The progress of the war in Ukraine was forecast, mostly correctly, by a wargaming team ahead of the invasion in February. But their forecast isn’t encouraging for resolution. CC-licensed photo by manhhai 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. No, you delete your account. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Inside the bitcoin bust that took down the web’s biggest child abuse site • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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The UK National Crime Agency agent showed [South African entrepreneur Jonathan] Levin a Bitcoin address that the agency had determined was part of [child sexual abuse content site] Welcome to Video’s financial network. Levin suggested they load it in Chainalysis’ crypto-tracing software tool, known as Reactor. He set down his cup of tea, pulled his chair up to the agent’s laptop, and began charting out the site’s collection of addresses on the Bitcoin blockchain, representing the wallets where Welcome to Video had received payments from thousands of customers.

He was taken aback by what he saw: many of this child abuse site’s users—and, by all appearances, its administrators—had done almost nothing to obscure their cryptocurrency trails. An entire network of criminal payments, all intended to be secret, was laid bare before him.

Over the years, Levin had watched as some dark-web operators wised up to certain of his firm’s crypto-tracing tricks. They would push their money through numerous intermediary addresses or “mixer” services designed to throw off investigators, or use the cryptocurrency Monero, designed to be far harder to track. But looking at the Welcome to Video cluster in the NCA office that day, Levin could immediately see that its users were far more naive. Many had simply purchased bitcoins from cryptocurrency exchanges and then sent them directly from their own wallets into Welcome to Video’s.

The contents of the website’s wallets, in turn, had been liquidated at just a few exchanges—Bithumb and Coinone in South Korea, Huobi in China—where they were converted back into traditional currency. Someone seemed to be continually using large, multi-input transactions to gather up the site’s funds and then cash them out. That made it easy work for Reactor to instantly and automatically cluster thousands of addresses, determining that they all belonged to a single service—which Levin could now label in the software as Welcome to Video.

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Deeply reported. (Deeply disturbing, too, in what it tells you about some of the people we share the planet with.)
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Paying with bitcoin in world’s crypto capital is still an infuriating experience • Bloomberg via Archive

Michael McDonald:

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The sign at el Salvador International Airport beckons like a message from the future. “Chivo,” it reads in slick blue script. Slang for “cool,” the word signals that Bitcoin are welcome at passport control, along with the almighty dollar and credit card.

So begins my journey—and experiment. For five days, I’m trying to pay my bills only in Bitcoin. El Salvador is the ideal laboratory. In September it became the first country to declare Bitcoin legal tender, which means all businesses should accept it as a form of payment.

On this Monday in February, the airport cashier stands before me, ready to accept the $12 entry fee. On her shirt she wears the El Salvador coat of arms, which features its famed volcanoes and motto: “God, Union, Liberty.” It’s a fitting image for the dream of cryptocurrency, which seeks to disrupt the world financial system.

I wave my iPhone, packed with Bitcoin ready to show their value as an honest-to-goodness medium of exchange. Then the official interrupts my reverie. “I’m sorry, sir,” she says. “Only cash or credit.”

It turns out that Chivo, El Salvador’s Bitcoin-processing system, isn’t so cool after all. Its point-of-sale device, a white gizmo that looks like a credit card reader, isn’t working. Something about the internet signal. I charge the fee to my Visa card. Score one for international banking, zero for the digerati.

It’s disappointing, because the trip took some serious prep.

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McDonald gives it a go. And he shows that, for all President Bukele’s noise, it isn’t working.
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US says it secretly removed malware worldwide, pre-empting Russian cyberattacks • The New York Times

Kate Conger and David Sanger:

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The malware enabled the Russians to create “botnets” — networks of private computers that are infected with malicious software and controlled by the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Russian military. But it is unclear what the malware was intended to do, since it could be used for everything from surveillance to destructive attacks.

An American official said on Wednesday that the United States did not want to wait to find out. Armed with secret court orders in the United States and the help of governments around the world, the Justice Department and the FBI disconnected the networks from the GRU’s own controllers.

“Fortunately, we were able to disrupt this botnet before it could be used,” Mr. Garland said.

The court orders allowed the FBI to go into domestic corporate networks and remove the malware, sometimes without the company’s knowledge.

President Biden has repeatedly said he would not put the US military in direct conflict with the Russian military, a situation he has said could lead to World War III. That is why he refused to use the US Air Force to create a no-fly zone over Ukraine or to permit the transfer of fighter jets to Ukraine from NATO air bases.

But his hesitance does not appear to extend to cyberspace. The operation that was revealed on Wednesday showed a willingness to disarm the main intelligence unit of the Russian military from computer networks inside the United States and around the world. It is also the latest effort by the Biden administration to frustrate Russian actions by making them public before Moscow can strike.

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The FBI can “go into” domestic corporate networks “sometimes without the company’s knowledge”? This is a hell of a thing to mention in passing.
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Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborne • Nature

Dyani Lewis:

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According to Trish Greenhalgh, a primary-care health researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, the IPC GDG [Infection Prevention and Control Guidance Development Group, an external group which advises the WHO on infection containment] members were guided by their medical training and the dominant thinking in the medical field about how infectious respiratory diseases spread; this turned out to be flawed in the case of SARS-CoV-2 and could be inaccurate for other viruses as well. These biases led the group to discount relevant information — from laboratory-based aerosol studies and outbreak reports, for instance. So the IPC GDG concluded that airborne transmission was rare or unlikely outside a small set of aerosol-generating medical procedures, such as inserting a breathing tube into a patient.

That viewpoint is clear in a commentary by members of the IPC GDG, including Schwaber, Sobsey and Fisher, published in August 20202. The authors dismissed research using air-flow modelling, case reports describing possible airborne transmission and summaries of evidence for airborne transmission, labelling such reports “opinion pieces”. Instead, they concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 is not spread by the airborne route to any significant extent”.

In effect, the group failed to look at the whole picture that was emerging, says Greenhalgh. “You’ve got to explain all the data, not just the data that you’ve picked to support your view,” and the airborne hypothesis is the best fit for all the data available, she says. One example she cites is the propensity for the virus to transmit in ‘superspreader events’, in which numerous individuals are infected at a single gathering, often by a single person. “Nothing explains some of these superspreader events except aerosol spread,” says Greenhalgh.

Throughout 2020, there was also mounting evidence that indoor spaces posed a much greater risk of infection than outdoor environments did. An analysis of reported outbreaks recorded up to the middle of August 2020 revealed that people were more than 18 times as likely to be infected indoors as outdoors. If heavy droplets or dirty hands had been the main vehicles for transmitting the virus, such a strong discrepancy would not have been observed.

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I still see people washing their hands as though it’s going to make the faintest difference; and wearing masks outside, ditto. The concerning phrase is “could be inaccurate for other viruses as well”. Maybe we’ve had a lot wrong for quite a while without realising.
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Apple TV+ market share grows and gets closer to HBO Max • 9to5Mac

Filipe Espósito:

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According to a new report from JustWatch, Apple TV+ lost some users after Apple reduced the free trial period for new customers in July 2021. Between July and September 2021, Apple TV+’s market share declined below 5%, but the platform regained subscribers in October 2021, surpassing the 5% mark.

The influx of new users to Apple TV+ in that period might be explained by the highly anticipated new shows and seasons that were released in September and October, such as Foundation, Invasion, and the second season of The Morning Show

In February 2022, the global market share of Apple TV+ was 5.6% – which is still far behind major competitors like Disney+ and Netflix, but it’s getting close to HBO Max. The streaming platform owned by WarnerMedia lost subscribers last month despite its expansion to more European countries. JustWatch estimates that HBO Max accounts for 7% of the global streaming market share.

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The graph shows Disney+ with 17.6%, HBO Max with 7%, Apple with 5.6%, and Peacock (NBC?) with 2.1%. Guessing that pretty much all the rest is taken by Netflix.

Love to know where Apple wants to get to with TV+. Is 5% enough? Or should it be 10%? 15%?
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Wargaming a Long War: Ukraine fights on • Modern War Institute

James Lacey, Tim Barrick and Nathan Barrick on the ongoing wargame that tried – ahead of time – to simulate what would happen in Ukraine, found it surprising, and is now catching up with reality, and trying to predict the future:

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Although Russia continues suffering higher attrition rates than its opponent, Ukrainian forces are far from unscathed. The most damaging losses for the Russians are in experienced officers, troops, and armored vehicles, which are the primary targets of local counter-attacks given increasing numbers of portable antitank weapons. The wargame highlighted Ukrainian capabilities to employ killer-drones to knock out Russian vehicles, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, and self-propelled artillery.

Open sources claim that Ukraine has over fifty such weapons on near-constant patrols and this number is growing. If only one drone in ten kills a vehicle each day, that equates to 150 vehicles a month and 1,350 Russian vehicles losses between now and Christmas. Moreover, the wargame-imposed daily success rate of a mere ten% is likely a gross underestimate. Add to this the losses inflicted from thousands of anti-tank weapons and the Russians soon ran short on modern armor to support combat operations. Over the wargame’s year-long course, Russian losses in troops and vehicles approached the entire amount it had built up around the perimeter of Ukraine at the conflict’s start.

Despite our intention to devote the rest of the wargame to a possible insurgency or national resistance campaign, the fact that, even if Ukraine was not winning the war, it was certainly not losing it, caused a re-evaluation. As Ukraine still had an intact, discernible, and well-manned front line, it was decided to let the wargame continue on its natural course. What was apparent to all was that the wargame was starting to parallel the situation the warring parties found themselves in 1915, with both sides unable to launch major offensives as manpower and munitions stocks were nearly exhausted.

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Yes, that’s 1915, the First World War one year in to its four-year duration. But notice how things are turning out unlike they expected, again and again. (Thanks G for the link.)
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How much is US intelligence helping Ukraine? • Mystics & Statistics

Christopher Lawrence:

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The strike at Belgorod [by two Ukrainian helicopters on a fuel dump inside Russia] brings out a point that I have not discussed yet in this blog. It does appear that Ukraine is getting significant help from the US intelligence assets. I have not evidence of this and am not aware of any other reporting on this.

Still, I find it hard to believe that Ukraine flew two or more helicopters dozens of miles across enemy territory, dodging radar, dodging their air force, and dodging their extensive SAM [surface to air missile] capability, to strike at a depot in Russia, if they did not know the path was clear. It is possible that a couple of guys took a high risk operation figuring they could get in and out of there by flying low, but most likely, the Ukrainians knew exactly what the radar coverage and SAM coverage was and flew between or around it. Ukraine probably does not have that intel capability. The US does. 

There have been several other incidents in the war that point to Ukraine having good intelligence. This includes 1) the picking off of six Russian generals, 2) the preplanned ambush that halted the Russian armored column at Brovary, and 3) the attack on the airbase near Kherson that took out at least ten Russian helicopters.

Each of these may have been caused by Ukrainian planning and acumen, but they are easier to explain if Ukraine has considerable help from US intelligence assets. It is pretty hard to conceive that Ukraine flew two+ helicopter into Russia to strike near Belgorod without knowing what was in the area.

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Seems very likely that it’s real-time intelligence, not just something that gets passed day by day.
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Twitter employees vent over Elon Musk investment and board seat • Business Insider

Kali Hays:

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Twitter employees expressed outrage, frustration and disappointment after learning Elon Musk is deeply involved in their company as the top shareholder and newly minted board member.

Musk helped build PayPal, birthed the modern space industry through SpaceX, and made Tesla the world’s leading electric carmaker. While that makes him more than qualified as a director, the billionaire is a divisive figure who speaks his mind and pushes companies and employees hard. Tesla faces 46 lawsuits from former and current employees alleging they were targeted and harassed based on gender and race, for instance.

One Twitter employee changed their Twitter profile name this week to “elon musk is a racist demagogue with a god complex.” Another took to the platform to say he’s “so disappointed,” adding that Musk being appointed to the board is “a huge step in the wrong direction.”

“Never been a perfect platform or fully convincing leadership, but I felt the overall direction and room Safety was given were encouraging,” Brian Waismeyer wrote. “This one hits hard.”

Private chatter inside the company has a similar tone to the public postings of Twitter staff, according to one worker. Some people are “frustrated” that an executive like Musk is now seen influencing any of Twitter’s decisions, this person said. They asked not to be identified discussing sensitive topics.

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The perfect tweet on the topic. Though as Hays also points out, the surge in the stock means that lots of the staff there are abruptly quite a bit richer through their stock options. And talking of Twitter staff venting on Twitter…
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It’s time for institutions to make their employees get off Twitter • The Washington Post

Megan McArdle:

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We in the media rue how so much of the right has closed itself off into bubbles that cannot be penetrated by facts or sources inconvenient to its ideology. We have talked much less about how our own behavior contributes to this phenomenon, particularly on social media.

I wouldn’t trust anyone who talked about me and my friends with the arrogant contempt that I routinely see emanating from journalists and academics on Twitter; we shouldn’t be surprised that conservatives don’t, either. Especially as they watch institutions be forced by Twitter mobs to hew to an ever-narrower ideological line.

These costs of tweeting aren’t balanced by the benefits, and at this point the majority of Twitter users I know seem to agree. They hate what Twitter does to their organizations and friends, they hate the pervasive fear, they even hate how much time they waste that could have been spent on better work. But they’re addicted to the attention, or fear ceding mindshare to people who are willing to stay in the fray. And so they’re all stuck in a destructive, yet unfortunately stable, equilibrium.

I’m just as guilty as anyone, and I can see how this might sound like me asking my boss to fire my dealer, because I don’t have the fortitude to quit. But this is really a collective action problem: People feel they have to stay on because others do, and others are on for the same reason.

Collective action problems can generally be solved only institutionally, which is why I think the big media outlets and the major think tanks should tell their employees to read Twitter all they like, but not to post anything more controversial than baby pictures or recipes for cornbread. Those who are lucky enough to have reputations big enough to lose — or to work for organizations that do — will be better off if they take their voices back inside the institutions that were designed to amplify their best work, rather than their worst moments.

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I think there’s a general truth in here, and in Social Warming I write about the effect that Twitter (in particular, Facebook less so) has had on journalism – driving journalists to compete to put out hot takes, to boost their brand, and often do so in effective opposition to the organisation they’re working for. The BBC seems to me to be getting hold of this.

Related: NYT’s executive editor tells its journalists to “meaningfully reduce” time spent on Twitter.
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US wind energy sets record for power generation • CNNPolitics

Ella Nilsen:

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The United States set a major renewable energy milestone last Tuesday: wind power was the second-highest source of electricity for the first time since the Energy Information Administration (EIA) began gathering the data.

As E&E reporter Ben Storrow noted and the EIA confirmed, wind turbines last Tuesday generated over 2,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity, edging out electricity generated by nuclear and coal (but still trailing behind natural gas).

Last year, wind was the fourth-largest electricity source behind natural gas, coal, and nuclear, generating close to 380 terawatt-hours for the entire year, according to the EIA. For context, a terawatt is a thousand times bigger than a gigawatt.

Major milestone aside, wind energy in the US is still lagging behind one European country that recently broke a record of its own: Germany.

Although the US has more wind capacity by sheer numbers – it’s a larger country with a larger population – Germany is outpacing the US in terms of how much electricity it gets from wind. In February alone, windmills in Germany generated a record 20.6 terawatt-hours of wind energy, Rystad Energy reported Tuesday, which made up 45% of its total energy in February.

In 2020 – the most recent year the EIA has robust statistics for – Germany got 24% of its electricity from wind, compared to 8% in the US.

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Just think how well positioned Germany would be if it had kept its many reactors online.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The world’s probably got enough phone chargers, so it’s good news that another Android OEM won’t include them with new phones. CC-licensed photo by Blondinrikard Fröberg 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. Day 40 of the two-day invasion. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook owner Meta targets finance with ‘Zuck Bucks’ and creator coins • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

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Meta has drawn up plans to introduce virtual coins, tokens and lending services to its apps, as Facebook’s parent company pursues its finance ambitions despite the collapse of a project to launch a cryptocurrency.

The company, led by chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, is seeking alternative revenue streams and new features that can attract and retain users, as popularity falls for its main social networking products such as Facebook and Instagram — a trend that threatens its $118bn-a-year ad-based business model.

Facebook’s financial arm, Meta Financial Technologies, has been exploring the creation of a virtual currency for the metaverse, which employees internally have dubbed “Zuck Bucks”, according to several people familiar with the efforts.

This is unlikely to be a cryptocurrency based on the blockchain, some of the people said. Instead, Meta is leaning towards introducing in-app tokens that would be centrally controlled by the company, similar to those used in gaming apps such as the Robux currency in popular children’s game Roblox.

According to company memos and people close to the plans, Meta is also looking into the creation of so-called “social tokens” or “reputation tokens”, which could be issued as rewards for meaningful contributions in Facebook groups, for example. Another effort is to make “creator coins” that might be associated with particular influencers on its photo-sharing app Instagram.

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Not even vaguely close to the globe-spanning regulation-independent cryptocurrency idea of Libra, and for that reason quite likely to get approved and succeed.

“Zuck Bucks”, though. Eugh.
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Police records show women are being stalked with Apple AirTags across the country • Vice

Samantha Cole:

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Police records reviewed by Motherboard show that, as security experts immediately predicted when the product launched, this technology has been used as a tool to stalk and harass women.

Motherboard requested records mentioning AirTags in a recent eight month period from dozens of the country’s largest police departments. We obtained records from eight police departments.

Of the 150 total police reports mentioning AirTags, in 50 cases women called the police because they started getting notifications that their whereabouts were being tracked by an AirTag they didn’t own. Of those, 25 could identify a man in their lives—ex-partners, husbands, bosses—who they strongly suspected planted the AirTags on their cars in order to follow and harass them. Those women reported that current and former intimate partners—the most likely people to harm women overall—are using AirTags to stalk and harass them. 

In one report, a woman called the police because a man who had been harassing her had escalated his behavior, and she said he’d placed an AirTag in her car. The woman said the same man threatened to make her life hell, the report said. 

…The fact that there are so many reports from people about AirTag stalking means Apple’s security measures, such as the notifications, are working as intended, said [director of cybersecurity at the EFF, Eva] Galperin. “It’s not that somebody has randomly found an AirTag. It’s that the anti-stalking mitigations that Apple has implemented are finally working, and the results are that some smaller subset of those people are then going to police,” she said. “So, yes, we did understand from the very beginning that this was going to be a major problem. But part of it I think is just reflected in the fact that stalking is a major problem.”

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No evidence that they’re being used for human trafficking (phew) and where they’re attached to cars, it seems to be thieves trying to steal the car.
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Google bans apps with hidden data-harvesting software • WSJ

Byron Tau in Washington and Robert McMillan in San Francisco :

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Google has yanked dozens of apps from its Google Play store after determining that they include a software element that surreptitiously harvests data.

The Panamanian company that wrote the code, Measurement Systems S. de R.L., is linked through corporate records and web registrations to a Virginia defense contractor that does cyberintelligence, network-defense and intelligence-intercept work for US national-security agencies.

The code ran on millions of Android devices and has been found inside several Muslim prayer apps that have been downloaded more than 10 million times, as well as a highway-speed-trap detection app, a QR-code reading app and a number of other popular consumer apps, according to two researchers who discovered the behavior of the code in the course of auditing work they do searching for vulnerabilities in Android apps. They shared their findings with Google, a unit of Alphabet, federal privacy regulators and The Wall Street Journal.

Measurement Systems paid developers around the world to incorporate its code—known as a software development kit, or SDK—into their apps, developers said. Its presence allowed the Panamanian company to surreptitiously collect data from their users, according to Serge Egelman, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, and Joel Reardon of the University of Calgary.

Modern apps often include SDKs written by little-known companies like Measurement Systems “that aren’t audited or well understood,” Mr. Egelman said. Inserting them is often enticing for app developers, who get a stream of income as well as detailed data about their user base.

“This saga continues to underscore the importance of not accepting candy from strangers,” Mr. Egelman said.

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Reading between the lines, this was the NSA/CIA/FBI trying to track (potential) terrorists: they paid from $100 to $10,000 per month. Wonder if an audit will find similar on an app that far-right users like.
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Twelve clever things you never knew WD-40 could do • Lifehacker

Sarah Showfety:

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Originally created as a rust-prevention solvent for use in the aerospace industry, WD-40 has become the go-to product for your home’s squeaky door hinges and stuck bike chains (Which can be counter productive as it then traps dirt and dust inside.) There’s some debate about what the product actually is, however—and what it should be used for.

If you believe the WD-40 website, the popular household fix-it spray “is a unique, special blend of lubricants.” If you believe the rest of the internet, it is not really a lubricant; rather a degreaser and water-displacing solvent. (According to the brand, the name does stand for Water Displacement, 40th formula.”) In addition to the lubricants it purportedly contains, it also has anti-corrosion agents and ingredients for “penetration and soil removal.”

Regardless of where you stand on its fundamental constitution, it’s hard to deny the product has a lot of practical uses around the house and garage—many that the average consumer of WD-40 may not be aware of.

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If you think about it as a water repellent, you might be able to guess some of them. But it’s a useful list.
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I think Twitter thinks we like using it 😕 • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick on Twitter’s vaguely promised addition of an edit button (“not because of a poll”):

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as someone who makes A LOT of Twitter typos, I actually just think the entire need for a Twitter edit button would be fixed if you could thread tweets independently of when they were published. A typo or an error in a tweet really only matters in threads and it’s kind of weird you can only link together tweets with a reply.

Anyways, like I said, I have a lot of questions about how this would work and Twitter’s communications team has not provided really anything of substance about it, which is kind of wild seeing as how an edit button would fundamentally change the nature of the platform possibly more than anything else they’ve done since the jump from 140 characters to 280.

Ed Zitron, who writes a real good newsletter, felt similarly, tweeting, “I feel like there are ways they could’ve announced this that included significantly more detail. Twitter’s comms strategy remains completely confusing to me.”

I think the reason Twitter’s communication is so bad about this kind of stuff is because everything Twitter does comes from a wildly misinformed place of perceived user enthusiasm. And they’re actually one of the few major platforms that still operates this way. Facebook is basically a nation state now that treats its users with the same level of affection The Matrix treats its meat tubes. The only thing their communications team emphasizes in updates are abstractions — connection, local networks, value, etc. And Instagram is basically a mall, with most of their announcements and features focused on the financial impact for the platforms’ many business and influencers. But Twitter, the company, still seems to think that their website is a website used by people who enjoy it. Which is bizarre! It’s 2022. People don’t enjoy websites anymore because there’s only 5 left and they all realized that it’s more profitable to piss people off. And this is especially true for Twitter!

Twitter has ruined more lives than any other website that has maybe ever existed, including 4chan.

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I’ve never wanted an edit button, but maybe that’s from having lived in a business where once the presses roll, there’s no undo. (Sometimes this has not worked to my advantage, but you live with it.) And as he points out, Twitter’s way of announcing the introduction is just weird.
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Twitter edits you(r website) • Kevin Marks

Marks has worked for all the big names (Apple, Google, BBC, BT) and done all the things, and knows all the problems that come from trying to do crowdpleasing things without thought:

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With all the fuss about Twitter’s promised edit button, and how they might design it, we’re missing a disturbing development — Twitter is using its embedded javascript to edit other people‘s sites.

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You need to read the post, but in the past when someone deleted a tweet (or the user was removed from Twitter *cough*Trump*cough*) any site that had embedded that tweet would still have a sort of shadow of it, without the Javascript that made clear it was from a live Twitter user. In that way, deleted tweets (and users) lived on. Twitter, however, feels that people who delete tweets want to remove them from view – so now those sites have empty spaces with a Twitter brand.

Marks objects. You can see the logic from Twitter’s (and the deleting user’s) perspective, though: isn’t control of what appears on their account up to them, not to the website that wants to include them?

The obvious result is going to be a lot more embedded screenshots of tweets, of course. Less readable, and essentially makes all the work by Twitter’s engineers to write code allowing embedding pointless.

(Next stage in the arms race: Twitter tries to stop people screenshotting tweets.)
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UK start-up achieves ‘projectile fusion’ breakthrough • Financial Times

Tom Wilson:

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A British start-up pioneering a new approach to fusion energy has successfully combined atomic nuclei, in what the UK regulator described as an important step in the decades-long effort to generate electricity from the reaction that powers the sun.

Oxford-based First Light Fusion, which has been developing an approach called projectile fusion since 2011, said it had produced energy in the form of neutrons by forcing deuterium isotopes to fuse, validating years of research.

While other fusion experiments have generated more power for longer, either by using “tokamak” machines or high-powered lasers, First Light says its approach, which involves firing a projectile at a target containing the fuel, could offer a faster route to commercial fusion power.

“The value of this [result] is that it offers potentially a much cheaper, a much easier path to power production,” said chief executive Nicholas Hawker.

To achieve fusion, First Light used a hyper-velocity gas gun to launch a projectile at a speed of 6.5km per second — about 10 times faster than a rifle bullet — at a tiny target designed to amplify the energy of the impact and force the deuterium fuel to fuse.

The design of the target — a clear cube, a little over a centimetre wide, enclosing two spherical fuel capsules — is the key technology and is closely guarded by the company. “It is the ultimate espresso capsule,” Hawker told the Financial Times last year.

…First Light, which is one of several private fusion companies currently pursuing commercial power, said its next aim was to demonstrate net energy gain from a reaction, before developing a 150MW pilot plant at a cost of less than $1bn in the 2030s.

It has spent about $60m to date and raised a further $45m in funding in February from investors, including Tencent.

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At least it’s cheap. As always, the trick is scaling up and getting it to happen continuously.

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Black market SIM cards turned a Zimbabwean border town into a remote work hub • Rest of World

Nyasha Bhobo:

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the high cost of running a telecomms business in Zimbabwe — due to import tariffs on communications equipment, foreign currency risk, and weak infrastructure — has kept prices high for consumers. “Poor collateral infrastructure, like electricity, dissuades telecomms investment and [means] fewer players, which leads to higher costs,” Arthur Gwagwa, a leading Zimbabwe telecomms expert and lawyer, told Rest of World.

The cripplingly high cost of internet access has slowed adoption of digital services by individuals and businesses and prevented Zimbabweans from accessing educational materials and health services online, Gwagwa said.

But for people living near the border with Mozambique, there is a workaround. Enterprising traders cross over on foot or on motorbikes, bulk-buy Movitel SIM cards, and return to Chimanimani, where they distribute the SIMs to supermarkets and corner shops, where they are sold with a markup of more than 50%. 

The availability of affordable internet has made the unfashionable rural district into an attractive destination for people who need to be online for work. The area was hit by a tropical cyclone in 2019, which displaced more than 11,000 people in Chimanimani alone, bringing hundreds of NGO and health workers to the area to work on the relief. Many have stayed, taking advantage of the cheap internet access to work remotely. 

…Nollen Singo, founder of NGO Orphans Dreams, which gives free math lessons to children orphaned by the cyclone, said that he’s been able to stay in the region because the cheap internet allows him to connect to free education apps that can be used in the classroom. “It’s so helpful being able to access Khan Academy maths app or Buzzmath app online and tutor local orphaned kids,” Singo said.

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Anyone who gets internet access always wants to retain it. The better you’ve had it, the less you’ll accept anything less. The ratchet effect is crucial.

(And in passing, ROW continues to show that the world is so very much bigger and more fascinating than Silicon Valley.)
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Realme won’t ship a charging brick with the upcoming Narzo 50A Prime • XDA Developers

Pranob Mehrotra:

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An increasing number of Android OEMs are following Apple’s move to remove charging bricks from smartphone retail boxes. Samsung was the first to follow suit with its Galaxy S21 series last year, and now Realme has announced that it won’t offer a charging brick with the upcoming Narzo 50A Prime.

In a recent post on the Realme community forums, the company said that it will not include a wall charger with its next Narzo smartphone — the Narzo 50A Prime. The move is part of Realme’s newfound sustainability initiative and the goal to “achieve Double Zero targets like net-zero carbon emissions by 2025.”

In addition, Realme says that its decision to not ship a charging brick with the Narzo 50A Prime has given the company enough wiggle room to offer a couple of additional features on the device. The post states: “The decision to remove the charger from the box aided us in many ways. The narzo 50A Prime is a big leap in terms of chipset performance & screen revolution. It will also help us to add more upgrades to the device with the best price and offers in the same class!”

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The significance is that Realme is not a premium brand. I think the dominoes will start to fall here: the environmental story is an easy one to tell, not shipping a charger cuts costs and packing weight and complication (need as many chargers as phones, got to get them together to pack, need to be sure they work), and people will shrug and use the charger they have.
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Ukraine Post #8: risk of nuclear war • Don’t Worry About The Vase

Zvi Mowshowitz considers The Bad Thing:

»

Russia still might choose to use a nuclear weapon, either to escalate-to-deescalate because Ukraine (or being able to claim a symbolic victory) was sufficiently existential, or because Putin thinks the West will simply fold.

Then there is the question of further escalation. Suppose Russia has used at least one nuclear weapon. Will [the conflict] go strategic?

That depends on a lot of things, most obviously what we do in response. Even then, assuming the use by Russia was tactical and does not threaten to turn the tide of battle, I presume that we almost certainly don’t use our nukes on them at all nor do we conventionally strike at Russian territory.

Using a nuclear weapon in response, or even conventionally striking Russia, is not necessary. We can win a conventional war even if Russia uses some number of tactical nuclear weapons, and the diplomatic fallout would be immense, especially if we did not answer in kind. Instead, I expect Russia to face additional conventional firepower combined with complete diplomatic and economic isolation, losing all the friends it has left with the possible exception of Iran. Our current sanctions may or may not pack sufficient punch, but the ultimate version of them really, really would pack quite a ton of punch. Russia would also be facing vastly superior conventional firepower, but we would have no desire to go to Moscow.

The logic of nuclear escalation is completely different when one side has zero interest in escalation even in the face of extreme provocation, because they have faith that they don’t need to do it and would not benefit from it.

«

“Tactical” nukes can go down to very, very low yields, in the single-digits-kiloton range; a use by Russia would essentially be an awful form of showing off, but would have been preceded by withdrawal of its troops to a very safe distance – which is part of why there’s some lingering unease about what’s happened in the north of the country. But with all the signs being that it’s instead trying to gird up to consolidate in the Donbas, maybe this branch of terrible outcomes has been avoided. At least for now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Moon-faced sunblocker Steven Seagal has appeared in a number of junky films known in the trade as “geezer teasers”, which offer easy work for past-it action stars. CC-licensed photo by Gage Skidmore 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. Unboarded. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Musk joins Twitter board in deal that prevents him from buying majority stake • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

Elon Musk is joining Twitter’s board of directors in a deal that prohibits him from buying more than 14.9% of the company’s stock, Twitter announced today. The news of Musk joining the board comes one day after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO revealed that he had purchased 9.2% of Twitter shares.

Musk said he’s looking forward to helping Twitter make “significant improvements” and asked Twitter users in a poll if they want an edit button. After about 3.4 million votes, 73.4% of respondents had voted yes—or rather, they voted “yse” instead of “on” because Musk misspelled both options. [Gee, wonder if that was a jkoe – Overspill Ed.]

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal suggested that Musk’s poll on an edit button might influence Twitter policy. “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully,” Agrawal wrote in a retweet of the poll.

Though a potential downside of an edit button is that users could significantly change tweets that are going viral, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth wrote, “We solved this on Facebook a long time ago. You just include an indicator that it has been edited along with a change log. If you are really worried about embeds, they can point to a specific revision in that history but with a link to the latest edit. Not a real issue.” Musk’s response to Bosworth said only that “Facebook gives me the willies.”

Musk’s agreement to join the board prevents him from taking a controlling stake in Twitter. “For so long as Mr. Musk is serving on the Board and for 90 days thereafter, Mr. Musk will not, either alone or as a member of a group, become the beneficial owner of more than 14.9% of the Company’s common stock outstanding at such time, including for these purposes economic exposure through derivative securities, swaps, or hedging transactions,” Twitter wrote in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing submitted today.

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That’s if you think Musk sets any store by SEC filings – see the next link. Clearly the board seat is the quid pro quo for not buying a majority stake; it’s also a smart way for Musk of not getting thrown off Twitter. (“Imagine if Trump was actually a billionaire,” someone commented.) But really, it’s not good news. What expertise is he going to bring? They’re not making cars, solar panels or rockets. Will it be his knowledge of shitposting?
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9.2% and the Master of Twitter • Margins

Ranjan Roy:

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I’m sure most of you have followed Elon [Musk] vs. the SEC in some capacity. But I think the timeline context is important to understand where we are today.

The most important question for me – Why did Musk start escalating in February?

The SEC had treated the 2018 settlement with kid gloves so why force their hand? Yes, there was a new insider trading investigation and some subpoenas, but why push this fight? Since the 2018 settlement, amidst that status quo detente, TSLA is up nearly 1750% and Tesla, the business, feels like it’s at its most stable operating performance ever. Why choose this moment to mess with the very circumstances that drove some of the greatest wealth creation in human history?

I had the chance to speak about this entire drama on March 10th on TechCheck – around the 3:05 mark in the video I laid three potential ways this could play out.

• The SEC could fight tooth and nail just to maintain the status quo where they were not really regulating him. This seemed unlikely.

• The SEC could agree the original settlement is void and then go after him over every single tweet since (even the original 420 tweet). This seemed most likely.

• The most extreme possibility I saw was the SEC could try to get Elon Musk kicked off of Twitter.

I know, it sounds ridiculous that the SEC could try to stop Musk from tweeting at all.

But if someone uses their personal Twitter account to repeatedly break securities laws, it doesn’t seem too crazy that the SEC could force that person to stop tweeting. If someone specifically created a legally binding arrangement with the SEC, and then repeatedly violated that arrangement in order to break securities laws, it doesn’t seem like a 1st amendment issue if they lose their privilege to tweet.

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He has plenty more. Roy is always worth reading. Effectively Musk is shortcircuiting the SEC’s power.
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Jeff Bezos and Amazon just hired everybody but SpaceX for Project Kuiper • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

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Amazon on Tuesday announced the largest commercial launch deal ever. The company said it has finalized agreements with three different rocket companies for a total of 83 launches. The rockets will deploy a majority of Amazon’s low-Earth-orbit constellation of broadband satellites.

With this deal, Amazon has acquired an extraordinary amount of medium- and heavy-lift launch capacity over the next five years, procuring launches from every major Western provider except for its direct satellite competitor, SpaceX. Aside from SpaceX, this purchase represents the vast majority of any “spare” launch capacity for larger rockets in the United States or Europe over the next half-decade.

Amazon announced launch agreements with the following companies as it seeks to build out its constellation of 3,236 satellites:
• Arianespace: 18 launches of Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket
• Blue Origin: 12 launches of the company’s New Glenn rocket, with options for 15 additional launches
• United Launch Alliance: 38 launches of the company’s Vulcan rocket

Additionally, Amazon previously announced that it has purchased the final nine Atlas V rocket launches from United Launch Alliance before that vehicle, which is powered by Russian engines, is retired.

«

So that’ll be Amazon, and Starlink, and there’s the Inmarsat one. Is there really room for three commercial satellite broadband providers? If there’s consolidation, then as many as two in three of those satellites will be surplus. Let’s hope they can be deorbited cleanly.
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Your camera roll contains a masterpiece • The New Yorker

Michael Johnston:

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The late Erich Hartmann, a past president of Magnum, once showed me his friend Henri Cartier-Bresson’s negatives and contact sheets, stored at the famous photo agency’s New York offices in rows of three-ring binders lined up on shelves. Sheet after sheet contained not a single photograph I recognized. Some worked, most didn’t—not even for H.C.B.

Happily, there’s another side to the equation. If you take enough photographs, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll eventually get an extraordinary one, for reasons you might not understand. Cartier-Bresson was a hunter in his youth, and photographers have often described his brand of street photography as a kind of “hunting,” but it might be more accurate to say that it was like fishing—a sport in which you can do a lot to optimize your chances but still can’t know for sure what you’re going to get. Chance is pretty much always in play. Sometimes everything comes together before the lens, and the visual world sorts itself within the frame, and you get a little gift. None of us really knows for sure if or when the magic’s going to happen.

Today, of course, we’re in the age of digital photography. Back in the eighties, I remember reading that six billion photographs were taken each year, a number that seemed as big as the ocean; currently, although exact numbers can’t be known, the world probably collects that many images every three and a half days. There’s a new way in which we can miss out on great photographs: they can be buried forever in the digital tsunami.

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Statistically, of course this must be true. He advises that you should “scroll your roll”. I think we should leave it to AI to have a stab at finding the very best ones. That happens already on the iPhone to some extent – it produces “memories” – but I think it offers far too many. And of course it can’t know about emotional impact. Maybe it could be trained on the few photos we pick as “favourites”?
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Russian–Ukrainian war • OpenStreetMap Wiki

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On behalf of the OSM Ukraine in connection with Russia’s ongoing military invasion of Ukraine we are turning to people who are contributing to the development and improvement of the OSM data.

We urge everyone to refrain from any mapping of the territory of Ukraine at the moment!

The Russo-Ukrainian War is unfolding on many fronts including the information one. The possible use of open data by Russian invaders to plan attacks on military and civilian objects is one of the most important reasons why we ask you not to perform any mapping of objects in Ukraine.

We shall take action to amend (delete, modify, revert to the previous state etc.) any found cases of mapping related to military or critical social infrastructure facilities as well as contact the DWG and other OSMF working groups to ban the users who systematically make similar changes (more than one).

Such a request (demand) echoes the provisions of the Article 114-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine according to which “Dissemination of information on redeployment, movement or location of the Armed Forces of Ukraine or other military formations established in accordance with the laws of Ukraine, if it is possible to identify them on the ground, if such information is not published by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, committed under martial law or state of emergency, shall be punishable by imprisonment for a term of five to eight years”

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Fast, the one-click payments service, is shutting down • Protocol

Veronica Irwin and Benjamin Pimentel:

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Online payments service Fast announced Tuesday that it is closing its doors, a sudden, stunning end to a seemingly fast-growing ecommerce venture once considered a pandemic darling.

The one-click-checkout software maker will discontinue service of its Fast Checkout on Friday, CEO and co-founder Domm Holland said in a statement. “Sometimes trailblazers don’t make it all the way to the mountaintop,” he said.

Fast ran out of funds after failing to secure additional investment fast enough in what had become a tough fundraising environment, a Fast employee told Protocol.

“We waited too long and we ran out of money,” said the employee, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation. Fast “misjudged significantly” the mood in the VC community, he added: “What was acceptable revenue and burn and prospects for growth in the summer of 2021 looks looks very different in April of 2022.”

…The pandemic greatly accelerated innovation in online shopping, and several other companies created their own one-click-checkout systems, including Shopify and Bold Commerce. PayPal was always considered a direct competitor to Fast, while Amazon invented one-click online checkout so long ago that its patent has expired. Apple auto-fills payment information on Macs and iPhones, as does Google’s Chrome browser.

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Yeah, really wouldn’t have thought this was a market where – Amazon’s patent having expired – there’s much space for making one-click checkout products. A week ago it claimed it was about to raise $100m. Guess there wasn’t a one-click for that.
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How Randall Emmett found success in Hollywood • Vulture

Joshua Hunt:

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I first heard of [multiple producer and two-times director] Randall Emmett last September, while speaking with Adam Champ, an executive at Daro Film Distribution in Monaco. From his office in Côte d’Azur’s sun-drenched tax haven, Champ explained an inglorious but profitable slice of the film industry that is built around a certain category of actor — the kind of action stars and leading men who once ruled Hollywood and now make very good money appearing in very bad movies, most of them relegated to streaming services, video on demand (VOD), and late-night television in Europe and South America.

Among these actors are John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, and Sylvester Stallone. But perched atop the ignominious heap is Bruce Willis, whose prolific partnership with EFO Films, one of the biggest players in this niche of the industry, results in as many as four or five movies each year.

“With Bruce Willis, there’s almost a model for how he features in these movies,” Champ theorized. “One of my clients calls it a ‘geezer teaser’: You have Bruce Willis at the intro of the movie, so people are like, Great, this is a Bruce Willis movie. But he’s actually a secondary character who shows up sporadically.”

In most of Willis’s movies for EFO, “sporadic” would be a generous appraisal of his presence. The actor clocks just seven minutes of screen time in Hard Kill, and in Extraction, he spends less than nine minutes onscreen. In the home-invasion thriller Survive the Night, audiences get almost ten minutes out of the actor, even if they aren’t his best.

«

Willis’s brief appearances, of course, are now explicable as due to his aphasia. Travolta, Cage, Stallone and others such as Steven Seagal will have to find their own reasons. But the “geezer teaser” is a brilliant description for these films, which in a previous life would have been straight-to-DVD; now they’re straight-to-streaming. (Via Benedict Evans’s newsletter.)

Also perfect for this paragraph:

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“If you throw Randy out the door, he comes in the window,” Lerner told the Los Angeles Times in 2012. “If you throw him from the window, he comes down the chimney.”

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Russian tech giant Yandex’s data harvesting raises security concerns • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

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Yandex has acknowledged its software collects “device, network and IP address” information that is stored “both in Finland and in Russia”, but it called this data “non-personalised and very limited”. It added: “Although theoretically possible, in practice it is extremely hard to identify users based solely on such information collected. Yandex definitely cannot do this.”

The revelations come at a critical time for Yandex, often referred to as “Russia’s Google”, which has long attempted to chart an independent path without falling foul of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s desire for greater control of the internet.

The company said it followed “a very strict” internal process when dealing with governments: “Any requests that fail to comply with all relevant procedural and legal requirements are turned down.”

But Cher Scarlett, formerly a principal software engineer in global security at Apple, said once user information was collected on Russian servers, Yandex could be obliged to submit it to the government under local laws. Other experts said that the metadata of the sort collected by Yandex could be used to identify users.

…Yandex has software in the form of a software development kit, or SDK, called “AppMetrica”. SDKs are building blocks used by developers to create apps. The Google Maps SDK, for instance, allows apps to embed mapping functions rather than build that functionality from scratch. Many SDKs are offered for “free” in exchange for access to user data that aids targeted advertising.

Among the apps with AppMetrica installed are games, messaging apps, location-sharing tools and hundreds of virtual private networks — tools designed to allow people to browse the web without being tracked. Seven of the VPNs are made specifically for a Ukrainian audience. Total installs of apps that include the AppMetrica SDK are in the hundreds of millions, according to Appfigures, an app intelligence group.

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Embedded SDKs really are both a necessity and a blight.
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Stop saying Ukraine is winning the information war • The Atlantic

Carl Miller:

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we compiled a roster of randomly selected accounts from across our new map [of tweets saying #IstandwithPutin and #IstandwithRussia] and delved into them, to try to draw out what set each of the different clusters of accounts apart. What struck us immediately was how clearly each cluster seemed to relate to geography—to the purported national identities and languages that the accounts used.

There was a dense knot of accounts identified as Indian that largely retweeted a stream of messaging in English and Hindi supporting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Another group used Urdu, Sindhi, and Farsi, with users primarily identifying as Iranian or Pakistani. One node was ostensibly from South Africa but included Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Kenyan users talking about public health, fuel shortages in Nigeria, and former South African President Jacob Zuma. A final cluster was the only one not characterized by language or geography. Accounts in this grouping sent the fewest tweets and had the fewest followers; many had been created either on the day of Russia’s invasion or on March 2, the day of a key United Nations vote condemning the invasion—and when I saw those hashtags suddenly trend.

…the early data are revealing, the activity suspicious. These accounts came alive for UN votes on the invasion, propelled in part, I suspect, by one or more “paid to engage” networks—groups of accounts that will shift their Twitter usage en masse to deliver retweets for a fee. But real people (we are unsure precisely how many) are also helping the hashtags trend. That interplay between organic and inauthentic activity is the most important subtlety of this research. It also gives us our most important conclusion.

Insofar as this was a coordinated campaign, we saw little attempt to address (or impersonate) Western social-media users. To the extent that we saw real people using the hashtag, very few were from the West.

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I Was a Facebook content moderator. I am now living in a horror movie • Business Insider

Daniel Moutang:

»

I come from a large family in South Africa.

Shortly after graduating, around March 2019, I came across a content-moderation position at a company called Samasource (now Sama). The company and the profession was unknown to me at the time, but the company claimed its focus was on training poor people and lifting them out of poverty — so I applied.

I was quickly on the journey of a lifetime to work as a Facebook content moderator in Nairobi, Kenya.

It was an adventure that would change my life forever — especially because in my family, and village by extension, I was breaking records. I was the first one to go to a so-called prestigious university, travel in a plane and work abroad.

On that flight to Nairobi, I had no idea I would be working on social media — let alone on Facebook. Neither did I know that, while breaking those records, I would actually destroy my mental stability and physical health.

The job of content moderators is to try to make Facebook safe for everyone who uses it. Sadly, some of the billions of users on Facebook post horrible things every day — and our job is to sift through these posts and take down ones that violate Facebook’s rules so ordinary people don’t have to see them.

It’s gruelling work. Imagine long shifts in an office looking at a constant stream of videos and images of graphic violence, animals being tortured, and the sexual exploitation of children.

The first video I remember seeing was a livestream of someone being beheaded. I believe my mental health began to fray from that first video, and over time it got worse.

«

“We just want to connect everyone in the world.” But this becomes incredibly problematic. You have to have rules on a social media site. Yet equally, sometimes those rules flip too far: the atrocities in Bucha and other Ukrainian cities were being automatically flagged and their hashtags blocked on Facebook and Instagram because there was “graphic content” associated with it. AIs don’t know there’s a war on. They don’t know which side has the moral merit. They don’t know that we sometimes need to be shown the graphic content – or at least have the option of looking away.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Are you ready for advertising on Netflix? There’s a relentless logic that implies it’s coming at some point. CC-licensed photo by irina slutsky 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. Doom, gloom, some levity. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘Now or never’ to avoid climate catastrophe, warns UN • Phys.org

Kelly MacNamara and Marlowe Hood:

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Humanity has less than three years to halt the rise of planet-warming carbon emissions and less than a decade to slash them by nearly half, UN climate experts said Monday, warning the world faced a last-gasp race to ensure a “liveable future”.

That daunting task is still—only just—possible, but current policies are leading the planet towards catastrophic temperature rises, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made clear.

The world’s nations, they said, are taking our future right to the wire.

The 2,800-page report—by far the most comprehensive assessment of how to halt global heating ever produced—documents “a litany of broken climate promises”, said UN chief Antonio Guterres in a blistering judgement of governments and industry.

“Some government and business leaders are saying one thing—but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic,” Guterres said.

In recent months, the IPCC has published the first two instalments in a trilogy of mammoth scientific assessments covering how greenhouse gas emissions are heating the planet and what that means for life on Earth.

This third report outlines what we can do about it.

“We are at a crossroads,” said IPCC chief Hoesung Lee. “The decisions we make now can secure a liveable future. We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming.”

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We’re screwed. OK, absent someone coming up with a brilliant scheme to extract carbon dioxide and methane from the atmosphere. Make the best accommodation you can plan for.
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How to make a timeless music video • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

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I always liked the song-and-dance routines in the great old movies, and have mourned their almost total disappearance (while acknowledging that having people break spontaneously into orchestra-accompanied melodies doesn’t, in most cases, tend to improve the realism of your plot!)

Well, it turns out that there’s a fun genre of YouTube creations, taking footage from the old masters and remixing it with more modern music, with some clever editing and retiming. For me, somehow, divorcing the dance from its original music and showing it in a new context only emphasises how good the performers were.

Here’s a very nicely-done favourite; did you know that Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth liked Led Zeppelin?

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Press the button. Absolutely guaranteed to pep up your day. As he points out, there’s another from 2015, which does much the same with Uptown Funk.
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Why Netflix should sell ads • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

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Netflix’s biggest advantage is the sheer size of its subscriber base: Netflix can, on an absolute basis, pay more than its streaming competitors for the content it wants, even as its per-subscriber cost basis is lower. This advantage is only accentuated the larger Netflix’s subscriber base gets, and the more revenue it makes per subscriber; the user experience of getting to that unique content doesn’t really matter.

All of these factors make a compelling case for Netflix to start building an advertising business.

First, an advertising-supported or subsidized tier [being cheaper] would expand Netflix’s subscriber base, which is not only good for the company’s long-term growth prospects, but also its competitive position when it comes to acquiring content. This also applies to the company’s recent attempts to crack down on password sharing, and struggles in the developing world: an advertising-based tier is a much more accessible alternative.

Second, advertising would make it easier for Netflix to continue to raise prices: on one hand, it would provide an alternative for marginal customers who might otherwise churn, and on the other hand, it would create a new benefit for those willing to pay (i.e. no advertising for the highest tiers).

Third, advertising is a natural fit for the jobs Netflix does. Sure, customers enjoy watching shows without ads — and again, they can continue to pay for that — but filler TV, which Netflix also specializes in, is just as easily filled with ads.

Above all, though, is the fact that advertising is a great opportunity that aligns with Netflix’s business: while the company once won with a differentiated user experience worth paying for, today Netflix demands scarce attention because of its investment in unique content. That attention can be sold, and should be, particularly as it increases Netflix’s ability to invest in more unique content, and/or charge higher prices to its user base.

This, I will note, is an about face for me; I’ve long been skeptical that Netflix would ever sell advertising, or that they should.

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Unfortunately, he’s right. The challenge of building an even vaguely targeted advertising business for all its viewers would be hugely costly: we’ll get plenty of warning because the expense will show up in the accounting. If it works, though, it could pull in huge amounts of money.
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ByteDance made fake accounts with content scraped from Instagram and Snapchat, former employees say • Buzzfeed News

Emily Baker-White:

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BuzzFeed News spoke with the four former ByteDance employees, all of whom worked on Flipagram (later renamed Vigo Video), and viewed internal documents that indicate the scraping was run by an engineering team in China and began soon after ByteDance acquired Flipagram in January 2017. The former employees described the project as one of several “growth hacks” — including the manipulation of like and video view statistics — employed by the company. One of the former employees said the scraping affected hundreds of thousands of accounts, and a document viewed by BuzzFeed News detailed plans to “crawl video > 10k/day in P0 countries” — according to the former employee, this meant the team’s goal was to scrape more than 10,000 videos a day in the highest priority countries.

…the scraped content was used to train ByteDance’s powerful “For You” personalization algorithm on US-based content so that it would better reflect the preferences of US users. Today, the “For You” algorithm powers both TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin. (Disclosure: In a previous life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.)

BuzzFeed News sent ByteDance a comprehensive list of the allegations we intended to print in this article as well as a detailed set of questions, including if data sets from Flipagram were ever used to train the “For You” algorithm that powers TikTok today or to train any other algorithms currently in use by ByteDance.

…Instagram’s and Snap’s terms of service forbade scraping in 2017, as they do today. At the time, Musical.ly’s terms of service prohibited users from “mak[ing] unauthorized copies of any content made available on or through” the platform.

Jason Grosse, a representative for Instagram’s parent company Meta, said the company would not comment at this time.

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Pretty smart tactic; sure, probably not particularly legal but that’s how these companies roll. Meta could sue, but why bother? Would it really be able to turn the clock back?
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Dead lay out in Bucha for weeks, refuting Russian claim, satellite images show • The New York Times

Malachy Browne, David Botti and Haley Willis:

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An analysis of satellite images by The New York Times rebuts claims by Russia that the killing of civilians in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, occurred after its soldiers had left the town.

When images emerged over the weekend of the bodies of dead civilians lying on the streets of Bucha — some with their hands bound, some with gunshot wounds to the head — Russia’s Ministry of Defense denied responsibility. In a Telegram post on Sunday, the ministry suggested that the bodies had been recently placed on the streets after “all Russian units withdrew completely from Bucha” around March 30.

Russia claimed that the images were “another hoax” and called for an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting on what it called “provocations of Ukrainian radicals” in Bucha.

But a review of videos and satellite imagery by The Times shows that many of the civilians were killed more than three weeks ago, when Russia’s military was in control of the town.

One video filmed by a local council member on April 2 shows multiple bodies scattered along Yablonska Street in Bucha. Satellite images provided to The Times by Maxar Technologies show that at least 11 of those had been on the street since March 11, when Russia, by its own account, occupied the town.

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Next step: the Russians will say the images have been altered. Other images will emerge showing the soldiers doing it (possibly from the soldiers’ own phones). The lies will go on. But Ukraine is not going to forgive. (Thanks G for the link.)
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As Russia plots its next move, an AI listens to the chatter • WIRED

Will Knight:

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A radio transmission between several Russian soldiers in Ukraine in early March, captured from an unencrypted channel, reveals panicked and confused comrades retreating after coming under artillery fire. “Vostok, I am Sneg 02. On the highway we have to turn left, fuck,” one of the soldiers says in Russian using code names meaning “East” and “Snow 02.”

“Got it. No need to move further. Switch to defense. Over,” another responds.

Later, a third soldier tries to make contact with another codenamed “South 95”: “Yug 95, do you have contact with a senior? Warn him on the highway artillery fire. On the highway artillery fire. Don’t go by column. Move carefully.”

The third Russian soldier continues, becoming increasingly agitated: “Get on the radio. Tell me your situation and the artillery location, approximately what weapon they are firing.” Later, the third soldier speaks again: “Name your square. Yug 95, answer my questions. Name the name of your square!”

As the soldiers spoke, an AI was listening. Their words were automatically captured, transcribed, translated, and analyzed using several artificial intelligence algorithms developed by Primer, a US company that provides AI services for intelligence analysts. While it isn’t clear whether Ukrainian troops also intercepted the communication, the use of AI systems to surveil Russia’s army at scale shows the growing importance of sophisticated open source intelligence in military conflicts.

…Calder Walton, a historian of espionage at Harvard, says the invasion of Ukraine shows how valuable open source information has become for intelligence operatives. Facial recognition software has been used to identify some individuals in videos of the conflict. “We are at an absolute watershed in terms of the nature of intelligence collection and what’s available,” Walton says. The conflict has highlighted the importance of mining different sources of intelligence. For instance, Ukrainian troops may have successfully targeted a number of Russian generals by looking for gray-haired individuals near antennas in satellite, drone, or other imagery. Russian troops have also taken to using cellphones, sometimes revealing their location and details of missions, as well as their frustrations and low morale.

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Rishi Sunak asks Royal Mint to create NFT • The Guardian

Richard Partington:

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The Treasury has asked the Royal Mint to create a non-fungible token, or NFT, as it attempts to show Britain is at the cutting edge for new technologies by launching its own cryptoasset.

It said the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, had asked the 1,136-year-old institution to create the NFT – a type of unique digital asset stored on a blockchain, the same decentralised ledger of transactions used to buy and sell cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin – so it could be issued by the summer.

“This decision shows the forward-looking approach we are determined to take towards cryptoassets in the UK,” the Treasury said on Twitter, posting a picture of the royal coat of arms on a blue background.

NFTs use the unique blockchain value to confer ownership of something – whether tangible or virtual – with pieces of digital art, photographs or music increasingly popular. Typically bought and sold by collectors, some NFTs have soared in value and are worth millions of pounds, as buyers use them to flaunt their taste or wealth, or speculate on the price gyrations to make money.

The Treasury’s announcement did not specify what image or object the Royal Mint’s NFT would confer ownership of, whether more would be created, nor whether NFTs would be used to generate funds for the exchequer. A Treasury spokesman said more details would be announced “soon”.

«

My guess is that it’s going to be something related to the Queen’s platinum (70-year) jubilee. There’s a four-day weekend from June 2; it could be timed to coincide.

It’s also tone deaf, for many reasons. There’s a huge cost of living crunch, at a time when taxes are the highest they’ve been since the second world war. So if this has a huge price tag, who’s it for? Why not sell crockery? Plus royalists tend not to have crypto expertise, and crypto nerds tend not to be royalists. And what would be the point in just minting one? A bad idea from start to finish.
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New Amazon worker chat app to ban words like “union” • The Intercept

Ken Klippenstein:

»

In November 2021, Amazon convened a high-level meeting in which top executives discussed plans to create an internal social media program that would let employees recognize co-workers’ performance with posts called “Shout-Outs,” according to a source with direct knowledge.

The major goal of the program, Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer business, Dave Clark, said, was to reduce employee attrition by fostering happiness among workers — and also productivity. Shout-Outs would be part of a gamified rewards system in which employees are awarded virtual stars and badges for activities that “add direct business value,” documents state. At the meeting, Clark remarked that “some people are insane star collectors.”

But company officials also warned of what they called “the dark side of social media” and decided to actively monitor posts in order to ensure a “positive community.” At the meeting, Clark suggested that the program should resemble an online dating app like Bumble, which allows individuals to engage one on one, rather than a more forum-like platform like Facebook.

Following the meeting, an “auto bad word monitor” was devised, constituting a blacklist that would flag and automatically block employees from sending a message that contains any profane or inappropriate keywords. In addition to profanities, however, the terms include many relevant to organized labor, including “union,” “grievance,” “pay raise,” and “compensation.” Other banned keywords include terms like “ethics,” “unfair,” “slave,” “master,” “freedom,” “diversity,” “injustice,” and “fairness.” Even some phrases like “This is concerning” will be banned.

«

Does that mean a sentence beginning “This is concerning the incident that happened last night” will be blocked? Very strange; people will figure their way around any block. They always do.
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Elon Musk is now Twitter’s largest shareholder; and that’s probably not a good thing • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

»

It’s unclear, in the short term, what [Musk buying 9.2% of Twitter] will mean for the company. It’s not clear, for example, that Musk will get a board seat or become a particularly active board member, but given his agitating, and the way he’s handled some of his other companies, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if he does end up becoming quite active.

Quoting the NY Times:

»

It is unclear what Mr. Musk’s plans are beyond the large shareholder position and whether he’ll ask — or be invited — to join Twitter’s board. Mr. Musk filed a securities document indicating that he planned for the investment to be passive, meaning he does not intend to pursue control of the company. But there was also speculation Monday that he could change the status of his investment, continue buying shares or even try to acquire the company outright, today’s DealBook newsletter reported.

“We would expect this passive stake as just the start of broader conversations with the Twitter board/management that could ultimately lead to an active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter,” Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said Monday morning.

«

Again, I think Musk deserves praise for driving some innovations forward, and having a unique vision on how to execute on big, challenging scientific problems — like sending rockets into space and building electric cars, among other things. But managing speech is not a scientific or engineering problem. It’s a human challenge. And Musk does not exactly have the greatest of track records in showing empathy, or, frankly, common decency.

When the initial rumors were that Musk might start a competing social network, I was at least intrigued to see how that might compete with something like Twitter. But I do wonder how much his naïve take on speech might do serious harm to Twitter.

Honestly, I hope this drives the Bluesky team to focus that much more on its efforts, because if Musk is intent on ruining Twitter, which may actually come to pass, having an easy offramp to building a better Twitter would be important.

«

As some have speculated, it would certainly be a brilliant hedge against being banned from Twitter. If only Trump had had the money (and foresight). Speaking of which…
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Exclusive: two key tech execs quit Truth Social after troubled app launch • Reuters

Helen Coster and Julia Love:

»

Truth Social is part of a growing sector of tech firms catering to conservatives and marketing themselves as free-speech champions. The platform promised to give Trump unfettered communication with the American public more than a year after he was kicked off Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for allegedly inciting or glorifying violence during the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the US Capitol.

The exit of two executives [Josh Adams and Billy Boozer, respectively chief technology officer and product development chief] critical to the app-launch efforts could imperil the company’s progress as it tries to prove it can compete with mainstream platforms such as Twitter, said two people familiar with the company. Like Twitter, Trump’s platform offers users the chance to connect and share their thoughts.

“If Josh has left… all bets are off,” one of those sources said of tech chief Adams, calling him the “brains” behind Truth Social’s technology.

Another source familiar with the venture said that Boozer also had a major leadership role as product chief, running management across technology infrastructure, design and development teams.

Reuters could not determine the specific circumstances behind the executives’ resignations, or whether they have been replaced or their duties reassigned. It also remains unclear whether Adams and Boozer still work on the venture in a different capacity after quitting their executive posts.

Their resignations came before their key roles in the closely watched company were even publicly known outside of Truth Social’s secretive culture.

Adams and Boozer worked at a level just below Wes Moss and Andy Litinsky, both former castmates on “The Apprentice,” Trump’s hit reality TV show, according to a source familiar with the venture.

«

“Troubled” app launch as in “hasn’t launched despite a firm promise in February that it would launch by the end of March”. There isn’t an Android app (which is 40% of installed base in the US). The BBC says it’s “branded a disaster“. It uses the Mastodon protocol, yet even so they can’t make it work.
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Surging price of battery materials complicates carmakers’ electric plans • Financial Times

Peter Campbell, Joe Miller and Song Jung-a:

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The car industry’s multibillion-dollar bet on electric vehicles was built on a single premise: that batteries would carry on getting cheaper.

In 2019, Volkswagen executives even brandished charts predicting a steady decline in battery costs, as they laid out their ambition to consign the combustion engine to history.

For years the industry was proved right: battery costs fell from $1,000 per KWH for the first models more than a decade ago to about $130 in 2021, paving the way to making them affordable for middle income families. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens to halt the slide.

Prices of nickel, lithium and cobalt — key raw materials for battery manufacturing — were already rising because of global demand. But with Russia accounting for 11% of the world’s nickel, and supply chains already stretched, the war has sent the cost of such commodities skyrocketing.

The price of these three metals required in a 60KWh battery, enough for a large family sport utility vehicle, has risen from $1,395 a year ago to more than $7,400 in early March, according to battery group Farasis Energy.

Battery companies, carmakers and suppliers are now grappling with the prospect that electric cars may be less profitable, or require cheaper materials, if they are to remain financially competitive.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: SpaceX first docked with the ISS in 2012, not 2021. Makes the Russian threat not to send rockets look even more feeble.

The Russian space agency chief threatened to pull the plug on the International Space Station if sanctions weren’t ended. The West called his bluff. CC-licensed photo by NASA on The CommonsNASA on The Commons on Flickr.

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

No Amazon, no problem: how a remote island community built its own online shopping service • Rest of World

Tiare Tuuhia:

»

Turoa Faura lives in Manihi, a remote coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is one of 118 atolls and islands that make up French Polynesia, an overseas collectivity of France that has its own government and is considered semi-autonomous. The islands are scattered over more than 3,500 square kilometers of ocean — an area five times as large as the French mainland. 

From the air, Manihi looks ephemeral: a tiny ring of sand that might be washed away at any moment, surrounded by endless shades of blue. The atoll, itself made up of many small islands arranged around a lagoon, is just 27 kilometers long and 8 kilometers wide, with its highest point 9 meters above sea level. It has a population of less than 1,000, with most inhabitants, including Faura, living in the main village of Turipaoa. Life here can be difficult. Well-paying jobs are few and far between, and residents are reliant on cargo ships from Tahiti, French Polynesia’s largest island, to bring necessities.  

The luxury of online shopping and home delivery, considered indispensable by many in the West, has long been out of reach for remote islanders like Faura. There’s no Amazon same-day delivery or Alibaba shipping to Manihi, and Turipaoa has only three small shops, which mostly sell food and essentials. There are no restaurants, hardware stores, or clothing shops that sell sought-after brands like Adidas.

Until recently, huge distances, a scattered population, and lack of internet access have made e-commerce unviable in French Polynesia. In the last few years, however, a nascent courier scene has taken off, making it possible for islanders to access an ocean of e-commerce products that were previously unavailable. As the global online shopping market continues to grow — a trend that has been augmented by the Covid-19 pandemic — local services are closing the last gaps for those living in some of the world’s most remote places.

«

Fascinating tale of DIY systems: orders are taken via Facebook Messenger, sent to drivers via Apple’s Notes app on iPhones using a shared note. Spread over a colossal area. Not a short read, but amazing.
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February 2022: Putin has never lost a war. Here is how he’ll win in Ukraine • Newsweek

Bill Powell and Naveed Jamali, writing in February, just as the invasion had got underway:

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As the invasion unfolded, a member of the Ukrainian parliament in Kyiv, Alexey Goncharenko, begged NATO to impose a no-fly zone, to allow his countrymen to have a fairer fight on the ground. There was zero chance of that happening, because Kyiv wasn’t in the club.

Soon now, its desire to be part of the West will be moot, as Putin’s Russia takes control—little more than 24 hours after the invasion began, Russian forces were already entering the the capital and Kyiv was hit with Russian “cruise or ballistic missiles.” Success is inevitable because Biden and the allies have made it clear that Moscow will not meet military resistance from the West. Over and over Biden has told the American people the US will not fight on the ground in Ukraine. He knows the public has no stomach for it.

If events play out as military analysts now expect, the conflict will end relatively quickly with a negotiated settlement that may cede some territory to Russia, the installation of a new Russia-friendly regime in Kyiv and a partial withdrawal of troops that allows Putin to avoid the quagmire the West so badly wants him sucked into. In doing so, Putin will be able to claim that he dealt a devastating setback to NATO, the main goal of his aggression.

For Putin, the sack of Ukraine will likely mark the endgame in his desire to restore the empire. If it doesn’t, it will mean at some point the world’s two largest nuclear powers will be in a shooting war, with all the risk that entails.

«

This was the featured story on the cover. Whoever the “military analysts” they used as sources were, I hope they’ve deleted their numbers from their phones. Bits and pieces of this analysis are right, but huge chunks are just wrong – particularly in expecting Ukraine to roll over. (To be fair, lots of non-specialists did.) One can this expect this means they’re miles wrong about a shooting war between the US and Russia.
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How the West got Russia’s military so, so wrong • The Atlantic

Phillips Payson O’Brien, much more recently:

»

Having good equipment and good doctrine reveals little about how an army will perform in a war. To predict that, you must analyze not only its equipment and doctrine but also its ability to undertake complex operations, its unglamorous but crucial logistical needs and structure, and the commitment of its soldiers to fight and die in the specific war being waged. Most important, you have to think about how it will perform when a competent enemy fires back. As Mike Tyson so eloquently put it, “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the mouth.”

What we are seeing today in Ukraine is the result of a purportedly great military being punched in the mouth. The resilience of Ukrainian resistance is embarrassing for a Western think-tank and military community that had confidently predicted that the Russians would conquer Ukraine in a matter of days. For years, Western “experts” prattled on about the Russian military’s expensive, high-tech “modernization.” The Russians, we were told, had the better tanks and aircraft, including cutting-edge SU-34 fighter bombers and T-90 tanks, with some of the finest technical specifications in the world. The Russians had also ostensibly reorganized their army into a more professional, mostly voluntary force. They had rethought their offensive doctrine and created battalion tactical groups, flexible, heavily armored formations that were meant to be key to overwhelming the Ukrainians. Basically, many people had relied on the glamour of war, a sort of war pornography, to predict the outcome of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.

Those predictions, based on alluring but fundamentally flawed criteria, have now proved false. Western analysts took basic metrics (such as numbers and types of tanks and aircraft), imagined those measured forces executing Russian military doctrine, then concluded that the Ukrainians had no chance. But counting tanks and planes and rhapsodizing over their technical specifications is not a useful way to analyze modern militaries. As The Atlantic’s Eliot Cohen has argued, the systems that the West used to evaluate the Russian military have failed nearly as comprehensively as that military has.

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I’d have expected that analysts would have used satellite observation of Russian exercises to figure some of this out, at the very least. Clearly the US military has good intelligence about what’s going on, possibly from very close to the Russian side. But they were all surprised by this, despite months of manoeuvres ahead of time?
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What a 1994 Bill Gates keynote tells us about the metaverse • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

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In Gates’ 1994 COMDEX mini-movie, the technology of 2005 is the star. Everybody uses pocketable wireless devices, which, among other things, can be used to pay for items such as coffee. A couple of plainclothes cops have an SUV equipped with a giant screen that displays maps and video calls; one uses a tablet computer that can transcribe interviews on the fly. A woman watching TV pulls up David Letterman and Oprah on demand, not when their shows happen to be broadcast. Her teenage son researches pre-Columbian art using a graphical browser and then gives a multimedia presentation on the subject at school. After he’s struck by a car while evading bad guys—apologies for the spoiler—a remote doctor uses a video call to diagnose his injuries while he’s still in an ambulance.

In 1994, all of this was gee-whiz stuff—even the flat-screen displays depicted in the film would have felt like a glimpse of tomorrow. But as I experienced Gates’ imagined 2005 today, I had to keep reminding myself that it was supposed to be full of wonders. What it shows looks an awful lot like smartphones, Google Maps, Zoom, Apple Pay, the iPad and Surface, Otter, Hulu, telehealth, and other tools of everyday living circa 2022.

And yet, all the ways in which Gates’ next-generation tech failed to line up with what we actually got are also fascinating. For instance, the pocketable devices are “Wallet PCs,” a class of gadget that Gates describes as “a grown-up pager.” People don’t make voice calls on them or use them to snap photos—but they do wield them as remote controls for larger screens in a way that never became commonplace in the real world. It’s unclear how big a role the internet and web play in the movie’s scenarios; Gates mentioned them only briefly. And he was overly optimistic about how quickly some of the innovations he predicted would come to pass—in many cases, they weren’t fully baked until well after 2005.

«

Sounds like Gates (and/or his team) got it all pretty much right, and they were only wrong by five or ten years, which compared to their timescale isn’t.. terrible? If you get there in the end, that’s the thing. But of course there’s strong survivor bias in this: we find the clever talks that predicted things correctly, rather than the zillions that got it wrong.
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Electricity • Little Green Tips

Sarah is “a busy mum of two” trying to reduce her energy use:

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here are a few more ideas I have discovered that will help reduce electricity usage.

One of the main changes I have made which has had an impact has been with the washing machine. Using our eco egg, I have lowered the temperature to 20ºC and reduced spin speed to reduce energy consumption. I’m washing my laundry at 20ºC now… down from 30ºC …..down from 40ºC. I don’t wash towels or bedding at 60ºC regularly either.

Instead of spinning at 1400rpm I drop to 1200 or 1000 or 800 depending on what I’m washing and where I’m drying it. I am also regularly descaling the washing machine (about once a month) so it works more efficiently and uses less energy.

Don’t assume eco settings on washing machine and dish washers use the least amount of electricity. They normally refer to using less water per load. Look up energy usage per program on the internet for your make/model if you can find it. Or just choose a shorter cycle time. I’ve gone from 2hr40 to 45 mins on our washing machine and our washing is just as clean.

Another things to do is when you need a new appliance make sure it’s as energy efficient as possible.

Since we have moved into our house we have gradually increased our insulation levels as well as getting thermal lined curtains, using a draught excluder at doors and closing curtains as soon as it gets dark to keep the heat in. You can make good use of passive solar gain from windows to help heat your house. Open up curtains in the day and when the sun sets close the close those curtains to hold in the heat.

Kettles are very very electricity hungry and take more energy to heat the water the hotter you want it to be. You can now get kettles that boil to either 80/90/100ºC. You don’t need 100ºC for tea or coffee. I don’t have a fancy kettle so I just flick the off switch before it finishes boiling when I remember.

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Assume the washing water starts at 7ºC (typical in the UK). This says it’s 1.53kWh to heat to 40ºC, v 1.07kWh for 30ºC. If you’re doing a wash every day, that could mount up. A kettle uses about 0.1kWh. If you have a lot of cups of tea, that’ll mount up faster than the washing.
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Web3 is supposed to be secure. What about all these hacks? • Decrypt

Jeff John Roberts:

»

it took six days for the Axie team to notice that $630m worth of Ethereum had been looted and to tell users, whose money is now gone.

If a security team at a bank or a Web2 company behaved this way, they would be fired and face charges of civil or even criminal negligence. But since it’s Web3, Axie leadership has offered only vague mumbles to the effect of what a shame this is. (Axie founder Jeff Zirlin tweeted on Tuesday, “It’s a hard day,” and two hours later, “This is when we show what we’re made of.”) As Bloomberg’s Matt Levine archly observed, “Nobody cares less about information security than the builders of cryptocurrency projects.”

The Axie debacle is hardly a one-off. Two months ago, hackers robbed Wormhole, a popular bridge to the Solana blockchain, to the tune of $320m. Fortunately for users, the venture capitalists beyond Wormhole, recognizing the terrible optics, decided to backstop the losses even as the engineers responsible all but shrugged their shoulders. Last week, $28m was drained from Solana stablecoin protocol Cashio. Last August, Poly Network was hacked for over $600m.

There are numerous other examples of Web3 users being robbed because the platforms they use are full of gaping security holes.

Meanwhile, more than two dozen Web3 companies, including Circle and BlockFi, revealed last month that they had been hit by a Web2-style attack. In that case, hackers compromised one of their marketing vendors and made off with a trove of customer data that is already being used to conduct phishing campaigns and other scams.

«

Levine’s comment hits the nail completely on the head. If it were actually their houses or cars or real money in their bank accounts – not the funny money they generate on their PCs – then they’d take a lot more care. But it isn’t. That alone tells you all you need to know, I think.
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UK ministers quietly approve Chinese microchip factory takeover • POLITICO

Eleni Courea:

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The UK government has quietly approved the controversial sale of a Welsh microchip factory to a Chinese-owned firm.

Ministers have decided not to intervene in the takeover of Newport Wafer Fab, which makes semiconductors, following a review by the government’s national security adviser, Stephen Lovegrove.

More than six months after he was asked to examine the sale, Lovegrove concluded there were not enough security concerns to block it, according to two government officials.

The decision has already caused alarm among security experts and backlash from Tory MPs who believe the government is employing too narrow a definition of national security.

Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said: “It’s not clear why we haven’t used our new powers under the National Security and Investment Act to fully review the takeover of one of our leading compound semiconductor companies.”

He added: “This is an area where China is sinking billions to compete. The government has no clear strategy to protect what’s left of our semiconductor industry.”

Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative leader and a long-standing critic of the Chinese government, said the decision was “ridiculous.” “Kwasi Kwarteng [the Business minister] needs to stand up for access to key technologies in the West which China is determined to get control over,” he said.

Duncan Smith warned: “If the government goes down this road, it will become yet another step in the pathetic process of appeasing China who right now is supporting Russia and plans to pose a direct and deliberate threat to the West’s access to microchips and other key components for electronic equipment.”

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Duncan Smith is reliably an idiot, but it’s strange that there are “not enough” security concerns. So there are some security concerns, just not enough of them?
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Russia asked NASA to end sanctions to save the ISS, but the West didn’t blink • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

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[chief of Russian’s spaceflight activities, Dmitry] Rogozin has been blustering about pulling the plug on the International Space Station almost since the beginning of the war against Ukraine. However he and the thousands of employees at Roscosmos have taken precisely zero concrete actions that would actually initiate that process. Indeed, earlier this week, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth on a Soyuz spacecraft. The operations were entirely nominal, and the relations between Russian and NASA officials professional.

It is possibly that Vladimir Putin could decide, at any moment, that it no longer suits him to participate on the space station. His decision-making process is opaque to Western observers. But this seems improbable, because walking away from the space station would be the equivalent of taking a wrecking ball to Russia’s civil space program. And Russians take enormous pride in their space program, going back more than six decades to Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin. Without active cooperation with Western nations, however, Russia would almost certainly no longer be a space power—it would be the world’s first former space power.

As part of his Twitter message, Rogozin shared letters he had received from the chiefs of other space agencies in response to his demands for an end to sanctions. Of note is a March 30 letter from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, pledging his ongoing support for the space station, but reiterating that the sanctions will not end. Nelson is not negotiating from a point of weakness here. The United States has a vibrant commercial space industry, which will prosper even without the space station. Nelson, too, knows that NASA likely could take steps to save the US segment of the space station and keep it flying even if Russia abruptly pulls out.

«

So0, basically, it’s all posturing and noise, and it’s hardly as if the West would abruptly end sanctions because they were worried about the ISS. Though it’s fortunate timing that Elon Musk’s SpaceX system proved it could dock with the ISS last year.

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How to jump to a folder on your Mac with a single keystroke • Macworld

Michael Simon:

»

We’ve all experienced this: You’re saving a file in Pages or Garageband or Microsoft Word and the dialog box starts in the completely wrong place. Then you need to go to your mouse or trackpad, click the arrow to expand and hope the destination you want is there. If it’s not—and it almost always isn’t—you need to click through folders and places until you land on the one you’re looking for.

But here’s the trick iOS engineer Zach Waugh shared: Type the forward slash (/) on your keyboard when the save dialog box pops up and you’ll go straight to a “Go to Folder” window that lets you quickly navigate to anywhere on your Mac. You’ll need to know the path, but it’ll also save your recent places so you don’t have to retype lengthy strings of folders. It even works with the user shortcut using the ~ symbol.

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Presumably because it’s actually running a terminal command underneath, so the / or ~ takes you to the root folder that you can access. A reminder that mac OS is actually a pretty face on top of texty Unix. Neat trick!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you’ve got 5G, have you found a use for it that goes beyond what you could do with 4G? Because people are starting to think there isn’t. CC-licensed photo by Jeanne Menjoulet on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Not retreating, just advancing backwards. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook News Feed bug mistakenly elevates misinformation, Russian state media • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

The engineers first noticed the issue last October, when a sudden surge of misinformation began flowing through the News Feed, notes the report, which was shared inside the company last week. Instead of suppressing dubious posts reviewed by the company’s network of outside fact-checkers, the News Feed was instead giving the posts distribution, spiking views by as much as 30% globally. Unable to find the root cause, the engineers watched the surge subside a few weeks later and then flare up repeatedly until the ranking issue was fixed on March 11th.

In addition to posts flagged by fact-checkers, the internal investigation found that, during the bug period, Facebook’s systems failed to properly demote nudity, violence, and even Russian state media the social network recently pledged to stop recommending in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The issue was internally designated a level-one SEV, or Severe Engineering Vulnerability — a label reserved for the company’s worst technical crises, like Russia’s ongoing block of Facebook and Instagram.

Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne confirmed the incident in a statement to The Verge, saying the company “detected inconsistencies in downranking on five separate occasions, which correlated with small, temporary increases to internal metrics.” The internal documents said the technical issue was first introduced in 2019 but didn’t create a noticeable impact until October 2021. “We traced the root cause to a software bug and applied needed fixes,” said Osborne, adding that the bug “has not had any meaningful, long-term impact on our metrics.”

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Once again: Facebook has grown so complex that it’s beyond Facebook’s control. Possibly separate, or possibly exactly the same thing: “Facebook fails to label 80% of posts promoting bioweapons conspiracy theory“.
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TSMC says demand for smartphones, PCs starting to slow • Nikkei Asia

Cheng Ting-Fang:

»

Consumer electronics demand is showing signs of slowing amid geopolitical uncertainties and COVID-related lockdowns in China, the chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said on Wednesday.

The slowdown is emerging in areas “such as smartphones, PCs, and TVs, especially in China, the biggest consumer market,” TSMC Chairman Mark Liu said. A key Apple supplier, TSMC is the world’s biggest contract chipmaker and a barometer of global electronics demand.

Liu also warned that the cost of components and materials are rising sharply, pushing up production costs for tech and chip companies. “Such pressure could eventually be passed on to consumers,” Liu said on the sidelines of an industry event where he was speaking in his capacity as chair of the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association.

Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is the world’s second-largest chip economy by revenue, behind only the US.

“Everyone in the industry is worried about rising costs across the overall supply chain… The semiconductor industry already and directly experienced that cost increase,” Liu said, adding that the industry is also concerned about macroeconomic uncertainties this year.

TSMC, however, is not likely to change its growth target and capital expenditure this year, he said.

“Despite the slowdown in some areas, we still see robust demand in automotive applications and high-performance computing as well as internet of things-related devices,” he said. “We still cannot meet our customers’ demand with our current capacity. We will reorganize and prioritize orders for those areas that still see healthy demand.”

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This isn’t looking good. If PCs and smartphones slow down, that’s basically the drivers for a big chunk of the electronics industry.
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Why leaders won’t tell Europeans to put on a sweater to beat Putin • POLITICO

Karl Mathiesen and Zia Weise:

»

No one wants to be Europe’s Jimmy Carter. 

As Europe struggles with an energy crisis triggered by Russia’s war on Ukraine, few politicians are keen on telling their citizens to cut their energy use.

Germany’s Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck on Wednesday became a rare exception when he told his people: “We are doing the utmost. Do the same. Save energy. With a great community effort by the government and the people in this country, the companies and the citizens, we can already become more independent from Russian energy imports.”

The EU sends about €800m a day to Russia for oil and gas imports, according to the Bruegel think tank. The Ukrainian government wants that stopped, arguing the cash is helping fuel Vladimir Putin’s war machine, but most EU governments are loath to risk their economies and the ire of their voters even when confronted with bombed Ukrainian cities and dead civilians.

It’s not that there’s a dearth of ideas. The International Energy Agency and the European Commission have put forward a smorgasbord of policies in recent weeks. These include lowering thermostats in homes by a degree to cut gas consumption and slashing oil demand by cutting speed limits, introducing car-free Sundays, offering free public transport and getting people to work from home.

The IEA said its measures could cut EU oil demand by 6% in four months and Russian gas imports by a third by the end of the year, while the Commission has proposed its own cluster of actions it says could slash demand for Russian gas by two-thirds this year.

National government agencies have also echoed the IEA. Germany’s federal environment agency said earlier this month that turning down thermostats by 2ºC would reduce Russian gas imports by 7%.  

This week, the president of the French energy regulator, Jean-François Carenco, joined the chorus of voices calling for measures to cut energy — which, as Habeck also pointed out, would have the side effect of saving people money. “Whether it is by lowering the heating, the air conditioning, the lights, there is an emergency and everyone must make an effort,” Carenco told Les Echos.

«

Carter was in charge during the US energy crisis. He took to the airwaves and declared that the Arab oil embargo was the “moral equivalent of war”. His critics reduced it to the abbreviation. He lost the election.
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Misinformation is stopping renewable energy projects • NPR

Julia Simon:

»

On a winter night in early 2016, Jeremy Kitson gathered in his buddy’s large shed with some neighbors to plan their fight against a proposed wind farm in rural Van Wert County, Ohio. The project would be about a mile from his home.

From the beginning, Kitson — who teaches physics and chemistry at the local high school — knew he didn’t want the turbines anywhere near him. He had heard from folks who lived near another wind project about 10 miles away that the turbines were noisy and that they couldn’t sleep.

“There were so many people saying that it’s horrible, you do not want to live under these things,'” Kitson says.

He and his neighbors went on the offensive. “I was just like, there’s got to be a way to beat ’em,” he says of the developer, Apex Clean Energy. “You got to outsmart them. You got to figure out the science. You got to figure out the economic arguments. You got to figure out what they’re going to say and figure out how to counter it.”

At the shed, according to Kitson, they agreed that part of their outreach would involve posting information on a Facebook community page called “Citizens for Clear Skies,” which ultimately grew to more than 770 followers.

In between posts selling anti-wind yard signs and posts about public meetings opposing local wind projects, there were posts that spread false, misleading and questionable information about wind energy. Links to stories about wind turbine noise causing birth defects in Portuguese horses. Posts about the health effects of low frequency infrasound, also called wind turbine syndrome. Posts about wind energy not actually reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Photos of wind turbines breaking, burning and falling — some in nearby counties and states, but some in Germany and New Zealand. According to 2014 data from the Department of Energy, the most recent available, out of the then-40,000 turbines in the U.S., there had been fewer than 40 incidents.

Kitson, the administrator of the Facebook page, says he knows that these accidents aren’t typical. “Those events are not likely. We know that,” Kitson says. But Kitson has seen a broken piece of a fallen turbine blade himself, which got him worrying about how the fiberglass might affect the integrity of the soil and the crops.

«

There’s a photo in the story showing a “no wind farms” sign amid huge tracts of snow. Sure, turn down free energy; freeze if you like. The fact that Kitson is described as a physics and chemistry teacher concerns me too.
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First ‘gapless’ human genome map is unveiled, years after earlier effort • WSJ

Amy Dockser Marcus:

»

Scientists have unveiled what they call the first truly complete map of a human genome, filling in significant gaps that persisted for almost 20 years and setting the stage for new discoveries about human evolution and fresh insights into cancer, birth defects and aging.

The newly mapped regions, described in six papers published this week in the journal Science, include parts of the genome that had long been uncharacterized because of the limits of DNA-sequencing technology.

“This is the first gapless sequence of a human genome,” Dr. Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, said Thursday at a press event about the new map. The institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, was a major funder of the project.

The scientists behind the research identified 99 new genes that likely code for proteins essential to human life, along with 2,000 more whose function is unclear.

Exploiting the new map for medical care would likely take years of additional research, said Wendy Chung, a Columbia University geneticist who wasn’t involved in the effort. But the map “gets us to the starting line,” she said, adding, “We have patients with diseases that we know are genetic but we haven’t been able to identify. I hope this map will help us fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge.”

The scientists also corrected thousands of errors in an earlier map of human DNA, which has served as a reference for doctors, geneticists and researchers since its completion in 2003. That landmark effort, the result of the $3bn Human Genome Project, sought to read every letter of a person’s DNA but even with refinements made in the ensuing years is believed to have found only about 92% of them.

«

The human genome is one of those eternal false summits. You think you’ve got there, but it takes a bit more effort and refinement. A bit more effort and refinement. And on and on. Genomics (figuring out what genes lead to what) is improving, but far more slowly than expected.
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Government’s choice for Ofcom chair says he does not use social media • The Guardian

Jim Waterson:

»

The 79-year-old Conservative peer chosen to oversee regulation of the internet has said he does not use social media but is aware of how it works thanks to his children.

Michael Grade confirmed to MPs that he was not on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook and had never been tempted by a “dance video” on TikTok. Despite this he said he had enough understanding of the key issues to be chair of the media regulator, Ofcom, which has been tasked with implementing the forthcoming online safety bill that will impose new standards on tech companies.

He told parliament: “I wouldn’t say I have no experience – I have three kids. I have a 23-year-old student son who is never off his screen. I do understand the dynamics. We can’t be experts in every single aspect of the turf that Ofcom has to patrol.”

The SNP MP John Nicolson suggested Lord Grade’s “lack of engagement with such an important part of contemporary life” could prove problematic when regulating the internet. Grade’s career was mainly spent in broadcast television at the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

While discussing so-called cancel culture, Grade also defended the right of Laurence Fox, the actor turned anti-lockdown campaigner, to express his views. He said: “I have known his family. His grandfather and my father were partners in business going back a long way. I admire his courage in speaking out and contributing to the debate. I don’t necessarily agree with what he says, but I admire him speaking out.”

«

Another triumph for the gerontocracy. Look, folks, I was available, and I have kids who use all the social networks. I watch TV too. But at least it’s not Paul Dacre.
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Man spared prison for ‘grossly offensive’ tweet after Captain Sir Tom Moore’s death • ITV News Anglia

»

A man has been spared jail for sending a “grossly offensive” tweet about Captain Sir Tom Moore which celebrated the fundraiser’s death.

Joseph Kelly, 36, posted on Twitter that “the only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella buuuuurn” on 3 February last year, the day after the 100-year-old of Bedfordshire died.

Kelly, of Castlemilk, Glasgow, was found guilty of sending the message following a trial at Lanark Sheriff Court in January and returned to the court for sentencing on Wednesday, where he was handed a community payback order.

Sheriff Adrian Cottam told Kelly he passed the “custody threshold” but there was a presumption against prison if there was an alternative. He sentenced him to a community payback order comprising 18 months of supervision and 150 hours of unpaid work, and said the punishment should act as a deterrent to others.

Sheriff Cottam said: “My view is, having heard the evidence, that this was a grossly offensive tweet. The deterrence is really to show people that despite the steps you took to try and recall matters, as soon as you press the blue button that’s it. It’s important for other people to realise how quickly things can get out of control. You are a good example of that, not having many followers.”

«

1) Personally, I’m not “grossly offended”. It’s hardly as if Kelly was threatening to burn the corpse. And he had a handful of followers.

2) This is the most ridiculous action, given the noise that government ministers have made about “freedom of speech”. Not that much, eh?

3) I’m significantly offended by the suggestion that Moore’s family has not acted according to their responsibilities to the charity. If they’re guilty, will they go to prison, as nearly happened to Kelly?

4) If the tweet’s grossly offensive, why is repeating it OK?
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I’m done with Wyze • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

I just threw my Wyze home security cameras in the trash. I’m done with this company.

I just learned that for the past three years, Wyze has been fully aware of a vulnerability in its home security cameras that could have theoretically let hackers access your video feeds over the internet — but chose to sweep it under the rug. And the security firm that found the vulnerability largely let them do it.

Instead of patching it, instead of recalling it, instead of just, you know, saying something so I could stop pointing these cameras at my kids, Wyze simply decided to discontinue the WyzeCam v1 this January without a full explanation. But on Tuesday, security research firm Bitdefender finally shed light on why Wyze stopped selling it: because someone could theoretically access your camera’s SD card, steal the encryption key, and start watching and downloading its video.

Since I published this editorial, several people have reached out to explain the issue isn’t nearly as bad as you might have imagined reading my words — that hackers would likely have to be inside your home network, or you would have had to make an egregious mistake by configuring your firewall to provide internet access to the camera’s virtual port.

…Wyze isn’t the only smart home company that’s danced around something like this: when randos actually did access people’s Google Nest security cameras (due to password issues, not a hack), Google didn’t fulfill its responsibility to properly warn its customers either.

Here’s another question: Why on earth would Bitdefender not disclose this for three whole years, when it could have forced Wyze’s hand?

«

The latter seems like the most pertinent question. Bitdefender could have lit the whole thing up. In a response, it said that it didn’t want to expose customers, without mitigation. Hollister points out it could just have put out a press release saying there was a vulnerability without specifying what. Wyze also leaked 2.4 million customers’ data in 2019. Oh well.

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How Google and Amazon bankrolled a ‘grassroots’ activist group of small business owners to lobby against Big Tech oversight • CNBC

Eamon Javers and Meghna Maharishi:

»

Clay Montgomery owns a small blacksmith shop called “Arrow M Enterprises” outside of Mingus, Texas, where he manufactures hand-forged metal works and grilling tools. He also sells a spicy barbeque sauce and a meat rub called “Bite My Butt.”

In recent years, Montgomery’s blacksmith shop has been listed as a member of a Washington, D.C.-based trade group called the “Connected Commerce Council” that claims to lobby on behalf of small businesses. On its website, the council describes itself as a non-profit membership organization with a single goal: “to promote small businesses’ access to essential digital technologies and tools.”

The group, which campaigns against aggressive regulation of big tech companies, also says it wants to ensure “policymakers understand the essential intersection of technology and small business,” according to its website.

But there’s just one problem: Montgomery says he’s not a member and, in fact, has never heard of the Connected Commerce Council. The blacksmith told CNBC he would never join a tech lobbying group in Washington. “Technology is not exactly my forte,” he said.

Montgomery isn’t the only small business owner bewildered to find their names listed as a member of the Connected Commerce Council, which also goes by “3C.” More than 20 other “members” contacted by CNBC said they similarly had never heard of the council and did not know why they were on their membership list.

«

So calamitously bad. Why do these giants think there’s any need to fake things like this? There’s a sort of inherent failure in the whole system. This involves lots of money, so that means multiple people signing off and approving it. How does that happen?
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5G Skeptic • ongoing

Tim Bray:

»

My home office is on our boat, anchored in central Vancouver. I pay my mobile provider more for extra data and do all my work via a hotspot on my aging Pixel 4. The phone calls what it sees “LTE+” (I don’t claim to understand what that means) which de facto gives me lots of tens of Mbits/sec, plenty enough for heavy Internet geeking with streamed background music, and watching ball games (remember, I’m semi-retired). Interestingly, the Marina also provides a WiFi signal which is pathetically slow and unreliable compared to the 4G data; the notion that WiFi is the gold standard for wireless Internet is pretty well over.

Our family has a cabin an hour’s boat-ride from Vancouver on the shores of Howe Sound. We have “Smart Hub Rural Internet”, which delivers a solid 15-25M down and 10+ up. Plenty enough for four people.

So, I’m having trouble seeing what problem I have that 5G will solve.

Speed? · Granted: Like many people, at home we have “fiber” Internet which offers hundreds of M so that our family of four can all stream and game at the same time, no problem.
Question: How often do you need more than the 50M or so LTE offers in a situation where it’s cheaper to provide it with 5G than with a wired connection?

Bandwidth · This is one that I can sort of believe in. In a football stadium or a big conference keynote, it is possible to provide decent WiFi coverage (I’ve experienced it). Is 5G a cheaper or better way to do that? I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound crazy.

«

There are plenty of tweets included as replies in the post, with a couple suggesting it can work for rural broadband. Pricey, though. In general, though, nobody at all can figure out what it’s better for.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Arizona, Lake Powell is at a record low due to the worst drought there in 1200 years, creating river and power management problems. CC-licensed photo by Reinhard Link 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. Withdrawing, really? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell:

»

Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.

Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.

…One trend Targeted Victory sought to enhance through its work was the “devious licks” challenge, which showed students vandalizing school property. Through the “Bad TikTok Clips” document [a Google doc of “dubious local news stories citing TikTok as the origin of dangerous teen trends”], the firm pushed stories about the “devious licks” challenge in local media across Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

That trend led Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) to write a letter in September calling on TikTok executives to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee, saying the app had been “repeatedly misused and abused to promote behavior and actions that encourage harmful and destructive acts.” But according to an investigation by Anna Foley at the podcast network Gimlet, rumours of the “devious licks” challenge initially spread on Facebook, not TikTok.

«

One amazing part of this is the targeting of local papers for stories and letters. As if kids would worry. But of course it’s the parents they’re targeting, who will bother politicians. And demonstrates Facebook’s raging envy of TikTok.
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Google cuts racy results by 30% for searches like ‘Latina teenager’ • Reuters via Yahoo

Paresh Dave:

»

When U.S. actress Natalie Morales carried out a Google search for “Latina teen” in 2019, she described in a tweet that all she encountered was pornography.

Her experience may be different now.

The Alphabet Inc unit has cut explicit results by 30% over the past year in searches for “latina teenager” and others related to ethnicity, sexual preference and gender, Tulsee Doshi, head of product for Google’s responsible AI team, told Reuters on Wednesday.

Doshi said Google had rolled out new artificial intelligence software, known as BERT, to better interpret when someone was seeking racy results or more general ones.

Beside “latina teenager,” other queries now showing different results include “la chef lesbienne,” “college dorm room,” “latina yoga instructor” and “lesbienne bus,” according to Google.

“It’s all been a set of over-sexualized results,” Doshi said, adding that those historically suggestive search results were potentially shocking to many users.

Morales did not immediately respond to a request for comment through a representative. Her 2019 tweet said she had been seeking images for a presentation, and had noticed a contrast in results for “teen” by itself, which she described as “all the normal teenager stuff,” and called on Google to investigate.

The search giant has spent years addressing feedback about offensive content in its advertising tools and in results from searches for “hot” and “ceo.” It also cut sexualized results for “Black girls” after a 2013 journal article by author Safiya Noble raised concerns about the harmful representations.

«

So if she previously encountered all pornography, will she now just have 70% pornography? Of course porn has always been the bugbear of search engines, going back to their very earliest days (yes, before Google, even). Weeding porn out of search results is a colossal part of search engines’ work; in Google’s earliest days, it was pretty much all they did before they could release it to the public.
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Apple and Meta gave user data to hackers who used forged legal requests • Bloomberg via Yahoo

William Turton:

»

Apple and Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Apple and Meta provided basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests.” Normally, such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, the emergency requests don’t require a court order.

Snap received a forged legal request from the same hackers, but it isn’t known whether the company provided data in response. It’s also not clear how many times the companies provided data prompted by forged legal requests.

Cybersecurity researchers suspect that some of the hackers sending the forged requests are minors located in the UK and the US. One of the minors is also believed to be the mastermind behind the cybercrime group Lapsus$, which hacked Microsoft, Samsung and Nvidia, among others, the people said. City of London Police recently arrested seven people in connection with an investigation into the Lapsus$ hacking group; the probe is ongoing.

«

Most likely used to hack or doxx their rivals. Impressive that they managed to find the emergency data request blanks, or an already filed one; you’d have to guess those were electronically filed somewhere in Microsoft, Samsung or Nvidia, and they made a convincing copy. But where would you find them? Would you spelunk through a gigantic folder called LEGAL?

Also not in the story: how many people were targeted. Going to guess it’s fewer than 20.
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Idol Words • Astral Codex Ten

“Scott Alexander” occasionally writes entertaining little short pieces, and this is one of them:

»

The woman was wearing sunglasses, a visor, a little too much lipstick, and a camera around her neck. “Excuse me,” she asked. “Is this the temple with the three omniscient idols? Where one always tells the truth, one always lies, and one answers randomly?”

The center idol’s eyes glowed red, and it spoke with a voice from everywhere and nowhere, a voice like the whoosh of falling waters or the flash of falling stars.

“No!” the great voice boomed.

«

It’s a lovely, silly story. What would you ask the three omniscient idols where one always tells the truth, one always lies and one answers randomly? (I think I know which one of the characters – not idols – I am.)
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Lake Powell plunges past a level that water managers sought to protect • Arizona Central

Brandon Loomis:

»

Water levels at drought-stricken Lake Powell have dropped below an elevation water managers had fought to protect, dipping past a buffer meant to protect hydropower generation.

For the first time since water rose behind Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s, the lake’s surface dropped below elevation 3,525 Tuesday, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said Wednesday morning. The dam can still produce electricity down to elevation 3,490, but shallower water reduces pressure and the power plant’s capacity, and further declines could damage the turbines.

The new low reflects the continuing dirty work of the region’s worst drought in 1,200 years, one that has deepened into a megadrought, according to scientists. High water demand from both a growing regional population and the effects of a warming climate promise to continue challenging water managers to shore up the Colorado River’s second-largest savings account.

Federal officials have set a goal of keeping the water higher than 3,525 feet above sea level, both for power production and for storage to safeguard Colorado River flows to Lake Mead and downstream users. The water is expected to rebound past that level when snow melts in the Rockies this spring, but Tuesday’s plunge marks one more in a series of troubling firsts — some foreboding and others already costly — for a river in decline.

«

Not a typo: 1,200 years. A millennium.
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Interoperability without sacrificing privacy: Matrix and the Digial Markets Act • Matrix.org

Matthew Hodgson, at a company which “is an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication over Internet Protocol”, on the DMA mandating interop between messaging clients:

»

if you were to actively interoperate between providers (e.g. if Matrix turned up and asked WhatsApp, post DMA, to expose an API we could use to write bridges against), then that bridge would need to convert between WhatsApp’s E2EE’d payloads and Matrix’s E2EE’d payloads. (Even though both WhatsApp and Matrix use the Double Ratchet, the actual payloads within the encryption are completely different and would need to be converted). Therefore such a bridge has to re-encrypt the traffic – which means that the plaintext is exposed on the bridge, putting it at risk and breaking the end-to-end encryption guarantee.

There are solutions to this, however:
• We could run the bridge somewhere relatively safe – e.g. the user’s client. There’s a bunch of work going on already in Matrix to run clientside bridges, so that your laptop or phone effectively maintains a connection over to iMessage or WhatsApp or whatever as if it were logged in… but then relays the messages into Matrix once re-encrypted. By decentralising the bridges and spreading them around the internet, you avoid them becoming a single honeypot that bad actors might look to attack: instead it becomes more a question of endpoint compromise (which is already a risk today).
• The gatekeeper could switch to a decentralised end-to-end encrypted protocol like Matrix to preserve end-to-end encryption throughout. This is obviously significant work on the gatekeeper’s side, but we shouldn’t rule it out. For instance, making the transition for a non-encrypted service is impressively little work, as we proved with Gitter. (We’d ideally need to figure out decentralised/federated identity-lookup first though, to avoid switching from one centralised identity database to another).
• Worst case, we could flag to the user that their conversation is insecure (the chat equivalent of a scary TLS certificate warning). Honestly, this is something communication apps (including Matrix-based ones!) should be doing anyway: as a user you should be able to tell what 3rd parties (bots, integrations etc) have been added to a given conversation. Adding this sort of semantic actually opens up a much richer set of communication interactions, by giving the user the flexibility over who to trust with their data, even if it breaks the platonic ideal of pure E2E encryption.

«

Or you could just use SMS. Alternatively, for security, RCS. Stop trying to justify it; the interop proposal is so terrible that it really, really needs to be junked as soon as possible. The DMA’s failure is that no tech company gets big by overhauling a rival in the exact same space. Google didn’t beat Microsoft in desktop operating systems. Facebook didn’t beat Google in search. TikTok didn’t beat Facebook in connecting people. DeepMind and Shazam ditto. The DMA creates the wrong incentives.

See also: “Forcing WhatsApp and iMessage to work together is doomed to fail” in Wired.
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‘I can fight with a keyboard’: how one Ukrainian IT specialist exposed a notorious Russian ransomware gang • CNNPolitics

Sean Lyngaas:

»

As Russian artillery began raining down on his homeland last month, one Ukrainian computer researcher decided to fight back the best way he knew how – by sabotaging one of the most formidable ransomware gangs in Russia.

Four days into Russia’s invasion, the researcher began publishing the biggest leak ever of files and data from Conti, a syndicate of Russian and Eastern Europe cybercriminals wanted by the FBI for conducting attacks on hundreds of US organizations and causing millions of dollars in losses.

The thousands of internal documents and communications include evidence that appears to suggest Conti operatives have contacts within the Russian government, including the FSB intelligence service. That supports a longstanding US allegation that Moscow has colluded with cybercriminals for strategic advantage.

The Ukrainian computer specialist behind the leak spoke exclusively to CNN and described his motivation for seeking revenge after Conti operatives published a statement in support of the Russian government immediately after the invasion of Ukraine. He also described his desperate efforts to track down loved ones in Ukraine in recent weeks.

To protect his identity, CNN agreed to refer to him by a pseudonym: Danylo. “I cannot shoot anything, but I can fight with a keyboard and mouse,” Danylo told CNN.

The trove of data Danylo leaked in late February illustrates why cybersecurity has been such a fraught issue in US-Russia relations. It includes cryptocurrency accounts the Conti hackers used to allegedly reap millions of dollars in ransom payments, their discussions of how to extort US companies and their apparent targeting of a journalist investigating the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny.

But it also shows how hard it can be to disable ransomware operations. Despite Danylo unmasking their operations, the hackers continue to announce new victim organizations.

«

He also says that FBI got in touch and asked him to stop leaking because the group might abandon its current system and set up a new one. So he did. At least publicly.
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China plans new restrictions in its booming live-streaming sector • WSJ

Keith Zhai and Liza Lin:

»

Live-streaming services in China, including those operated by social-media giants ByteDance Ltd., Kuaishou Technology and Huya Inc., are consumed by roughly 70% of the country’s internet users, according to the state-run China Internet Network Information Center, commanding an audience of more than 700 million last year.

Many live-streaming influencers earn commissions on products that they promote, but for many of them a key revenue stream comes in the form of tips and virtual gifts, ranging from the equivalent of 15 cents for a virtual beer to more than $1,100 for a virtual spaceship.

Popular live-streamers are backed by professional marketing teams and can earn tens of thousands of dollars each day in direct donations from fans. The most sought-after live-streaming hosts can earn millions in brand endorsements and sponsorships.

Any attempts to regulate this booming segment of the online world would follow in the footsteps of other efforts to clamp down and clean up behavior on the internet, particularly for younger people.

In the past year, China has cracked down on for-profit education providers, railed against the evils of what it described as a culture of celebrity worship and set strict limits on the amount of time minors can spend playing computer games.

These and other regulatory actions last year hit investor confidence in Chinese stocks, sparking steep selloffs in shares of e-commerce and gaming businesses.

…authorities were discussing a daily limit of 10,000 yuan, equivalent to about $1,570, on the amount of gifts that live-streaming hosts can accept. Chinese regulators worry that young people, drawn by the promise of lucrative earnings, would otherwise aspire to become live-streaming celebrities, the person said, adding that this was counter to the values that officials hoped to instill.

«

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Climate groups say a change in coding can reduce bitcoin energy consumption by 99% • The Guardian

Dominic Rushe:

»

Without a change to the [bitcoin] code, the fundamental problem will remain that bitcoin’s code “incentivises maximum energy use”, said Chris Larsen, founder and executive chairman of crypto company Ripple and a climate activist. “The minute that there is the opportunity to go to something dirty, which is what you are seeing, that is going to happen.”

One “nightmare scenario”, he said, is that the world does get to a renewable future in China, the US and EU but countries rich in fossil fuel switch to bitcoin mining to keep their operations running.

“Imagine the Saudis sitting on all that oil, which has a cost of about ½ cent per kilowatt hour – no renewable can match that,” Larsen said. “Bitcoin mining could be this endless monetization engine for fossil fuels. That would be a nightmare.”

The campaign is launching with digital advertising in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Marketwatch, Politico, Facebook and other publications. Organizers are also taking legal action against proposed mining sites and using their large memberships to push bitcoin’s biggest investors and influencers to call for a code change. “In this world, with all these smart people, there has got to be a better solution,” said Larsen.

«

Ethereum is moving to “proof of stake”, though it always seems to be just slightly in the future. Jam tomorrow, all the time.
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Farage lined up for €18.5m carbon windfall despite climate scepticism • Financial Times

Jim Pickard and Camilla Hodgson:

»

Former Brexit champion Nigel Farage is in line to gain up to €18.5m from share options in a carbon offsetting company despite launching a new campaign opposing the government’s “net zero” 2050 target.

Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party, announced in March 2021 that he had become chair of the advisory board to Dutch Green Business, listed on Euronext Amsterdam.

He was introduced to the company by his friend John Mappin, a pro-Putin heir to a jewellery fortune, scientologist and anti-vaxxer, who together with his wife has a 30% stake in DGB, according to Bloomberg data.

Farage was granted 1mn share options at the general meeting of DGB’s shareholders in September 2021, with a “strike price” — the price he would pay for them — of €1.50.

But that same month his advisory position was put on hold owing to a dispute between the board of directors and Mappin and his wife, Irina Kudrenok-Mappin, over their shareholdings. “At the moment my relationship (with DGB) is in abeyance,” Farage told the FT.

«

Pity there isn’t a way to earn money by offsetting hypocrisy.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The latest game where AI has become a contender is contract bridge – though not yet the bidding process. CC-licensed photo by Roger W on Flickr.

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Social media might be bad for teens’ mental health at certain age windows • The Verge

Nicole Wetsman:

»

[University of Cambridge psychologist Amy] Orben and her team first looked at a survey of over 72,000 people 10 to 80 years old in the United Kingdom. They were surveyed up to seven times each between 2011 and 2018 and asked a series of questions that included their life satisfaction and the amount of time they estimated they spent on social media each day.

Narrowing in on adolescents, the team found that for people in the 16- to 21-year-old age range, both very low and very high social media use were both linked with lower life satisfaction. In 10- to 15-year-olds, there wasn’t much difference in life satisfaction between kids reporting low and high social media use. But in that group, girls with high social media use had lower life satisfaction than boys.

The team also examined data from a survey given to over 17,000 10- to 21-year-olds, identifying separate windows for boys and girls in their early teens where higher social media use was linked with lower life satisfaction a year later — 14 to 15 for boys and 11 to 13 for girls. The relationship showed up for both sexes at age 19. The windows seem to map on to the start of puberty for both boys and girls (girls tend to hit puberty earlier) and a major social transition — many young adults in the UK leave home at around 19.

Other types of research could help figure out the reasons for those windows, Orben says: studies looking at things like sensitivity to social rejection or impulse control, compared with these sorts of data sets, could help understand why kids at certain ages might have worse experiences after using social media.

Orben cautioned that there are limitations to the study — it can’t show that social media use caused changes in life satisfaction, just that there’s a relationship. It also relies on people reporting how much they use social media, which could be inaccurate. That’s a challenge for most social media research. Companies like Meta don’t give researchers access to internal data that could give scientists a more objective look at social media use — things like how long people use the platforms or who they’re interacting with.

Future research could help identify the groups of adolescents and teenagers who might have the most negative impacts from social media.

«

This is precisely what I found when I researched the topic for Social Warming, in a chapter about the effects of social media on children which had to be cut for reasons of length.
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Artificial intelligence beats eight world champions at bridge • The Guardian

Laura Spinney:

»

French startup NukkAI announced the news of its AI’s victory on Friday, at the end of a two-day tournament in Paris.

The NukkAI challenge required the human champions to play 800 consecutive deals divided into 80 sets of 10. It did not involve the initial bidding component of the game during which players arrive at a contract that they must then meet by playing their cards.

Each champion played their own and their “dummy” partner’s cards against a pair of opponents. These opponents were the best robot champions in the world to date – robots that have won many robot competitions but that are universally acknowledged to be nowhere near as good as expert human players.

The AI – called NooK – played the same role as the human champion, with the same cards and the same opponents. The score was the difference between those of the human and the AI, averaged over each set. NooK won 67, or 83%, of the 80 sets.

Jean-Baptiste Fantun, co-founder of NukkAI, said he had been confident the machine – which the company has been developing for five years – would triumph in thousands of deals, but with only 800 it was touch-and-go.

Announcing the results, the mathematician Cédric Villani, winner of the Fields medal in 2010, called NukkAI “a superb French success story”.

AI researcher Véronique Ventos, NukkAI’s other co-founder, calls NooK a “new generation AI” because it explains its decisions as it goes along. “In bridge, you can’t play if you don’t explain,” she says.

«

Not doing the bidding seems like a big element to miss out, and is really where at least half the human subtlety of contract bridge comes in. (Tell me whether bidding is more or less than half, contract bridge fans.)

An accompanying piece: how Deep Blue paved the way for modern AI.
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Axie Infinity’s Ronin network suffers $625m exploit •

Andrew thurman:

»

An attacker “used hacked private keys in order to forge fake withdrawals” from the Ronin bridge across two transactions, as seen on Etherscan.

While the Ronin sidechain has nine validators requiring five signatures for withdrawals and is meant to protect against these types of attacks, the blog post notes that “the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.”

The blog post pegged the losses at 173,600 ether and 25.5m in USDC, currently worth in excess of $625m.

Back in August 2021, a hacker made off with $611m in an exploit of cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Poly Network. The vast majority of the funds were returned.

The Ronin attacker’s Ethereum address is a fresh address that transferred ETH in from the Binance exchange one week ago. Etherscan records show that the attack took place last Wednesday.

«

Most of that’s gobbledygook, isn’t it. A backdoor through our gas-free RPC node? The problem for the thieves is always how you spend it, because the offramps from crypto are well-policed.
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FinFisher claims insolvency amid German government investigation • Gizmodo

Lucas Ropek:

»

FinFisher is no more. Long accused of helping authoritarian governments to spy on political dissidents and activists, the creepy surveillance company has abruptly shut down amidst an ongoing investigation into its business dealings.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that the Munich-based spyware firm had shuttered its offices after quietly filing for insolvency this past February.

The company, which is known for its powerful and invasive malware “FinSpy,” has been under investigation by the German government since 2019 over allegations that it illegally sold spyware to the government of Turkey without acquiring the requisite export license. The spyware, which was allegedly used to monitor the phones of political activists in the country, is known for its ability to pilfer data and listen-in on mobile users.

The company’s implosion last month will likely affect German officials’ probe. At the time of the announced insolvency, authorities had been in the process of pursuing authorization to seize assets allegedly “obtained from an illegal act.” Though the investigation is ongoing, the asset seizure will no longer be possible, since the company no longer exists.

«

Wonder if the software will resurface at a newly created company in a week or two.
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Verizon blames ‘bad actors’ for the spam text you got from your own number • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Yesterday, I wrote about receiving a spam text that bizarrely looked as though it came from my own phone number. But what initially seemed like a random, spoofed spam message is increasingly starting to look like a focused effort targeting Verizon Wireless, one of the largest telecoms in the United States. Today, the carrier confirmed it’s aware of the situation and is investigating the matter with the help of US law enforcement.

“Verizon is aware that bad actors are sending spam text messages to some customers which appear to come from the customers’ own number,” Verizon spokesperson Rich Young told The Verge by email. “Our team is actively working to block these messages, and we have engaged with US law enforcement to identify and stop the source of this fraudulent activity. Verizon continues to work on behalf of the customer to prevent spam texts and related activity.”

In the hours since we published our original story, many more Verizon customers have reported receiving that same exact text about a free gift with a link at the end. In my case, the link forwarded me to Channel One Russia, a Russian state media network.

At the moment, however, Verizon says “we have no indication that this fraudulent activity is originating in Russia.” The deluge of texts comes as many US companies remain on high alert for potential retaliatory cybersecurity attacks from Russia over the severe US sanctions that resulted from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Other major US carriers have not received the same mass wave of spam texts that are spoofed with customers’ own numbers, leading to some speculation of an internal breach at Verizon or a more sophisticated attack than run-of-the-mill spam. But according to Young, Verizon’s network hasn’t been compromised. “We believe this activity is being generated from external bad actors with no direct tie to our company,” he said.

«

If it’s external, and Verizon’s systems haven’t been compromised, why are only Verizon numbers being hit?
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Looking back on the origin of ‘Skip Intro’ five years later • About Netflix

Cameron Johnson is director of product innovation:

»

some designers and I were discussing how to help members get the most out of their Netflix experience. Sometimes you want to find a particular moment you love — that awesome action scene or the big reveal of that can’t-believe-it twist —  or rewatch a favorite joke.

An idea was floated to add skip forward and skip backward buttons in 10-second increments. The reason to offer a skip back 10 seconds was obvious: maybe you got distracted and missed a particular moment. 

But why skip forward 10 seconds?

Well, you might want to skip the opening credits. But no one could come up with any other compelling reasons. 

At the same time, I was watching Game of Thrones, which has a famously long (and beautiful) opening credits sequence. I found the show so compelling that I wanted to skip the credits and jump right into the story, and I found it frustrating to try to manually jump forward to the just the right place. Sometimes I would jump too far, and sometimes I would jump too short. I wondered whether other people felt the same.

We did research and found that in about 15% of the time members were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes. This gave us confidence that a lot of people wanted to skip the intro.

Rather than build a general purpose solution that might help a little with several different needs, like a skip forward 10 seconds button, we designed a single purpose solution that did only one thing really well. 

«

Gets used 136 million times a day, he says, saving people a cumulative 195 years daily. (195 years is ~102m minutes, so about 80 seconds on average per intro sequence. Or 40 seconds if it’s watched by two people.) Redolent of the days of Flash websites, which definitely had “Skip intro”.
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Communication breakdown: how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine bogged down • Radio Free Europe

Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov:

»

[independent military analyst specialising in telecoms, Stanimir] Dobrev also says that [Russian] forward detachments in the early days of the war appeared to have outrun their communications support.

“The Russian battalion tactical groups immediately went a much greater distance from the border, [and] at the same time, we didn’t see equipment that could provide secure communication with the command post along with them,” he said.

He says repeater cars and new communication towers need to be installed along the way, and their set-up and use require experienced operators. “Indirectly, this indicates that the Russian offensive groups didn’t expect to stay on the road for a long time,” Dobrev said.

He and other observers also note that clear signs have emerged of interception of communication between Russian special services and other troops that should otherwise be on encrypted channels.

Christo Grozev, of the open-source sleuthing group Bellingcat, cited a “super expensive cryptophone system” introduced by Russia in 2021 seemingly being intercepted because it requires a 3G or 4G cellular network to operate.

“The cellular networks are still controlled by Ukraine, which means that for the Ukrainian military they remain a relatively secure means of communication from eavesdropping,” Dobrev said.

Not so for Russians using those same networks, or, obviously, Ukrainian fixed lines.

«

It’s a pretty long, in-depth assessment of how badly the Russian telecoms system has failed its military. Which it has done in many ways.
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Ukraine will not be like Korea; dogged resistance will turn it into Putin’s ‘bleeding ulcer’ • The Conversation

Frank Ledwidge is senior lecturer in military capabilities and strategy at the University of Portsmouth:

»

Nato has applied the lessons of Iraq to develop new thinking on setting up effective resistance forces against Russian forces. For some time Ukrainian, US and other intelligence agencies will have been identifying and supplying the territorial defence leaders behind Russian lines, and they have been effective in disrupting Russian supply lines and logistics.

Should Ukraine be split as Putin plans, this will not be a frozen conflict, as Korea is. Nor will it resemble Abkhazia or Chechnya, uneasy though they both remain, under the control of a Russian puppet Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya and military occupation in the breakaway Georgian region. Even Afghanistan in the 1980s will pale in comparison.

From 1807 to 1814 on the Iberian peninsula, Napoleon had to fight Spanish, Portuguese and British armies while beset by ubiquitous, ferocious insurgents. He described this war as his “bleeding ulcer”, draining him of men and equipment. It is the west’s aim to make Ukraine for Putin what Spain was for Napoleon.

In the absence of a negotiated settlement, Ukraine and Nato will continue to grind away at Russia’s army, digging away at that bleeding ulcer and prolonging Russia’s agony on the military front, as the west continues its parallel assault on its economy. If Putin’s plan is to proceed with the Korea model, he will fail.

«

The key question is what happens in the Donbas and Crimea. Would those really be regained by Ukraine?
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Motorola emerges as US’ #3 smartphone OEM in 2021 for first time • Counterpoint Research

Varun Mishra:

»

Motorola emerged as the third-largest smartphone brand in the US in 2021, according to Counterpoint Research’s Market Pulse Service. In 2008, when feature phones were dominant, Motorola was the largest handset (smartphones and feature phones combined) OEM in the US. However, within the smartphone segment, this is the first time ever that Motorola has entered the top three in the US market for a full year.

Motorola’s sales more than doubled in 2021, growing 131% YoY. While Apple and Samsung dominate the premium price bands, Motorola rose through the ranks to become the #2 smartphone player in the $400 and below price segment in the US.

«

Sounds amazing (especially since Motorola has gone through a near-death experience over the years, being sold by Google to Lenovo, which faffed around with it for ages). But then you look at the graph, and it shows that Motorola’s share was 10%. Apple had 58%, and Samsung 22%. Motorola only got there because LG gave up, after years of losing money in the business.
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We study virus evolution. Here’s where we think the coronavirus is going • The New York Times

Sarah Cobey, Jesse Bloom, Tyler Starr and Nathaniel Lash:

»

It’s impossible to say whether future variants will have more big Omicron-like jumps or more typical stepwise changes, but we are confident SARS-CoV-2 will continue to evolve to escape immunity.

While transmissibility of viruses does plateau at a certain point, other human viruses that escape immunity keep doing so. The influenza vaccine has been updated annually for decades to chase viral evolution, and some influenza viruses show no sign of slowing down. Immune escape is an endless evolutionary arms race, because the immune system can always make new antibodies and the virus has a vast set of mutations to explore in response. For instance, Omicron has just a tiny fraction of the many mutations that have been observed in SARS-CoV-2 or related bat viruses, which are in turn just a small fraction of what lab experiments suggest the virus could potentially explore.

Taking all this together, we expect SARS-CoV-2 will continue to cause new epidemics, but they will increasingly be driven by the ability to skirt the immune system. In this sense, the future may look something like the seasonal flu, where new variants cause waves of cases each year. If this happens, which we expect it will, vaccines may need to be updated regularly similar to the flu vaccines unless we develop broader variant-proof vaccines.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The NHS is to start testing of an AI system to predict levels of A&E admissions. CC-licensed photo by Lydia 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. State of preparedness. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

When Nokia pulled out of Russia, a vast surveillance system remained • The New York Times

Adam Satariano, Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik:

»

For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM [System for Operative Investigative Activities] to Russia’s largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system’s connection to the MTS network. Russia’s main intelligence service, the F.S.B., uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications.

The documents, spanning 2008 to 2017, show in previously unreported detail that Nokia knew it was enabling a Russian surveillance system. The work was essential for Nokia to do business in Russia, where it had become a top supplier of equipment and services to various telecommunications customers to help their networks function. The business yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, even as Mr. Putin became more belligerent abroad and more controlling at home.

For years, multinational companies capitalized on surging Russian demand for new technologies. Now global outrage over the largest war on European soil since World War II is forcing them to re-examine their roles.

…Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russian intelligence and digital surveillance who reviewed some of the Nokia documents at the request of The Times, said that without the company’s involvement in SORM, “it would have been impossible to make such a system.”

“They had to have known how their devices would be used,” said Mr. Soldatov, who is now a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

«

Well, if you sell a telecoms system in an authoritarian country then it’s always likely to be used for surveillance. Hardly a surprise. But if Nokia won’t, Huawei or ZTE will.

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The latest marketing tactic on LinkedIn: AI-generated faces • NPR

Shannon Bond:

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At first glance, Renée DiResta thought the LinkedIn message seemed normal enough.

The sender, Keenan Ramsey, mentioned that they both belonged to a LinkedIn group for entrepreneurs. She punctuated her greeting with a grinning emoji before pivoting to a pitch for software.

“Quick question — have you ever considered or looked into a unified approach to message, video, and phone on any device, anywhere?”

DiResta wasn’t interested and would have ignored the message entirely, but then she looked closer at Ramsey’s profile picture. Little things seemed off in what should have been a typical corporate headshot. Ramsey was wearing only one earring. Bits of her hair disappeared and then reappeared. Her eyes were aligned right in the middle of the image.

“The face jumped out at me as being fake,” said DiResta, a veteran researcher who has studied Russian disinformation campaigns and anti-vaccine conspiracies. To her trained eye, these anomalies were red flags that Ramsey’s photo had likely been created by artificial intelligence.

That chance message launched DiResta and her colleague Josh Goldstein at the Stanford Internet Observatory on an investigation that uncovered more than 1,000 LinkedIn profiles using what appear to be faces created by artificial intelligence.

«

But, for once, not pushing disinformation; they’re just bots used for marketing purposes. A sort of visual spam: respond eagerly and you’ll be put on a phone to a real human who’ll try to sell you something.

The next step, presumably, is that GPT-3 gets hooked up to a voice synthesizer and the human gets cut out of the phone call bit.
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NHS England deploys pilot AI tool to forecast A&E admissions • Computer Weekly

Brian McKenna:

»

The NHS is deploying a demand forecasting tool from artificial intelligence (AI) firm Faculty that will predict accident and emergency admissions and help it better accommodate post-pandemic backlogs for elective procedures.

The same firm was involved in building a Covid-19 “early warning system” in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. That was also used to forecast hospital admissions.

…Faculty said data about factors such as Covid prevalence and public holidays improved the accuracy of the model behind the tool. Their ambition is to include weather data sources in future iterations.

The tool was co-developed with frontline clinical and operational staff in nine pilot NHS trusts. It is being rolled out to more than 100 NHS trusts.

Myles Kirby, director of health and life sciences at Faculty, said: “Since our work with the NHS began two years ago, Faculty has been driven by one goal – to help improve patient care.

“By better forecasting patient demand, we are helping staff tackle treatment backlogs by showing them who is set to be admitted, what their needs are, and which staff are needed to treat them.”

«

Would have been nice to know how well it did in the Covid forecasting.
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The EU tries to loosen Big Tech’s grip • Financial Times

The FT’s editorial board:

»

Big Tech finally has commandments to abide by. Among them: thou shalt not bundle products, and thou shalt permit interoperability between different systems. Penalties for transgressions include a fine of up to 20% of a company’s global turnover, or even a break-up of businesses for recidivists. The advent of the Digital Markets Act in the EU, the text of which was finalised last week, means a user of Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service could text a friend who uses a different service. It means Apple must allow its smartphone users to pick apps from beyond its own App Store. It is the biggest overhaul of the digital marketplace in 20 years, and it is welcome.

Having these ground rules laid down — so-called ex-ante regulation — is a departure from the system until now, where what is deemed to be problematic behaviour is retrospectively enforced by citing breaches of broad-brush antitrust law. Even though the EU has taken a much more expansive view of competition law than the US, traditional antitrust laws that define consumer harm through the lens of prices have not kept pace with the digital economy, where personal data is bartered for ostensibly free services, and where a marketplace’s main producers are also its gatekeepers.

The DMA is one strand of twin policies to help redress the balance in favour of consumers and competitors; the forthcoming Digital Services Act will focus on privacy and how Big Tech should use personal data. The pieces of legislation mark a watershed moment, not least because they put tech gatekeepers in the same camp as other “utility” sectors such as finance, energy and telecoms that must follow ex-ante regulation because of their size and importance to consumers’ daily lives.

«

I think there are going to be a lot of unintended consequences from this. It’s welcome in some ways (bundling can forestall innovation) but rather as GDPR and cookies have put a ton of roadblocks in our way, and the benefits are hard to see, so I think we’ll be complaining about the DMA in the years to come.

Quick recap from Axios of some of what the DMA brings: • Require companies to obtain “explicit consent” to target ads based on personal data
• Require that instant messaging platforms like Apple’s iMessage and Meta’s WhatsApp exchange messages with smaller services
• Require large platforms to give users freedom to select a browser, search engine and personal voice assistant of their choice.
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Volodymyr Zelensky in his own words • The Economist

»

On March 25th 2022 Ukraine’s president spoke in person to The Economist in what he and his staff have taken to calling “the fortress”. Here are highlights of what he told us—switching freely between English, Ukrainian and Russian. We have edited them for clarity.

The Economist: You are an actor and president. Now you are being called a 21st-century Churchill. It’s an extraordinary change. How did it happen?

Volodymyr Zelensky: I think that these changes happened already in Ukraine when they elected me. It’s what [the people] wanted. They saw my honest position on everything. Like your father says, if you don’t know how to do something this way or that way, be honest and that’s it. You have to be honest, so that people believe you. You don’t need to try. You need to be yourself. And maybe, after you show who you are, maybe people will love you more than before, because they see that you are not so strong or are lazy at times. No, each time don’t lie and show people who you are exactly. And it’s important not to show that you are better than who you are.

TE: Did you always have it in you to be so brave? To be such a strong person?

VZ: It’s not about being brave. I have to act the way I do. I have to do it this way. None of us was ready for the war before it began. You can’t say, “If I were the President of Ukraine, then I would do it this way”, because you can’t imagine what it would mean. And you can’t imagine even how you will do it. That’s what it was like in this case with me. And all of the people around me.

«

Good to have him in his own words.
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Heardle, that daily musical intros game

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• Listen to the intro, then find the correct artist & title in the list.

• Skipped or incorrect attempts unlock more of the intro

• Answer in as few tries as possible and share your score!

«

The whole -dle thing is an entire ecosystem now.
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Who’s driving that food delivery bot? It might be a Gen Z gamer • Los Angeles Times

Ronald White:

»

In a low-light Culver City control room, Lily Shaw is getting her pilot mood on.

A can of mint Guayaki Yerba Mate sits near her carefully manicured fingers. “Good jams to get pumped” from alt rock band Slothrust blast on her earbuds. Horn-rimmed, blue-light filtering glasses protect her eyes. Her favored chartreuse Xbox controller stands ready to command her laptop.

Shaw is set for her mission: piloting an order of burritos and doughnuts along Santa Monica sidewalks to a hungry customer.

It’s not exactly “Top Gun,” but Shaw’s job at delivery startup Coco highlights a little-known fact about the autonomous delivery robot industry, which is projected to mushroom in growth over the next few years. Those cute sidewalk-traveling ice chests on wheels aren’t completely autonomous, unlike the Roomba roaming your house.

For all their AI and other advanced technology, such sidewalk robots — suddenly all over certain neighborhoods and college campuses — are backed by armies of human minders who track the last-mile delivery vehicles the way parents hover over toddlers taking their first steps. These behind-the-scenes workers monitor, drive, troubleshoot, rescue and — when things go terribly wrong — may hop on a bike or scooter to complete the delivery themselves.

California has become a proving ground for several sidewalk delivery robot startups like Coco, which was born two years ago in the living room of UCLA alumni Zach Rash and Brad Squicciarini, both now 24 and riding a pandemic-related desire for contact-free delivery. A recent partnership with Segway is promising to unleash thousands of the pink vehicles in multiple cities.

«

The picture accompanying the article of Shaw’s POV is fascinating. It’s real Ender’s Game stuff, if Enders wound up navigating around potentially hostile people.
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It’s just Oscars takes all the way down • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick on the Will-Smith-slapping-Chris-Rock kerfuffle:

»

I used to even watch award shows or televised live events hoping for this kind of thing to happen. But now, the very thought of having the same “have you seen X meme or Y take” conversation, which now happens both online and off, feels completely draining. Even if I still find the memes super funny.

I assume, like most parts of America, this viral fatigue is connected to the Trump administration. Sorry, we gotta go there. The interplay between viral content, celebrity, live television, and unscripted chaos really started in America with Kanye West’s 2009 “Imma let you finish” moment, but I’d argue went fully mainstream as a trope for American media to acknowledge and seize upon with Miley Cyrus’s 2013 twerking incident.

By the next year, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were hosting the Golden Globes via a drinking game, and ever since, the only thing that has kept American award shows even barely relevant is their potential for memes, and, more recently, discourse. And this idea — a celebrity, a stage, a live feed, and Twitter — was central to Trump’s campaign and his whole time in office. I mean, what was the Trump administration if not a constant series of unscripted awards show moments?

Unfortunately, at least for me, I actually don’t see this general trend reversing…

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Fabulous, especially the description of the Trump administration. If only he hadn’t been president, things might have been tolerable (which is to say, ignorable).
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A $350,000 Bored Ape NFT was just sold for only $115 • The Block

Osato Avan-Nomayo:

»

A Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT has just been sold for 115 DAI ($115) in what appears to be either a costly mistake or a hack.

Data from OpenSea shows the previous owner with the moniker “cchan” accepting a 115 DAI bid on Monday for BAYC #835. That’s 99.9% lower than the current floor price — the lowest price one is available to buy — of the popular NFT collection.

The same owner also sold Mutant Ape #11670 for 25 DAI ($25) to the same buyer. The floor price for mutant apes is 22.6 ETH ($76,000). While it is not immediately clear why the owner would accept such low offers, the situation seems to be a mistake with cchan confusing DAI for ETH. There were three other high-value bids for the Bored Ape between 75 ETH and 106 ETH placed by other collectors that were not accepted.

The floor price for BAYC sits at 106 ETH ($350,000) as of the time of writing. But the NFT in question sports sunglasses and a cigarette, several traits that mean it would typically sell higher than the current floor price. (It’s hard to specify exactly how much it specific NFT should be valued — a wider problem that has been perplexing NFT traders when it comes to using them for loans).

Apart from being sold much lower than the floor price, the sale also represents a major loss for cchan, seeing as the BAYC NFT was initially acquired for 16 ETH in August last year.

Since the purchase, the new buyer has claimed the Ape tokens from the ApeCoin airdrop. They received 12,136 Ape tokens ($180,000).

What’s strange about this whole situation is that the previous owner had to approve their wallet to be able to interact with DAI. That means a transaction will have popped up asking them to approve the use of the stablecoin — a sign that the payment wasn’t being made with ETH. They then sold both the Bored Ape and the Mutant Ape within a minute of each other, suggesting they had decided to accept both offers in one go.

While this might suggest that this was a deliberate move (for some unbeknown reason), a glance at the buyer’s wallet shows otherwise. The buyer has been continously placing bids in DAI on multiple Bored Ape NFTs, seemingly looking to trick someone into believing the offer is in ETH and accepting the purchase. This suggets the seller fell into the intentional trap.

It’s also possible that the seller had their account compromised.

«

I love that the possibilities are (translated into normal currencies) “they thought they were being offered dollars, not rubles” or “they were hacked”, and that these are the default expectations. Looks to me like a scam, since the buyer grabbed the ApeCoin their new ownership entitled them to. And it’s all legit.
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Apple to cut iPhone, AirPods output amid Ukraine war uncertainty • Nikkei

Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li:

»

Apple launched the iPhone SE as its first 5G-capable budget phone less than three weeks ago but is now telling multiple suppliers that it aims to lower production orders by about 2m-3m units for the quarter, citing weaker-than-expected demand, four people told Nikkei Asia. The U.S. tech giant also reduced orders for its AirPods earphones by more than 10m units for all of 2022, as the company predicted lukewarm demand and wanted to reduce the level of inventories.

The company shipped about 76.8m units of AirPods in 2021, Counterpoint Research data showed, but people with knowledge of the situation said overall shipments for 2022 could likely see a decline.

Apple also asked suppliers to make a couple of million fewer units of the entire iPhone 13 range than previously planned, but said this adjustment was based on seasonal demand.

These moves by the world’s most powerful chip and component procurer underline the mounting pressure on the tech industry following the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war, which has compounded the yearslong chip shortage that has hit a string of industries from smartphones to PCs to automobiles.

Numerous governments, from the US and the EU to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, have imposed economic sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, and the supply chain has been rocked by turmoil in the oil, energy and raw materials markets.

«

Always wary of “Apple has cut demand…” stories, but the supply chain issues behind this one seem solid enough, and there’s probably going to be a new whiplash effect through the European tech industry. (And don’t forget Ukraine’s xenon!)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Back in 2013, Jeff Bezos promised us Amazon delivery drones within five years. Instead they keep crashing on test flights. CC-licensed photo by Mike Licht 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. Widely available. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon Delivery drones keep crashing in testing: at least eight in 13 months • Business Insider

Katherine Long:

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Amazon’s autonomous delivery drones have crashed at least eight times in the past 13 months, a review of federal crash reports and internal documents shows.

At least one of these crashes, when a drone that was being tested dropped from 160 feet, resulted in an acres-wide brush fire last June, Insider previously reported. The most recent crash Insider confirmed was at an eastern Oregon airfield on February 1 of this year.

Amazon is testing these drones under its ambitious Prime Air program, which in 2020 was granted license from the Federal Aviation Administration to test in limited capacities. Confirmation of these crashes comes as the company looks to secure new registration that would allow it to test its unmanned vehicles closer to population centres and with fewer restrictions.

The company conducted more than 2,300 drone test flights last year, according to internal documents obtained by Insider. Amazon has previously said that no one has ever been injured as a result of the company’s flight tests.

…Prime Air has suffered from high turnover, internal conflict, and product delays, Insider previously reported. The roughly 800-person division had a turnover rate higher than 20% last year, according to an internal document, including departures from Amazon’s Prime Air headquarters in the UK, where 100 people lost their jobs in a restructuring.

Most of the federal crash reports redact Amazon’s name, but Insider checked the date of the reports against screenshots of internal messages alerting employees that a crash had taken place. Most of the reports are from a range in Pendleton, Oregon, where Amazon tests its drones.

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In December 2013 Jeff Bezos insisted that Amazon drones would be making deliveries within five years. Maybe there’s some relativity effect where time is passing more slowly for us.

Of course, the military versions (not available on Amazon) are showing their mettle in what I suppose we have to call the Ukrainian theatre.
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Do you want me to leave the Apple ecosystem? • Lapcat Software

Jeff Johnson is president, CEO, founder and bottle-washer of Lapcat:

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“If you want sideloading, then you can just buy an Android phone.”

This is a ubiquitous response to the request that Apple unlock iPhone and allow installation of software from outside the App Store (which has always been possible on the Mac). It reminds me of the “America, love it or leave it” response to criticism of US government policies. Here’s my serious question: are you serious? Do you want me, a longtime software developer in the Apple ecosystem, to discontinue my iOS and Mac apps, pack up, and switch to different operating systems? Is that what you want? Moreover, do you want all supporters of so-called “sideloading” among iPhone developers and users to also ditch their iPhones and switch to Android, leaving only the lockdown adherents in the Apple ecosystem? Is the world you want one where buying and using an electronic device requires having a particular ideology?

…I suspect that the suggestion is not actually serious, and you don’t want all sideloading adherents to leave the Apple ecosystem. I doubt that Apple wants us to leave either, because that would mean lost apps from software developers and lost money in hardware sales and “services” from users. The real motivation behind the suggestion that “you can just switch to Android” is just to stifle open criticism of Apple and its policies. The suggestion is not to switch away from iPhone but rather to STFU. This is one reason why we should always dismiss the above quoted response to sideloading as empty rhetorical garbage. It’s effectively, “If you want sideloading, then I don’t care, I don’t want to hear it.”

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The EU’s Digital Markets Act might impose sideloading on Apple, which is going to make for an interesting little struggle. If Apple’s smart, it will get in front of it and make allowances similar to those Google already has with the Play Store. But knowing Apple, it will instead fight tooth and nail, insisting the App Store keeps people “safe”. But, as Johnson points out, that’s not true at all: scams run rampant. It’s just Apple profits from them, where it wouldn’t from sideloaded ones.
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There’s something off about ApeCoin • The Verge

Casey Newton:

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A core idea of web3 is that it is more open and inclusive than what came before. Before, you had to be an accredited investor to participate in a new project like Yuga Labs; today, you can simply buy some ApeCoin and begin to “participate” in the “ecosystem.” Over time, perhaps you’ll own enough ApeCoin to be able to shift the direction of the project: voting on delegates, or future projects, or whatever.

But this is a lot of power to grant to the public, and so perhaps it’s understandable that web3 startups are being stingy with it. DAOs are created, but distanced from the core intellectual property. Token holders are granted votes, but on fringe issues. Nearly half of any tokens (38%, in the case of ApeCoin) are given for free to an inner circle. Decentralisation becomes a marketing pitch — a forever promise of rewards to come, if you only buy and hold those tokens — but it’s all still centralised where it counts.

Maybe I’m being too cynical here. Bored Apes seems like a fun brand, and if any NFT project tokens are going to have lasting value, it may well be Yuga Labs’. Over the past month or so, I’ve seen Bored Apes painted on jackets in fashion boutiques in Miami, and graffitied on walls in Brooklyn. It seems possible that people will enjoy the major-label Bored Apes virtual band, or make real money off the forthcoming Bored Apes play-to-earn game.

But something still feels off to me. Self-dealing founders and investors; a hype machine in overdrive; and a growing disconnect between the web3 we were promised and the one that’s being traded on the crypto exchanges. This sleight of hand might keep working for a while. But eventually the truth catches up with you. And when it does, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that decentralisation is its first casualty.

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I think decentralisation has already been a casualty; it’s just that people (the greater fools, and those who aren’t) are so keen to cash in somehow that they ignore the fact. For both, it’s convenient to pretend what’s happening is not happening.
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What happens when kids get their history from video games? • The Atlantic

Luka Ivan Jukić:

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Analysing video games is particularly difficult for two reasons. First, their influence is hard to track: Teachers may not even notice that the student asking why the Ottomans didn’t colonize America or what happened to Burgundy may have a view of history that was moulded by Paradox games. “The student in your class that knows what Prussia is is the student that played Europa Universalis IV,” Devereaux said. And second, unlike other cultural mediums, “games are about systems; they’re about the mechanics,” Devereaux told me. Those systems and mechanics are how video games can “teach” people history. The presence of such mechanics, though, does not mean that players will necessarily understand them. “The major challenge is getting players to recognise and think explicitly about these systems,” Marion Kruse, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati and a dedicated gamer, told me.

In my experience, Europa Universalis is particularly effective at teaching users about its systems. Playing in Spain in Europa Universalis, you’ll learn the power of a good marriage when you see that Spain is actually the result of a personal union between the crowns of Castile and Aragon. If you’re unlucky enough to choose a country in the Balkans, you will quickly understand the full force of the Ottoman invasions of Europe. Invade the Soviet Union in Hearts of Iron, Paradox’s Second World War simulator, and you’ll be reminded why Napoleon and Hitler both failed to subdue Russia: “General Frost.” The processes the player engages with teach them claims about how the world works—what The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost has called “procedural rhetoric.”

[Games company] Paradox’s titles don’t take a single view of history, but each game does provide a framework for understanding a particular historical period, buoyed by a number of procedural claims. Take Europa Universalis. The game essentially simulates the story of Europe’s rise from a relative backwater to a continent that dominated the world. That means that no matter what exact course the game takes, it usually results in the consolidation of large, powerful, centralised states in Europe and their rise to global primacy.

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It’s something of a curate’s egg – good in parts. In reality it’s a mess like SimCity, which builds in all sorts of very right-wing assumptions about taxation and segmentation.
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Exxon is mining bitcoin in North Dakota as part of its plan to slash emissions • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

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ExxonMobil, the top oil and gas producer in the U.S., is piloting a project to mine bitcoin in North Dakota, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

For over a year, Exxon has been working with Crusoe Energy Systems, a company based in Denver, said the people who asked not to be named because details of the project are confidential. Crusoe’s technology helps oil companies turn wasted energy, or flare gas, into a useful resource.

Similar to ConocoPhillips’ mining scheme in North Dakota’s Bakken region, Exxon is diverting natural gas that would otherwise be burned off into generators, which convert the gas into electricity used to power shipping containers full of thousands of bitcoin miners. Exxon launched the pilot in late January 2021 and expanded its buildout in July.

While Exxon hasn’t talked publicly about its work in the space, Eric Obrock, a 10-year veteran at the company, said on his LinkedIn profile that from February 2019 to January 2022, he “proposed and led the first successful commercial and technical demonstration of using Bitcoin proof-of-work mining as a viable alternative to natural gas flaring in the oil patch.”

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Absolutely bonkers. The most amazing example of fucking for virginity.
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1999: Dig more coal — the PCs are coming • Forbes

Back in May 1999:

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Somewhere in America, a lump of coal is burned every time a book is ordered on-line.

The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.

Under the PC’s hood, demand for horsepower doubles every couple of years. Yes, today’s microprocessors are much more efficient than their forerunners at turning electricity into computations. But total demand for digital power is rising far faster than bit efficiencies are. We are using more chips — and bigger ones — and crunching more numbers. The bottom line: Taken all together, chips are running hotter, fans are whirring faster, and the power consumption of our disk drives and screens is rising. For the old thermoelectrical power complex, widely thought to be in senescent decline, the implications are staggering.

About half of the trillion-dollar infrastructure of today’s electric power grid exists to serve just two century-old technologies — the lightbulb and the electric motor. Not long ago, that meant little prospect for growth in the power industry. We have about as many motors and bulbs as we need. “The long-run supply curve for electricity is as flat as the Kansas horizon,” declared green guru Amory Lovins in 1984.

…The infoelectric convergence is already having a visible impact on overall demand. At least 100 million nodes on the Internet, drawing from hundreds to thousands of kilowatt-hours per year, add up to 290bn kWh of demand. That’s about 8% of total US demand. Add in the electric power used to build and operate stand-alone (unnetworked) chips and computers, and the total jumps to about 13%. It’s now reasonable to project that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade.

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Instead: computers got faster while using less power. But then: bitcoin.
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Why Apple acquired a UK-Based ‘open banking’ fintech • Forbes

Ron Shevlin says most people have got it wrong on why Apple bought British-based Credit Kudos the other week:

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Apple has two strategic issues it must address that go beyond just offering BNPL [Buy Now Pay Later – as companies such as Klarna offer, where big-ticket items can be bought on regular payments, with the offer made at the online checkout without waiting for an external credit check] or even launching the Apple Card in the UK:

1) Building Out a Digital Commerce Ecosystem
Commerce platform providers like Block (I still think of them as Square), PayPal, Shopify, and even Klarna are building out robust digital commerce capabilities that support a wide range of functionality in the commerce ecosystem.

Square’s acquisition of AfterPay is just the icing on a digital commerce cake the company has been building for the past 10 years. (11 companies in 10 years.)

Klarna, too, has been building out a digital commerce ecosystem. (16 companies in 10 years.)

PayPal highlighted its merchant value chain capabilities in its February 2021 investor presentation with a slide titled “We’re building a comprehensive platform to power the global digital economy.”

2) Improving Its Data Management/Analytics Capability
Apple is a products company. It’s not good with data the way Google and Amazon are good at amassing and applying data.

I often half-joke that the reason Apple positions itself as a “privacy friendly” company is because it doesn’t know what to do with the data it has on its customers.

The Credit Kudos acquisition is a small—but still important—step towards correcting this deficiency in Apple’s digital commerce arsenal.

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I said that “Apple’s credit card is organised in partnership with Goldman Sachs, but this makes it look as though it’s aiming to go it alone”, which I suppose is half-right. Don’t @ me. (Via Dave Birch.)
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Workers are trading staggering amounts of data for ‘payday loans’ • WIRED

Caitlin Harrington:

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Tulloch is one of a growing number of US workers turning their personal data over to private companies in exchange for paycheck advances, fuelling an industry potentially worth up to $12bn, by some estimates. In 2020, $9.5bn in wages were accessed early, according to the research firm Aite-Novarica Group, up from $6.3bn in 2019. These early payouts can be habit-forming; a 2021 report from the Financial Health Network found that more than 70% of pay advance users took out consecutive advances.

What Tulloch didn’t know was that when he signed up for the app, a company called Argyle was retrieving the data that would be used to decide how much money to give him. It builds the technology that allows companies like B9 to extract a wealth of data from payroll accounts—up to 140 data points. These can include shifts worked, time off, earnings and promotions history, health care and retirement contributions, even reputational markers like on-time rate or a gig worker’s star rating and deactivation history. For every worker that uses its product, Argyle charges customers like B9 a fee, plus an additional monthly charge for continuous monitoring. This makes for a valuable data trove; it’s further upstream than banking data, providing a fuller picture of a worker’s earnings, deductions, and behaviour. Some estimate that payroll data could be worth $10bn. Argyle pegs it at 10 times higher.

Argyle is part of an emerging set of payroll data companies founded over the last four years to cash in on workers’ personal information. They build secure connections between payroll providers like Paychex and businesses that want to access that data, like B9. Argyle acts like a courier, shuttling data from one account to another, the same way banking data is transmitted to apps like Venmo.

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For reference, Facebook gathers almost 100 data points about you just for its ad targeting.
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Two brothers swindle over $1bn from a Turkish bank • Interesting Engineering

Can Emir:

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Two brothers from the Black Sea province of Samsun, Turkey, have been detained after embezzling a Turkish bank of over $1 billion (16 billion Turkish liras).

According to the police investigation reported in Dünya (in Turkish), two brothers in their 20s, both working in a gas station, were using a mutual account they had opened at a private bank.

The story goes that one day, the younger brother discovered a loophole in the mobile banking application and after making some 70 transactions, he transferred 16 billion liras from a bank’s investment account to their own account.

The loophole discovered by the younger brother allowed the duo to withdraw as much cash as they wanted through an investment account connected via the bank’s mobile app. The account, which was reserved for customers who were conducting stock trading, reportedly had a bug.

The younger brother told investigators that they had no money in the account when he checked it on February 26. He then selected the “investment account” option on the app when a menu came up and asked him to type in the amount of cash he wished to withdraw. “I randomly typed a number and saw the amount I wrote was transferred to my account. I decided to try typing more and, every time that amount was transferred to my account. Then we saw there were some 16 billion in our account” he reportedly said.

“I told my family about the situation and we decided to pay the outstanding debts of anyone we knew. I did it with my brother and we wired TL 80,000 to our relatives in debt” the younger brother explained.

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So, just a bug up to the point where they decided to take the money. Though if it had happened with cryptocurrency, well, that would now be their money.
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Weaning Europe off Russian energy will mean making changes • The Economist

“Charlemagne”:

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Energy prices, whether of petrol, gas or electricity, have rocketed in Europe. Some people might barely have noticed. In France, the authorities have essentially capped electricity and gas bills. Italy on March 18th added €4.4bn ($4.8bn) in subsidies to limit power-price rises for companies and consumers, on top of the €16bn already agreed in recent months. Several countries have cut petrol duties, a much-needed source of tax income. European leaders meeting in Brussels as The Economist went to press were due to discuss new state largesse to households and industry. This is the “whatever it takes” approach at work. As with Covid-19, government is paying first and will ask questions later.

What is startling is how little is being asked of Europeans. Even simple measures that might barely inconvenience people are treated as taboo. Earlier this month the International Energy Agency (IEA), which advises rich-country governments, suggested that Europeans might consider turning down the thermostat by just 1ºC. What might seem like mere virtue-signalling greenery would actually cut consumption by 10bn cubic metres of natural gas over a year. That is roughly one month’s worth of Russian imports. This modest appeal was relayed by precisely nobody in office.

Some EU governments want to ban Russian oil, the Kremlin’s biggest money-spinner. Yet no one is seriously considering the obvious way of using less of it. Lowering motorway speed limits by 10kph would trim fuel use in the rich world by around 15%, not to be scoffed at when Europe is scrambling for any hydrocarbons it can get. Throw in subsidies to boost the use of public transport, a plea to work from home one day a week where possible and a ban on car use in cities on Sundays, and Europe could save perhaps a fifth of the Russian oil it imports, according to IEA figures and Charlemagne’s guesswork. These may or may not be sensible ideas. The point is that they are not being discussed.

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Possibly, s/he suggests, we’ve just lost the capacity for altruistic sacrifice. But that’s contradicted by the past two years, when we endured lockdowns both for our own good and that of others. It is puzzling that there isn’t a campaign to make this point. Perhaps it’s coming later this year, when the next 50% hike in energy prices (in the UK) arrives.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none reported.