data licensing provides most of the rest. The company launched Twitter Blue —its first consumer subscription offering—last year, rolling it out to the U.S. market in November. Chief Executive Parag Agrawal said on Twitter’s last earnings call in February that the company has seen a “strong response” from “our most heavy users” for the service. But he added that Blue is “not critical” to reaching $7.5bn of revenue in 2023, a target set at an analyst meeting in early 2021.

Mr. Musk will likely have his own goals in mind, and a privately held Twitter would be accountable only to him for reaching them. But since Mr. Musk has elected not to pay for Twitter entirely out of his own pocket, he’ll have to be accountable to others as well.

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There’s such myopia around this. Twitter’s ad models is terrible, and is part of why it has been so anaemic for years. There are so many possible business models: direct subscriptions, paywalled accounts (you already can’t retweet a locked account, so some of the infrastructure is there), much more targeted advertising, licensing tweets, licensing the “social graph” of who follows who and what topics, and any and all mixtures of those.

Musk has proven, at SpaceX and Tesla, that he can attract and manage really good engineers who do remarkable work; Twitter’s team need to prove their mettle now. The content moderation can remain as it is for now; that’s not the hinge feature of the network. Nor, dammit, is an edit button.
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The is no such thing as a good billionaire, and Elon Musk is no exception • Metro News

Joshua Potash is an adjunct lecturer at City University of New York:

»

On October 31 last year, Elon Musk sent out a tweet which claimed that if the United Nations put forward a proposal to solve world hunger with $6bn, he would contribute the money.

Two weeks later, the head of the U.N.’s World Food Program tweeted out a $6.6bn plan to ‘avert famine in 2022,’ tagging Mr. Musk and generating major headlines. But, as of February, 2022, the WFP had not received a cent from the world’s richest man. 

While Mr Musk may not have been convinced by the UN plan, it came as little surprise to me that a billionaire chose not to donate a huge chunk of his wealth to solve world hunger.

People like Elon Musk don’t get rich by giving money away, but in this particular case, however, the issue goes far beyond one flippant tweet. It looks like Musk’s attitude towards the World Food Program is part of a larger pattern. 

When Covid hit the United States, in March 2020 Musk tweeted that, ‘SpaceX is working on ventilators too.’ Instead, Musk made a donation to a number of hospitals of ventilation equipment which turned out to be breathing devices more commonly used for treating sleep apnea than those found in intensive care.

Similarly, in 2018 Musk pledged that he would ‘fund fixing the water in any house in Flint, Michigan that has water contamination above FDA levels.’

After the pledge, his Foundation donated $480,000 to fund water filtration systems in a dozen schools in the city, in a year when his net worth was already $19.9bn.

In 2018, the year of his bold pledge to the citizens of Flint, an investigation found Musk had paid no federal income tax.

It would be wonderful if the richest people on Earth used their wealth for good, but they don’t. The collected wealth of billionaires is not being used to end hunger or homelessness.

«

Now: you could argue that creating reusable rockets (SpaceX), really usable electric cars (Tesla), just-in-time online delivery (Amazon) and, er, reusable rockets (Blue Origin) takes humanity further into the future. But as Potash points out, they could actually do both. Donating billions need not distract Musk from running Tesla or SpaceX for a moment.
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Elon’s giant package • Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk

Ranjan Roy:

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In 2019, when Musk was promising robotaxis in a year, it really captured people’s imaginations. Nowadays, it just doesn’t feel like anyone other than Cathie Wood & team are pretending to take those magical, futuristic business lines seriously (yes, ARK’s new model says robotaxis will be 62% of total Tesla revenue by 2026).

Even that whole dancing robot thing showed the difficulty of capturing our collective imagination. For those unfamiliar, last November Tesla announced a humanoid robot thing. The presentation ended with a guy in a robot suit dancing (yes, this is real).

On the recent earnings call, Musk gave a half-hearted statement about how this theoretical line of humanoid robots could be worth more than electric vehicles for Tesla. The whole thing has honestly felt a bit routine. I’ve watched this stuff for years, and maybe it’s overall Elon-promise fatigue, but a lot of these moonshot proclamations have started to feel a bit throwaway – from Elon, from the fanboys, from the press, from the entire infrastructure that once was manic over them.

However, the Twitter thing really lit a fire. Maybe Musk was really going to join the Board and be a cooperative part-owner, but the moment he saw the energy the potential purchase generated, he went all in. Musk buying Twitter has generated the conversational energy that rockets and robots once did.

«

And, as he goes on to point out, Musk and his brother and the ARK Investment company have all been selling Tesla stock (ARK even while it suggested a higher price target for the stock). So this is about the “next thing”, and putting himself in a place where the Securities and Exchange Commission can’t touch him.

Musk isn’t a fool (don’t let the tweets fool you), and Roy tries to see the bigger picture. We all see the rain-dirty valley; what shape is the Brigadoon?
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Hot/Crazy scale test • Individual Differences Research

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The Hot/Crazy Scale is a phenomenon popularized by the sitcom How I Met Your Mother and is well-known in internet pop culture. Some claim that the theory is pseudoscientific, while others maintain that it’s backed by proper studies. The theory holds that it’s possible to decipher how you should regard a potential partner based on their levels of “hot” and “crazy.”

This version of the Hot/Crazy Scale Test presents an updated and gender-neutral approach to the theory.

«

Wonder if we could get Twitter’s new owner to answer this. It’s only 20 questions (and not about whether you’re animal/vegetable/mineral), so quite quick. Of course the problem is whether you’re being truthful about yourself. At least it’ll distract you from doing Wordle for a few minutes. Oh, you already have?
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North Korea hackers still accessing money they stole from Axie Infinity • The Washington Post

Tory Newmyer and Jeremy B. Merrill:

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The cybercriminals’ continued access to the money, more than $600m stolen from the Axie Infinity video game, underscores the limits of law enforcement’s ability to stop the flow of illicit cryptocurrency across the globe. The hackers are still moving their loot, most recently about $4.5m worth of the Ethereum currency on Friday, according to data from cryptocurrency tracking site Etherscan — eight days after the Treasury Department attempted to freeze those assets by sanctioning the digital wallet the group used in its attack.

The gang, which the Treasury Department identified as the Lazarus Group, also known for the 2014 hacking of Sony Pictures, so far has laundered nearly $100m — about 17% — of the stolen crypto, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. They moved their haul beyond the immediate reach of US authorities by converting it into the cryptocurrency Ethereum, which unlike the cryptocurrency they stole cannot be hobbled remotely. Since then, the gang has worked to obscure the crypto’s origins primarily by sending instalments of it through a program called Tornado Cash, a service known as a mixer that pools digital assets to hide their owners.

Authorities and major crypto industry players are scrambling to keep up. Treasury sanctioned three more addresses associated with the gang on Friday, as Binance, a large international crypto exchange, announced it had frozen $5.8m worth of crypto the hackers had transferred onto its platform.

The cat-and-mouse game unfolding between law enforcement and the North Korean hackers is another example of how criminals have learned to target the growing crypto economy’s weak points. They exploit faulty code in decentralized crypto platforms, use tools that help them hide their tracks such as converting assets to privacy-enhancing cryptocurrencies like Monero, and take advantage of spotty law enforcement coordination across international borders.

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It seems we’re being told that crypto isn’t anywhere near as regulated as normal currencies. Hard to credit. (Nice intersection of North Korea stories, hacking stories and crypto stories.)
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How the Eindhoven heat battery can quickly make millions of homes gas-free • Eindhoven University of Technology

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The idea that started it all was the heat battery as a storage medium in homes. In the meantime, however, the consortium is also looking at heat storage in office buildings, greenhouse horticulture or, for example, electric buses or luxury ships.

But, they realised, if this thermal battery [which uses the reversible exothermic reaction of potassium carbonate with water] can store heat loss-free, it can also be transported loss-free. After all, nothing else happens to the dry salt as long as no water is added. This is exactly where the thermal battery could make the difference, because other forms of heat transport, such as through pipes or phase transitions, always run up losses.

The consortium therefore also focuses their attention on industrial residual heat as a heat source, a kind of ‘heat waste’, such as that generated as a by-product in factories or surplus heat from data centers. This heat is not so ‘hot’ anymore; at temperatures below 150ºC it has no value for most industry.

For homes, however, such heat is very useful. Such temperatures are more than sufficient for heating your home or taking a hot shower. If industrial residual heat could be used to heat homes, you have a win-win situation: homes could be made independent of gas – an even more urgent need given the dependence on (Russian) gas – and CO2 emissions would be reduced.

Adan does a quick calculation. “In the Netherlands we have about 150 PetaJoule (a number with 15 zeros) of residual heat from industry per year. That would enable you to take almost 3.5 million homes off the gas, which is more than twice the target of the Dutch government, namely 1.5 million homes gas-free by 2030.”

If you superimpose the locations of the sources of industrial residual heat and homes on a map of the Netherlands, Adan says the match is reasonably good. There is no more than 30km (18.6mi) between them.

«

Using a crystal for energy storage is a simple enough idea, but getting it to industrial (or domestic) scale is a lot tougher. (Thanks Titus for the link.)
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Deadly divergence: how Brexit could become the new killer on Britain’s roads • The New European

David Ward:

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From July 6th proven life-saving technologies such as autonomous emergency braking and intelligent speed assistance (ISA) will be a mandatory fitment for new model passenger cars and commercial vehicles across the EU. The so-called General Safety Regulation (GSR) will be phased in over a number of years and eventually apply to all new vehicles on European roads. Once fully implemented by EU Member States, the GSR is expected to save 25,000 road deaths and 140,000 serious injuries. [ISA equipped vehicles continuously detect the speed limit through a combination of digital maps and cameras. It prevents the driver from exceeding the limit but can be overridden if needed.]

However, the UK government is undecided on whether or not to apply the new regulations and the Department for Transport is consulting on what to do. Meanwhile, the minister for Brexit opportunities, Jacob Rees Mogg told MPs last week that “we should put divergence behind us” and not look “over our shoulder saying the EU is doing this, and, therefore, we should do it too”.  He then illustrated his point by mentioning forthcoming EU vehicle safety requirements for speed limiters. His comments were clearly prompted by stories in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail quoting Brexiteer backbench MPs warning about “Big Brother in the cockpit”. 

Lost in this ideological argument about the UK’s post Brexit scope for regulatory freedom is any focus on the need to reduce the 33,000 deaths and serious injuries that have occurred on British roads in the decade from 2010-2019. According to the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory the GSR package has the potential to have a greater safety benefit than the introduction of seat belts. They estimate it will prevent 1,762 deaths and 15,000 injuries and deliver £7 billion in net economic benefits by 2037. Crucially the 15 measures in the GSR aim to improve safety not just for vehicle occupants but for vulnerable road users – pedestrians and cyclists – too. 

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Not sure even the Haunted Hatstand could argue that more people dying on the roads is a Brexit benefit.
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Chess.com banned by Russia • Chess.com

Chess.com Team:

»

Yesterday, Chess.com was banned by the Russian government agency Roscomnadzor, the “Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media.” Roscomnadzor is responsible for censorship within Russia, a busy occupation these days. Since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine on February 24th, Roscomnadzor has banned hundreds of sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google News, BBC News, NPR, and Amnesty International.

According to Roscomnadzor, their goal is to block two webpages: “On The Invasion of Ukraine” which outlines our policy and actions regarding the war on Ukraine and addresses FAQ and “Ukrainian Chess Players In Times Of War” which is a piece interviewing Ukrainian chess players on their circumstances and views during the early days of the war. Since Chess.com uses secure https webpages, Roscomnadzor is unable to ban these single pages and has banned the entire Chess.com site. Our members report that Chess.com’s apps are unaffected. We happily encourage our Russian members to continue accessing our site using our apps or any of the many outstanding VPN services that are so essential in Russia.

We reaffirm our condemnation in the strongest possible terms of the Russian government’s war of aggression against Ukraine and will continue to publish content to that effect.

«

You have to consider how big chess is in Russia to realise that doing this is a big move.
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Belarusian railway saboteurs helped thwart Russia’s assault on Kyiv • The Washington Post

Liz Sly:

»

Belarus railway saboteurs can at least claim a role in fuelling the logistical chaos that quickly engulfed the Russians, leaving troops stranded on the front lines without food, fuel and ammunition within days of the invasion.

Alexander Kamyshin, head of Ukrainian railways, expressed Ukraine’s gratitude to the Belarusian saboteurs. “They are brave and honest people who have helped us,” he said.

The attacks were simple but effective, targeting the signal control cabinets essential to the functioning of the railways, members of the activist network said. For days on end, the movement of trains was paralysed, forcing the Russians to attempt to resupply their troops by road and contributing to the snarl-up that stalled the infamous 40-mile military convoy north of Kyiv.

How much of the chaos can be attributed to the sabotage and how much to poor logistical planning by the Russians is hard to tell, especially as there is no independent media reporting from Belarus, said Emily Ferris, a research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. But without automated signalling, trains were forced to slow to a crawl and the number of them traveling on the tracks at any one time would have been severely restricted, she said.

“Given the Russian reliance on trains, I’m sure it contributed to some of the problems they had in the north. It would have slowed down their ability to move,” she said. “They couldn’t push further into Ukrainian territory and snarled their supply lines because they had to rely on trucks.”

«

As you’d expect, the Belarusian authorities are not pleased, and have sought out anyone who might have been involved, searching their phones for evidence of involvement – such as the Telegram channels through which the sabotage was organised. Eleven people are in prison and could get up to 20 years for “terrorism”.
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Hopin: virtual events start-up struggles as real gatherings return • Financial Times

Kadhim Shubber, Patricia Nilsson and Miles Kruppa:

»

In November 2020, with the pandemic in full force, British virtual events start-up Hopin declared that a new era of digital gatherings had begun.

Virtual events were “here to stay”, said founder Johnny Boufarhat, as he bragged that there were “more than 15,000 monthly events” available on Hopin’s “Explore” platform. Today, there are fewer than 500 listed.

Boufarhat’s vision made Hopin a pandemic sensation and Europe’s fastest growing start-up ever. Launched in 2019, his company rocketed to fame after Covid hit with a conferencing product that seemed tailor-made for lockdowns.

The 27-year-old raised more than a billion dollars for Hopin in little over a year, reaching a $7.8bn private market valuation that made him Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire on paper.

As top-tier venture capital firms like IVP, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global clamoured to invest, Boufarhat sold $195m worth of his own shares, according to a Financial Times analysis.

With Covid beginning to recede and publicly traded technology stocks being dumped by investors, Boufarhat now faces a moment of truth as he tries to build a sustainable business that lives up to the lofty expectations it set during the pandemic.

“The landscape will look very different going forward. People can now meet,” noted one events industry executive. They dismissed the pandemic-driven online events boom as “a bit of an artificial bubble”.

«

The staffing numbers have done much the same: down by 12%, or 138 people. Which raises the question of how it needed a thousand-plus staff. OK, so it has studios and meeting rooms. The pandemic really blew some companies up.

Still, Boufarhat has $195m or so to comfort him. The pipeline of money going from venture capital funds to so-so businesses, hus enriching individuals of varying competence (👋 WeWork) continues unabated.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: thanks to everyone who pointed out that yesterday’s analysis of Twitter’s cash flow should have said that it has never achieved what Musk needs to service the debt on his loan. (Latest estimates are that it would need about $3bn in free cash flow, which is 3x what it has ever managed annually.)

Playing Pokémon Go has been linked to a drop in depression-related internet searches, a new study says. Was it the fresh air or the company? CC-licensed photo by PaintimpactPaintimpact on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Not in the Sue Gray report. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google, Meta, and others will have to explain their algorithms under new EU legislation • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

The final text of the DSA [Digital Services Act] has yet to be released, but the European Parliament and European Commission have detailed a number of obligations it will contain:
• Targeted advertising based on an individuals’ religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity is banned. Minors cannot be subject to targeted advertising either
• “Dark patterns” — confusing or deceptive user interfaces designed to steer users into making certain choices — will be prohibited. The EU says that, as a rule, cancelling subscriptions should be as easy as signing up for them
• Large online platforms like Facebook will have to make the working of their recommender algorithms (e.g. used for sorting content on the News Feed or suggesting TV shows on Netflix) transparent to users. Users should also be offered a recommender system “not based on profiling.” In the case of Instagram, for example, this would mean a chronological feed (as it introduced recently)
• Hosting services and online platforms will have to explain clearly why they have removed illegal content, as well as give users the ability to appeal such takedowns. The DSA itself does not define what content is illegal, though, and leaves this up to individual countries
• The largest online platforms will have to provide key data to researchers to “provide more insight into how online risks evolve”
• Online marketplaces must keep basic information about traders on their platform to track down individuals selling illegal goods or services
• Large platforms will also have to introduce new strategies for dealing with misinformation during crises (a provision inspired by the recent invasion of Ukraine).

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The targeted advertising ban might be tricky (people have wondered how, say, hairdressers specialising in ethnic hairstyles should find clients). Policing dark patterns will be fun (who decides it’s “dark”, and who forces the change?). And the recommendation algorithm element is really putting the cat among the pigeons.

What’s more, the DSA will likely come into force more quickly than the Digital Markets Act. Popcorn time!
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Twitter reexamines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal • WSJ

Cara Lombardo:

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Twitter is re-examining Elon Musk’s $43bn takeover offer after the billionaire lined up financing for the bid, in a sign the social-media company could be more receptive to a deal.

Twitter had been expected to rebuff the offer, which Mr. Musk made earlier this month without saying how he would pay for it. But after he disclosed last week that he now has $46.5bn in financing, Twitter is taking a fresh look at the offer and is more likely than before to seek to negotiate, people familiar with the matter said. The situation is fast-moving and it is still far from guaranteed Twitter will do so.

Twitter is still working on an all-important estimate of its own value, which would need to come in close to Mr. Musk’s offer, and it could also insist on sweeteners such as Mr. Musk agreeing to cover breakup protections should the deal fall apart, some of the people said.

The two sides are meeting Sunday to discuss Mr. Musk’s proposal, the people said.

Twitter is expected to weigh in on the bid when it reports first-quarter earnings Thursday, if not sooner, the people said. Twitter’s response won’t necessarily be black-and-white, and could leave the door open for inviting other bidders or negotiating with Mr. Musk on terms other than price. Mr. Musk reiterated to Twitter’s chairman Bret Taylor in recent days that he won’t budge from his offer of $54.20-a-share, the people said

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What negotiation does Twitter’s board think are feasible? Even meeting him is a sign of weakness, and he’ll recognise that. He’ll eat them alive.

The reality though is that Musk’s plan will fail on two fronts (but note proviso). First: Twitter has already tried free speech maximalism: it ends badly with out-of-control pile-ons and terrorist videos. Second: Musk’s borrowing would require about $1bn per year just to cover the debt interest, and Twitter has never generated that level of free cash flow, ever.

The proviso: it might do if Musk creates a new business model that brings in more money. I think Ben Thompson’s one might be worth a try.
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Removing roads and traffic lights speeds urban travel • Scientific American

Linda Baker:

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Conventional traffic engineering assumes that given no increase in vehicles, more roads mean less congestion. So when planners in Seoul tore down a six-lane highway a few years ago and replaced it with a five-mile-long park, many transportation professionals were surprised to learn that the city’s traffic flow had actually improved, instead of worsening. “People were freaking out,” recalls Anna Nagurney, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who studies computer and transportation networks. “It was like an inverse of Braess’s paradox.”

The brainchild of mathematician Dietrich Braess of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, the eponymous paradox unfolds as an abstraction: it states that in a network in which all the moving entities rationally seek the most efficient route, adding extra capacity can actually reduce the network’s overall efficiency. The Seoul project inverts this dynamic: closing a highway—that is, reducing network capacity—improves the system’s effectiveness.

Although Braess’s paradox was first identified in the 1960s and is rooted in 1920s economic theory, the concept never gained traction in the automobile-oriented US. But in the 21st century, economic and environmental problems are bringing new scrutiny to the idea that limiting spaces for cars may move more people more efficiently. A key to this counterintuitive approach to traffic design lies in manipulating the inherent self-interest of all drivers.

A case in point is “The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks,” published last September in Physical Review Letters by Michael Gastner, a computer scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, and his colleagues. Using hypothetical and real-world road networks, they explain that drivers seeking the shortest route to a given destination eventually reach what is known as the Nash equilibrium, in which no single driver can do any better by changing his or her strategy unilaterally. The problem is that the Nash equilibrium is less efficient than the equilibrium reached when drivers act unselfishly—that is, when they coordinate their movements to benefit the entire group.

The “price of anarchy” is a measure of the inefficiency caused by selfish drivers. Analyzing a commute from Harvard Square to Boston Common, the researchers found that the price can be high: selfish drivers typically waste 30% more time than they would under “socially optimal” conditions.

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When they say “socially optimal” do they mean “on public transport”? I happened across this paradox by accident, but its implications are colossal. It even applies to semiconductor circuits: add more connections and you can reduce effective electron flow. This article is from 2009, but nothing has changed (except maybe people are less willing to listen to the experts who explain why building Yet Another Road won’t actually help).
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Pokemon Go study found it led to “decrease in depression-related internet searches” • The Gamer

Issy Van der Velde:

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Many of us remember the summer of 2016. Just about everyone was playing Pokemon Go. People would go out late at night just to catch a rare Pokemon and find others in their town right there alongside them. Some areas even reported more traffic accidents as people were so concerned with catching-’em-all they didn’t look at the roads.

A recent study by the London School of Economics looked into how the global phenomenon affected local depression trends. Since the game had a staggered launch, the study was able to compare the amount of depression-related searches in areas that had access to the game and areas that didn’t.

What it found was that there were fewer searches for depression-related terms such as ‘depression’, ‘stress’, and ‘anxiety’, suggesting “location-based mobile games may decrease the prevalence of local rates of depression.” The effect doesn’t seem to have been permanent, as the study found the effects, while significant, were short-term.

The study isn’t trying to claim going outside for a bit cures depression. “In the paper, the authors are keen to stress that their findings only relate to those suffering from non-clinical forms of mild depression and not those suffering with chronic or severe depressive disorders.”

However, the study believes the reason Pokemon Go led to fewer depression-related searches is that it, and other location-based video games, “encourage outdoor physical activity, face-to-face socialisation and exposure to nature.” All things that tend to make people happier.

The study argues that its findings highlight the mental health opportunities of video games like Pokemon Go, and that due to their relatively low cost and accessibility they may be of more interest to people who make public health laws and policies.

Again, it’s important to stress that the study is not claiming going outside for a bit can cure clinical depression. It’s found that being out in nature, socialising face-to-face, and mild exercise can help alleviate symptoms of mild depression.

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Seems sort-of obvious, but nevertheless good. Maybe AR systems will bring similar side benefits.
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AkuDreams NFT project earns $34m that its team will never be able to withdraw • web3 Is Going Great

Molly White:

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Micah Johnson, an artist and former professional baseball player, launched an astronaut-themed NFT project called AkuDreams. The auction was based around a Dutch auction, with the added twist that the lowest bid would set the final price for the NFT and all higher bids would be refunded.

The contract suffered from several flaws, however. The first allowed an exploiter to stop all refunds and withdrawals from the contract. Luckily for the team, the exploiter was well-intentioned and only intended to highlight the issue; they removed the block shortly after, leaving a message urging the team to have their contracts audited before release.

AkuDreams were not so lucky with the second issue. A bug in the code failed to account for users minting multiple NFTs in a single transaction, which made it so that the claimProjectFunds function that would allow the team to withdraw their earnings can never successfully execute. This means that the team can never withdraw the 11,539 ETH ($34m) earned from the NFT sales—it is stuck there forever.

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So it’s a sort of self-destructing safe that sets fire to the contents if ever opened. A work of staggering genius.
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Anomaly Six demonstrated its surveillance powers by spying on CIA • The Intercept

Sam Biddle and Jack Poulson:

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In the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter. According to Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six — or “A6” — the combination of its cellphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to effortlessly spy on Russian forces as they amassed along the Ukrainian border, or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines. To prove that the technology worked, Clark pointed A6’s powers inward, spying on the National Security Agency and CIA, using their own cellphones against them.

…According to audiovisual recordings of an A6 presentation reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the firm claims that it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, equivalent to a fifth of the world’s population. The staggering surveillance capacity was cited during a pitch to provide A6’s phone-tracking capabilities to Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring firm that leverages its access to Twitter’s rarely granted “firehose” data stream to sift through hundreds of millions of tweets per day without restriction. With their powers combined, A6 proposed, Zignal’s corporate and governmental clients could not only surveil global social media activity, but also determine who exactly sent certain tweets, where they sent them from, who they were with, where they’d been previously, and where they went next.

…Using satellite imagery tweeted by accounts conducting increasingly popular “open-source intelligence,” or OSINT, investigations, Clark showed how A6’s GPS tracking would let Zignal clients determine not simply that the military buildup was taking place, but track the phones of Russian soldiers as they mobilized to determine exactly where they’d trained, where they were stationed, and which units they belonged to. In one case, Clark showed A6 software tracing Russian troop phones backward through time, away from the border and back to a military installation outside Yurga, and suggested that they could be traced further, all the way back to their individual homes. Previous reporting by the Wall Street Journal indicates that this phone-tracking method is already used to monitor Russian military manoeuvres and that American troops are just as vulnerable.

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The spying-on-CIA bit is pretty dramatic too, involving geofencing.
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Obama says tech companies have made democracy more vulnerable • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Eugene Scott:

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In a lengthy speech at Stanford University, located in the heart of tech-heavy Silicon Valley, the former president spoke about the ways that tech platforms have helped to divide the public, spread misinformation, and erode trust in democratic institutions, leading to the rise of autocrats such as Russian leader Vladimir Putin and unnecessary deaths from the coronavirus.

“People are dying” because of disinformation on social media services, he said. Companies, he said, are not being transparent with the public about how their algorithms — the software they use to spread content on their services — work.

“Algorithms have evolved to the point that no one on the outside of these companies can accurately predict what they’ll do … and sometimes the people who built them aren’t sure … That’s a problem,” he added.

In his speech, Obama said that when he was president, he didn’t realize “how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories, despite having spent years being a target of disinformation myself,” saying he still harbors regret to this day. Disinformation refers to a coordinated campaign by political leaders, corporations, or other figures to spread harmful falsehoods and misleading narratives.

Despite keeping a relatively low public profile during his post-presidency, the former president in recent months has started to turn disinformation into a signature issue for his public life after office, embarking on a campaign to warn the public about the harm caused by falsehoods online and the social media algorithms that spread them.

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Maybe I should send him a copy of Social Warming – he might find it apropos.

(Why do some news orgs use boring headlines for the title parts of news stories, which get sucked into search engines? For this one it’s “Obama warns about disinformation at Stanford event”, which is dullsville.)
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The renewable-energy revolution will need renewable storage • The New Yorker

Matthew Hutson looks at various projects being suggested to store energy from renewable sources:

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Li-ion [lithium-ion] batteries, despite their flaws, are a known quantity. The method being developed by Energy Vault isn’t. Still, the company isn’t alone in pursuing what’s known as “gravity storage.” Gravitricity, based in Scotland, recently concluded a demonstration that involved hefting a fifty-ton block up a tower, two stories at a time; it now plans to raise and lower single, thousand-ton blocks inside disused mine shafts. Two other companies, Gravity Power, in California, and Gravity Storage GmbH, in Hamburg, aim to place a massive weight at the bottom of a shaft and then pump water underneath to lift it. To withdraw energy, they’ll let the weight push the water down into a pipe and through a turbine. RheEnergise, based in Montreal, has come up with yet another take on pumped hydro, centered on a fluid that the company invented called R-19, which is two and a half times as dense as water; its system will move the fluid between tanks at the top and bottom of an incline. The work is still at the crowdfunding stage.

Just as you can store potential energy by lifting a block in the air, you can store it thermally, by heating things up. Companies are banking heat in molten salt, volcanic rocks, and other materials. Giant batteries, based on renewable chemical processes, are also workable. In so-called flow batteries, tanks can be used to manage electrolytes, which hold a charge. In hydrogen storage, electrolysis is used to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water; the hydrogen is then cached underground, or in aboveground tanks, as gas or liquid or part of ammonia. When it’s recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell, it forms water again and releases electricity.

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I read this article with a mounting sense of despair. The ideas are so stupid. They ignore the very inconvenient and ubiquitous Second Law of Thermodynamics – systems become more disordered. “Efficiency” gets only the briefest mention amid all the fracking-adjacent, skyscraper-cranes adjacent ideas which you only have to hear to know will fail because they have too many moving parts.

Pumped hydro – move water up a hill with excess energy, let it flow down when needed – is up to 80% efficient in a full cycle. Only something using liquids will come anywhere close.
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This AI Does Not Exist

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This AI Does Not Exist generates realistic descriptions and code snippets of machine learning models given a name for one that doesn’t exist.

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Good enough to fool a human on a superficial glance, anyway.
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Google Messages bug leaves camera on, draining battery • 9to5Google

Kyle Bradshaw:

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A new bug in Google Messages leaves your camera on in the background, quickly draining your battery and heating up your device.

(Since the story first appeared, Google has begun rolling out a fix for the Messages app.)

Within the Google Messages app, there’s an easy way to quickly snap a picture and immediately attach it to a message and send it to a friend. In the view for attaching images from your gallery, there’s also a live feed from your camera to either take an immediate snapshot from that thumbnail view or you can expand it for a better view.

In recent updates of the Google Messages app, as spotted on one of our own devices as well as being reported on Reddit, a bug in the app occasionally leaves this camera feed running even when it’s not on screen — including when Messages is in the background. In our experience, this causes significant battery drain and heat, as you’d expect.

As there isn’t any visible cause for the increased usage, we had to track down the problem using Android 12’s privacy indicators for the camera and microphone. When the issue occurs, an Android 12 device will show that Google Messages is actively using your camera. The easiest way to stop the issue in the moment is to close the app from the Recents view.

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Flagship Android tablets take aim at pros • ZDNet

Ross Rubin:

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One of the biggest differentiation pro-Android tablets have versus inexpensive versions, or even the iPad, has been the ability to switch into a desktop mode. Samsung has long offered this via the DeX feature on its tablets, an extension of the interface it can present when an S-series smartphone connects to a monitor or television. Lenovo’s more recent answer is Productivity Mode, which presents a more subtle change to the user interface, e.g. keeping launcher icons intact, while still presenting a taskbar.

While either can be activated via a tap on the settings button and Productivity Mode’s transition is faster than DeX, most Windows users will find the DeX approach more familiar. That said, Lenovo offers an experimental feature that allows users of its desktop mode to extend work area across multiple monitors versus simple mirroring of the display, a feature that’s been historically limited to “desktop” OSes such as Windows macOS and Chrome OS.

The latest pro Android tablets bring a degree of polish and flexibility that is far beyond the early days of such devices–with more promising enhancements coming soon. But they continue to face stiff competition and category friction

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The key problem is that smartphones don’t run Windows. OK, iPads don’t either, but there’s better integration between the iPad and Windows apps than between Android tablets and Windows apps (isn’t there?).

The absence of Android tablets at the top end is a longstanding mystery. But it’s not the hardware.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified