Even if you’re playing chess anonymously, an AI can probably pick you out by your style (given enough of your back catalogue). Surprised? CC-licensed photo by Nenad Stojkovic on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Complete: one. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The worrisome rise of NFTs • Nautilus

Caleb Scharf is an astrobiologist:

»

NFTs are (for now) almost comically bereft of anything most of us would associate with social or cultural value. Down the line there may be value in attaching permanent ownership or provenance to digital works of art. But at the moment it’s Pudgy Penguins for the masses, or a pixel-heavy version of Nyan Cat going for an eye-watering $1.2 million for cynical investors. With an explosive growth of equally speculative and bewildering offerings appearing every day.

This represents a tangible planetary burden. Prompting the people behind the blockchains to try to improve their environmental image. The company Ethereum (that supports cryptocurrency as well as NFTs) has indicated it aims to cut energy use by more than 99% by changing its core methodology. That change will make it possible for aspiring currency “miners” to participate without so much hardware and electricity consumption.

That sounds great but understanding the nature of these changes is not easy, since the whole idea of blockchains is rooted in astonishingly arcane concepts like “proof of work” or “proof of stake” manifested in computer hardware and algorithms. It’s also far from clear that other companies will follow suit, or that the most energy-intensive pieces can ever be fully removed from the scheme without risking the innate reliability that makes the blockchain so appealing in the first place.

The much bigger question, though, has less to do with these emergent upstarts in our informational world and more to do with humanity’s overall trajectory. Any species that endlessly grows, and continually invents energy-hungry processes, may not be destined for a happy ending. At best, such a species will go through boom-and-bust cycles, with big corrective failures. At worst, a species like this simply won’t make it through to the future. NFTs and cryptocurrencies by themselves may not be the cause of a future collapse, but they are symptoms of what ails us. And like all symptoms, they can offer clues to a cure, because the root of the problem may be much deeper—in the fabric of digital information itself.

«

Also: “NFTs, an overblown speculative bubble inflated by pop culture and crypto mania“. If only articles criticising NFTs could make them go away.
unique link to this extract

Team GB athletes offered temporary phones over China spying fears • The Guardian

Sean Ingle:

»

The British Olympic Association will offer temporary phones to Team GB athletes and staff at next month’s Winter Olympics in Beijing after fears they could be spied on by the Chinese government.

While the British delegation will not be banned from taking their own mobile devices, they have been warned against doing so by the BOA because it fears the authorities could install spyware to extract private information or track future activity.

A BOA spokesperson said: “We’ve given athletes and staff practical advice so that they can make their own choice as to whether they take their personal devices to the Games, or not. Where they do not want to take their own equipment, we have provisioned temporary devices for them to use.”

The Dutch Olympic Committee*Dutch Sports Federation (NOC*NSF) has gone a step further by telling its athletes not to bring their personal mobile phones or laptops because it anticipates China may carry out surveillance on electronic devices during the Games.

The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant said the NOC*NSF would give athletes and support staff phones and laptops which will be destroyed when they return home.

NOC*NSF spokesperson Geert Slot declined to discuss specific cases but said cybersecurity was part of the risk assessment. “The importance of cybersecurity has grown over the years,” he said. “But China has completely closed off its internet, which makes it a specific case.”

«

Don’t remember this in 2008.
unique link to this extract

Epstein-Barr virus found to trigger multiple sclerosis • Scientific American

Lydia Denworth:

»

A connection between the human herpesvirus Epstein-Barr and multiple sclerosis (MS) has long been suspected but has been difficult to prove. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is the primary cause of mononucleosis and is so common that 95% of adults carry it. Unlike Epstein-Barr, MS, a devastating demyelinating disease of the central nervous system, is relatively rare. It affects 2.8 million people worldwide. But people who contract infectious mononucleosis are at slightly increased risk of developing MS. In the disease, inflammation damages the myelin sheath that insulates nerve cells, ultimately disrupting signals to and from the brain and causing a variety of symptoms, from numbness and pain to paralysis.

To prove that infection with Epstein-Barr causes MS, however, a research study would have to show that people would not develop the disease if they were not first infected with the virus. A randomized trial to test such a hypothesis by purposely infecting thousands of people would of course be unethical.

Instead researchers at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School turned to what they call “an experiment of nature.” They used two decades of blood samples from more than 10 million young adults on active duty in the US military (the samples were taken for routine HIV testing). About 5% of those individuals (several hundred thousand people) were negative for Epstein-Barr when they started military service, and 955 eventually developed MS.

…The results, published on September 13 in Science, show that the risk of multiple sclerosis increased 32-fold after infection with Epstein-Barr but not after infection with other viruses. “These findings cannot be explained by any known risk factor for MS and suggest EBV as the leading cause of MS,” the researchers wrote.

«

A stronger connection than smoking 25 cigarettes per day v lung cancer. So is the next step some sort of vaccination against EBV?
unique link to this extract

Lords Committee pours cold water on UK CBDC • FinExtra

»

A Committee of peers in the House of Lords has concluded that there is no convincing case for the creation of a central bank digital currency in the UK.

The Economic Affairs Committee found that while a CBDC may provide some advantages, it could present significant challenges for financial stability and the protection of privacy.

The Bank of England and HM Treasury have been actively pursuing the case for a CBDC, dubbed Britcoin, due to the declining use of cash and the threats to monetary sovereignty posed by private digital currencies.

The upper chamber of the House of Commons commenced its inquiry into the issue in November, taking evidence from the Bank of England and senior banking officials.

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, Committe Chair, comments: “We took evidence from a variety of witnesses and none of them were able to give us a compelling reason for why the UK needed a central bank digital currency. The concept seems to present a lot of risk for very little reward. We concluded that the idea was a solution in search of a problem.”

«

Amen on that one.
unique link to this extract

Alleged Apple App Store scammer AmpMe lowers prices and says it’ll investigate its ‘consultants’ • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

AmpMe isn’t a brand-new app that popped up just to scam unsuspecting users out of their money. [In] 2015… we first covered the idea: an app that can sync up a room full of smartphones into a single gigantic speaker with no fees in sight. But as App Store scam hunter Kosta Eleftheriou points out, the app looks seriously shady more than six years later — if you downloaded it yesterday, it would immediately try to sell you on a $9.99 a week automatic recurring subscription. That’s $520 a year, an incredible sum if you pull it out as a party trick and then forget to cancel.

AppFigures estimates the app has raked in $13m since 2018.

As we discussed last April, it’s ridiculously easy to find scams on Apple’s App Store — just follow the money and look at the reviews. If you see an app that charges ridiculous subscription fees, yet still has loads of five-star ratings, something might be off. And if those reviews look absolutely fake, and the app’s barely functional, you’ve probably spotted a scam.

«

So Hollister emailed AmpMe, which replied in part:

»

To claim that our users are commonly paying $520 per year does not reflect reality. For example, in 2021, the average user that subscribed and took advantage of our free trial paid a total average of $17. If you take only paying users, the average yearly subscription revenue is about $75. Internally, this has reinforced our belief that AmpMe’s pricing is transparent with clear and easy opt-out procedures.

Regarding the reviews, we hear the feedback loud and clear. Through the years, like most startups, we’ve hired outside consultants to help us with marketing and app store optimization. More oversight is needed and that’s what we are currently working on.

«

“Outside consultants” is an interesting phrase. It sounds as though there are companies out there ranging around spotting “undermonetised” opportunities on the App Store and perhaps taking a cut when they turn them into moneyspinners through a combination of subscriptions and fake reviews.
unique link to this extract

January 6 panel targets social media companies with subpoenas after ‘inadequate responses’ to voluntary request • CNNPolitics

Annie Grayer, Ryan Nobles and Zachary Cohen:

»

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riot has issued four subpoenas to giant social media conglomerates after the panel said the companies provided “inadequate responses” to its initial request for documents and information over the summer.

The subpoenas were sent to Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Alphabet, the parent company to Google and YouTube, Twitter and Reddit.

“Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps – if any – social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence,” Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson who chairs the committee said in a statement. “It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,” he continued.

The committee writes to Alphabet that it believes the company has “significant undisclosed information that is critical to its investigation” about how it moderated its content and how those policies impacted what was on the platform on January 6.

Although Thompson in his letter acknowledges that the committee and Alphabet have had “subsequent engagements” since the panel’s initial reach out in August, he writes that Alphabet “has not demonstrated a commitment to voluntarily and expeditiously” produce the documents being requested.

«

Didn’t expect it to be YouTube that got told off. But Thompson is annoyed at the lack of detail from YouTube.
unique link to this extract

AI unmasks anonymous chess players, posing privacy risks • Science

Matthew Hutson:

»

Chess-playing software, such as Deep Blue and AlphaZero, has long been superhuman. But Ashton Anderson, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto and principal investigator of the new project, says the chess engines play almost an “alien style” that isn’t very instructive for those seeking to learn or improve their skills. They’d do better to tailor their advice to individual players. But first, they’d need to capture a player’s unique form.

To design and train their AI, the researchers tapped an ample resource: more than 50 million human games played on the Lichess website. They collected games by players who had played at least 1000 times and sampled sequences of up to 32 moves from those games. They coded each move and fed them into a neural network that represented each game as a point in multidimensional space, so that each player’s games formed a cluster of points. The network was trained to maximize the density of each player’s cluster and the distance between those of different players. That required the system to recognize what was distinctive about each player’s style.

The researchers tested the system by seeing how well it distinguished one player from another. They gave the system 100 games from each of about 3000 known players, and 100 fresh games from a mystery player. To make the task harder, they hid the first 15 moves of each game. The system looked for the best match and identified the mystery player 86% of the time, the researchers reported last month at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). “We didn’t quite believe the results,” says Reid McIlroy-Young, a student in Anderson’s lab and the paper’s primary author. A non-AI method was only 28% accurate.

…The researchers are aware of the privacy risks posed by the system, which could be used to unmask anonymous chess players online. With tweaks, McIlroy-Young says, it could do the same for poker. And in theory, they say, given the right data sets, such systems could identify people based on the quirks of their driving or the timing and location of their cellphone use.

«

You can already be identified from your gait, so this is just adding to the dimensions by which you can be deanonymised. Shades of Philip K Dick’s ‘The Unreconstructed M’.

unique link to this extract

How Twitter rolled over to get unblocked in Nigeria • Rest of World

Abubakar Idris and Peter Guest:

»

Twitter’s negotiated return to Nigeria, which was announced this week, has been in the works for months and was finalized before Jack Dorsey’s departure as the company’s CEO, a senior source in the Nigerian government told Rest of World. 

The senior official, who asked not to be named, said that Twitter had agreed to all of the government’s demands in November 2021. The agreement had been sent to the president for approval in December 2021, but took until January 13 to work its way through the bureaucracy. Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO on November 29. 

Nigeria ended its seven-month ban on Twitter after the social media company agreed to a list of demands from the government. Twitter will open an office in the capital Abuja, register as a broadcaster, pay taxes, and commit to being sensitive to national security and cohesion, according to documents seen by Rest of World. 

«

Paying taxes?! Those things that go to the government?
unique link to this extract

The ethics of a second chance: pig heart transplant recipient stabbed a man seven times years ago – The Washington Post

Lizzie Johnson and William Wan:

»

Leslie Shumaker Downey was at home babysitting her two grandchildren Monday when a message pinged on her cellphone.

Her daughter had sent a link to a news article about a 57-year-old man with terminal heart disease. Three days earlier at the University of Maryland Medical Center, he had received a genetically modified pig heart. The first-of-its-kind transplant was historic, saving the man’s life and offering the possibility of saving others.

What a great breakthrough for science, Downey thought, reading the headline. Then her phone pinged again.

“Mommmmmmm,” Downey’s daughter wrote. She told her to look at the man’s name.

Downey froze. The man being heralded as a medical pioneer, David Bennett Sr., was the same man who had been convicted in 1988 of stabbing her younger brother seven times, leaving him paralyzed. Edward Shumaker had spent the next 19 years using a wheelchair, before he had a stroke in 2005 and died two years later — one week before his 41st birthday.

«

If one were into writing sermons, this would be a terrific opener.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A German newspaper has raised questions about the timings and dates of tennis’s Novak Djokovic’s PCR Covid tests. Big questions. CC-licensed photo by angela n. on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. No blue site! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The subversive genius of extremely slow email • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

»

Every day, the mail [British readers: post] still comes. My postal carrier drives her proud van onto the street and then climbs each stoop by foot. The service remains essential, but not as a communications channel. I receive ads and bills, mostly, and the occasional newspaper clipping from my mom. For talking to people, I use email and text and social networking. The mail is a ritual but also a relic.

That relic is also the model for a new personal-communication app called Pony Messenger. Think of it as email, if email arrived by post: You compose a message and put it in an outbox; once a day (you can choose morning, afternoon, or evening “pickups”), Pony picks up your outbound dispatches and delivers your inbounds. That’s it. It’s postal-service cosplay. It’s slow email.

Dmitry Minkovsky has been working on Pony over the past three years, with the goal of recovering some of the magic that online life had lost for him. The work falls into a long tradition, part conceptual art and part whimsy, that emerged in response to the oppressive instantaneity of the internet. In 2007, the Near Future Laboratory made Slow Messenger, an IM appliance that would reveal messages only if you cradled it in your hand; last year, the artist Ben Grosser created the Minus social network, on which you can post only 100 times. Other technologies of unhurriedness include Dialup (a surprise-phone-call app), Slowly (a pen-pal service), and Mail Goggles (a Gmail add-in to prevent email regret).

I used to find such projects appealing for their subversiveness: as art objects that make problems visible rather than proposing viable solutions to them. But now it’s clear that the internet needs design innovations—and brake mechanisms—to reduce its noxious impact. Our suffering arises, in part, from the speed and volume of our social interactions online. Maybe we can build our way toward fewer of them.

«

The thing we used to value about email was that it would be delivered immediately. Now though we have messaging, and everyone* has a smartphone, so that isn’t such a pressing issue. I’m really not sure I’d trade my constant stream of email for a once-per-day drop, unless it all came at 7am. Which I suppose could be arranged.
unique link to this extract

Growth streak for traditional PCs continues during holiday quarter of 2021 • IDC

»

Total PC shipments during 2021 reached 348.8 million units, up 14.8% from 2020. This represents the highest level of shipments the PC market has seen since 2012.

“2021 has truly been a return to form for the PC,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC’s Mobile and Consumer Device Trackers. “Consumer need for PCs in emerging markets and global commercial demand remained strong during the quarter with supply being a gating factor. While consumer and educational demand has tapered in some developed markets, we continue to believe the overall PC market has reset at a much higher level than before the pandemic.”

“A challenging logistical environment, coupled with ongoing supply-side shortages, meant that the PC market could have been even larger than it was in 2021,” according to Tom Mainelli, group vice president of IDC’s Device and Consumer Research. “We closed the year with many buyers still waiting for their PC orders to ship. As we move through the first half of the year, we expect supply to remain constrained, especially with regards to the commercial segment where demand is the most robust.”

«

Really remarkable. Apple did very well (unsurprisingly, given the pent-up demand for the new M1 MacBook Pros and Airs) with 22% growth, half as much against as the rest of the market. So it had 7.5% sales share for the year, its highest in ages. The M1 project has surely paid off.
unique link to this extract

Ground temperatures hit 129ºF as Argentina suffers blackouts • Gizmodo

Molly Taft:

»

On Tuesday, air temperatures rose to 106.7ºF (41.5ºC) in Buenos Aires, the second-highest reading in the city in more than 100 years of records. Other parts of the country saw temperatures as high as 113ºF (45ºC). The heat was so bad in Argentina on Tuesday that it was briefly the hottest place in the world, surpassing parts of Australia that usually have that honor during austral summer.

“This is a heat wave of extraordinary characteristics, with extreme temperature values ​​that will even be analyzed after its completion, and it may generate some historical records for Argentina temperatures and persistence of heat,” meteorologist Lucas Berengua told Reuters.

Infrastructure has sagged in the face of sweltering temperatures. Around 700,000 people were without power for hours on Tuesday afternoon as temperatures rose and the grid struggled; the city’s electric providers blamed increased demand from cooling during the heatwave. The agency that provides drinking water also asked residents to take conservation measures, saying that its purification system was affected during the outage.

Climate change is a key ingredient in basically all heat waves now. The planet has warmed roughly 1.8ºF (1ºC) since the world began burning fossil fuels. That seeming small rise has majorly shifted the odds toward more extreme heat, and observations around the world have borne that out.

«

#dontlookup. Though at least this isn’t a wet-bulb high – the sort that kills.
unique link to this extract

🤔 What if the Industrial Revolution had started 2,000 years ago rather than 200? (And why didn’t it?) • Faster Please

James Pethokoukis:

»

why didn’t the Industrial Revolution start 2000 years ago? One important reason: Those pre-industrial societies intentionally extinguished the sparks of progress. For millennia, stasis had powerful defenders. The Roman Emperor Tiberius executed rather than rewarded a man who had invented unbreakable glass. Queen Elizabeth I declined to grant a patent to the inventor of the stocking-frame knitting machine, worrying that the invention would deprive textile workers of their employment. The guilds of preindustrial Europe played a key role in making sure Europe stayed preindustrial by blocking new technologies.

Then the protectors of the status quo, like the textile machinery-wrecking Luddites, started to fail. Governments started siding with the innovators and disruptors. Politicians did not like angry workers, but they liked losing wars to richer and technologically superior enemies even less. This is all documented in The Technology Trap by Carl Benedikt Frey, the Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at Oxford University, where he teaches economics and economic history. In November 2019, I had a podcast chat with Frey. From that conversation:

Pethokoukis: What was the original catalyst for the industrial revolution as you understand it?

Frey: So I don’t believe in mono-causal explanations of economic development. I think it was a blend of things that came together that made the industrial revolution, but I think that one very underestimated factor that I highlight in the book has to do with the structure of political power.

Before the industrial revolution, in most pre-industrial societies, craft skills were a source of political clout. They didn’t have any interest in technologies that threatened their jobs and incomes. And, fearing social unrest, monarchs of governments typically sided with the guilds rather than pioneers of industry, fearing that they might challenge the political status quo.

And what happened in Britain was, first of all, with the rise of Atlantic trade, the new merchant class emerged. They were the ones who stood to benefit from mechanization because, with rising wages, mechanization was what allowed them to remain competitive in trade.

«

A very interesting counterfactual. But also, what are the modern equivalents of craft guilds? Fossil fuel companies?
unique link to this extract

Novak Djoković: were the results of his positive PCR test manipulated? • DER SPIEGEL

Jörn Meyn, Max Hoppenstedt, DER SPIEGEL:

»

A coronavirus test with the number 7371999 was actually supposed to be Novak Djoković’s ticket for unproblematic entry into Australia. That positive test is the most important argument the unvaccinated tennis player has presented for why he should be allowed into the country, despite its strict entry regulations, to play in the Australian Open, which begins on Jan. 17. The PCR test was performed at 1:05 p.m. on Dec. 16, and seven hours later, the positive result was returned.

That, at least, is the story told by documentation from the Institute of Public Health of Serbia, which Djoković’s lawyers later presented in court. But a closer look at the allegedly positive PCR test, especially its digital version, raises questions.

The digital data suggests that the test results aren’t from Dec. 16 at all. In the digital results, there is a timestamp for 2:21 p.m. Serbian time on Dec. 26. Such timestamps are normally produced automatically by corona test systems, marking when individual tests are entered into the relevant database. That usually happens just a few minutes after the test result becomes available. Another possibility could be that the timestamps are generated when the tested person downloads the results from the server.

Djoković’s lawyers also presented a second, negative test as part of the tennis star’s immigration proceedings. That test was apparently meant to prove that Djoković had since recovered from his COVID-19 illness. According to the documentation presented, it is from the afternoon of Dec. 22 – and the timing of that test is confirmed by the digital timestamp.

«

Very sus. And the other, natural question: if he hadn’t happened to get infected, what was he going to do to qualify for entry to Australia, which offers only very narrow options for the unvaccinated?
unique link to this extract

An Open Letter to Spotify

»

On Dec. 31, 2021, the Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), a Spotify-exclusive podcast, uploaded a highly controversial episode featuring guest Dr. Robert Malone (#1757). The episode has been criticized for promoting baseless conspiracy theories and the JRE has a concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals. JRE #1757 is not the only transgression to occur on the Spotify platform, but a relevant example of the platform’s failure to mitigate the damage it is causing.

We are a coalition of scientists, medical professionals, professors, and science communicators spanning a wide range of fields such as microbiology, immunology, epidemiology, and neuroscience and we are calling on Spotify to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform. With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence. Though Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, the company presently has no misinformation policy.

«

That last bit isn’t quite right. Spotify’s misinformation policy is that it doesn’t care about misinformation spread by Joe Rogan, because it paid $100m to get him exclusively and so anything that gets attention is tickety-boo. Probably including this open letter.
unique link to this extract

BBC does not subscribe to ‘cancel culture’, says director of editorial policy • The Guardian

Jim Waterson:

»

The BBC opposes so-called “cancel culture” and will actively provide a platform for individuals with contrary viewpoints, according to the man who enforces its editorial standards.

David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy, said the broadcaster should “represent all points of view” and wanted to see a belief in impartiality triumph over identity.

“We are very committed to ensuring that viewpoints are heard from all different sorts of perspectives and we don’t subscribe to the ‘cancel culture’ that some groups would put forward,” he said.

Jordan said everyone should expect their views to be appropriately represented by the national broadcaster – even if they believe the Earth is flat. “It’s critical to the BBC that we represent all points of view and give them due weight,” he said.

“Flat-earthers are not going to get as much space as people who believe the Earth is round, but very occasionally it might be appropriate to interview a flat-earther. And if a lot of people believed in flat Earth we’d need to address it more.”

Asked about issues such as transgender rights, Jordan told the House of Lords communications committee that impartiality should triumph over personal identity. He criticised the New York Times for some of its editorial choices in this area and said individual BBC staff should not be able to veto coverage.

«

The flat earth bit has attracted a lot of attention. Though I think Jordan was trying, in a hurry, to think of a topic where there might be an emergent difference of opinion with most of the opinion coming down on one particular side. And he lighted on “flat earth”, which was a terrible choice because it’s settled science, right back to the Greeks. Next time could I suggest trying “the presence of alien life on a distant planet”, Mr Jordan?
unique link to this extract

Lawsuit filed against Kim Kardashian for promoting bogus cryptocurrency to her followers • Finbold

Jordan Major:

»

With the ever-increasing number of scams occurring in the cryptocurrency space, investors are starting to take matters into their own hands.

Ryan Huegerich, a New York resident, and other claimants filed a class-action lawsuit against  Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather Jr, and Paul Pierce in a California district court, for promoting an Ethereum knockoff, Ethereum Max (EMAX), according to a lawsuit filed on January 7.

The investors acquired EMAX tokens between May 14, 2021, and June 27, 2021, and the complaint was placed on classaction.org, which serves as a consumer resource for class action litigation.

“Defendants touted the prospects of the Company [EMAX] and the ability for investors to make significant returns due to the favorable ‘tokenomics’ of the EMAX Tokens,” the complaint said.
Unknown entities behind the knockoff coin

Apart from suing the celebrities, New York resident Huegerich is also suing the as-of-yet unidentified business body that is behind the EMAX tokens.

“Plaintiff will identify the appropriate Corporate Defendant through discovery of the Executive Defendants,” according to the complaint.

The EMAX cryptocurrency reached an all-time high of $0.0000008546 in May of last year, however at the time of publication, it was trading at $0.0000000197, roughly 97% less than that figure.

«

So basically it went from needing a microscope to see the price to needing an electron microscope to see the price. But the point is that Kardashian pushed the EMAX token to her followers.
unique link to this extract

Wordle and IP law: what happens when a hot game gets cloned • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

t’s important to note that the basic five-letter guessing game underlying Wordle is not itself a completely original idea. The same basic gameplay was popularized by Lingo, a game show that dates back to the ’80s in the US and other countries. The two-player pen-and-paper game Jotto, which goes back to 1955, would also be very familiar to Wordle players. Before that, a more traditional version of the game called Bulls and Cows has been played since the 19th century, according to at least one source.

Conveniently, none of this history provides a legal problem for Wordle itself. “Whenever you have a copyright, you’re protecting the expression, not the idea,” Dallas attorney Mark Methenitis told Ars. “It’s a line a lot of people have a very hard time with, especially when you get into games.”

In other words, it’s exceedingly hard to copyright an abstract game mechanic like “guessing five-letter words and giving hints based on correct letters.” A game developer can file for a patent on an original gaming idea, a legal process that has been used to strangle video game clones in the past. But getting a patent is a long and arduous process that can fall apart if there’s “prior art” predating the idea (or if the mechanic could be considered legally “obvious”).

Separate from copyright or patent, a trademark could at least legally protect the name Wordle from being exploited by copycats. But unlike copyright, which applies automatically when a work is published, trademarks offer very limited protection until and unless they are registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

«

So all the ripoffs that have been thrown out of the iOS App Store… probably weren’t breaking any demonstrable law.
unique link to this extract

Hoping to get an important ex-Facebooker to talk to me for the paperback edition of Social Warming, my latest book. Stick around.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

With the spread of the ‘Western’ diet has come a growth in the incidence of autoimmune diseases in countries where they weren’t known. Genes seem to be the issue. CC-licensed photo by MIKI Yoshihito 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. Still not quite crypto-free. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

There are scores of Wordle clones on iOS because of course there are • Protocol

Nick Statt:

»

Wordle is the newest viral game taking over your Twitter feed and group chats, and with popularity comes cloning. If you search “Wordle” on the App Store right now, you’ll find nearly a dozen copycat versions of the game, many of which shamelessly use the game’s name in the app title with little to no alteration.

Most of the games look identical to the version created in private and for free by software engineer Josh Wardle, who maintains the game but has not asked for any monetary compensation for doing so. But as is the case with anything organic and popular on the internet, there are always those interested in profiting off it in one way or another. That’s especially true in the world of mobile gaming where so-called cloning is a rampant practice with little to no recourse for creators.

Usually, cloned apps are made by relatively anonymous developers whose skill lies in quickly turning new and popular ideas in game design into quick, functional apps. In some cases, developers will rework existing apps and change the name, too. But slap some ads on there or attach a small price like $1.99 and they stand to make some money.

However, in this case, a developer by the name of Zachary Shakked created a Wordle clone as a self-described fan of the game, and then released it on iOS with a $30-per-year pro version that allows you to keep playing and also modify the number of letters in the word you’re guessing. It’s one of the more popular of the Wordle clones on the iPhone right now. Shakked has since put his Twitter profile to private after users found older tweets in which he criticized those who shamelessly copy other’s ideas.

Cloning is not exactly what you would call honest app development work, and it’s an endemic issue in mobile gaming that’s not quite solvable given the industry-wide truce around abuse of copyright law and trademarks. Games wouldn’t be very fun if you had to pay a licensing fee or risk a lawsuit every time you wanted to borrow a good idea, so most developers just treat copying and cloning as the cost of doing business.

«

Intriguingly, the Google Play store has two, and they’re older than Wardle’s version. (At least, as of late Tuesday.)
unique link to this extract

Pig heart transplanted to human for the first time • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

The patient who received the heart had end-stage heart disease and was too sick to qualify for the standard transplant list. Three days after the procedure, the patient was still alive.

The idea of using non-human organs as replacements for damaged human ones—called xenotransplantation—has a long history, inspired by the fact that there are more people on organ waiting lists than there are donors. And in recent years, our ability to do targeted gene editing has motivated researchers to start genetically modifying pigs in order to make them better donors. But the recent surgery wasn’t part of a clinical trial, so it shouldn’t be viewed as an indication that this approach is ready for widespread safety and efficacy testing.

Instead, the surgery was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration under its “compassionate use” access program, which allows patients facing life-threatening illnesses to receive investigational treatments that haven’t gone through rigorous clinical testing yet.

The heart used for this transplant did come from a genetically modified line that was specifically engineered to reduce the chance of rejection by the human immune system. There are a number of lines that have been engineered with this in mind (there’s a review of some of the competing ideas on what to modify). This line was developed by a company called Revivicor (now part of United Therapeutics), but the company doesn’t provide any details on its website of the precise changes made. Searching for Revivicor on ClinicalTrials.gov returns only a single hit that involves a completely different pig line.

So it’s difficult to know exactly what genes were modified in these pigs. The University of Maryland’s press release indicates that there were three pig genes knocked out to lower its immune profile and avoid rejection, and a fourth knocked out to block “excessive growth” of the porcine cells. In addition, six human genes were inserted into the pigs to enhance the human immune system’s tolerance of the foreign cells.

«

This has been ages in the making. Nature, October 1995: “Pig-to-human heart transplant slated to begin in 1996.” The key issue is the rejection by the human body of proteins on the surface of the pig cells: in essence it looks to the body like an invading virus.

By 2015 Novartis had bought Imutran, one of the pioneers in the xenotransplantation field, and was experimenting with primates. And now we reach humans, via a different company.
unique link to this extract

After identity theft, Salvadorans now report funds disappearing from Chivo wallets • Coindesk

Andrés Engler:

»

In the last few weeks, dozens of Salvadorans have reported on social media that money has disappeared from their Chivo wallets, the digital application developed by the Salvadoran government for the use of bitcoin throughout the country.

The reports come after hundreds of Salvadorans complained in October that hackers had illegally activated wallets associated with the nine-digit numbers on their identity cards – known as DUI for its acronym in Spanish – to claim the $30 bitcoin incentive dangled by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele.

Luis Guardado, a Salvadoran who has lived in the United States for 30 years, was one of those who experienced the loss of funds. On Dec. 2, he sent $190 from Coinbase to his Chivo wallet for an upcoming visit to his home country, he told CoinDesk.

Noticing that the amount was slow to arrive, Guardado decided to trace the hash of the transaction. He discovered that the amount had been sent from his Coinbase wallet to a temporary address provided by Chivo from which it sends money to final recipients, but within the hour it had been removed from there. And the money never arrived in his wallet.

Guardado is no newbie to the crypto world, having started investing four years ago in coins such as bitcoin and ether.

“The glitch is not from Coinbase. I have the blockchain record, which says the money was released,” Guardado said.

Guardado called Chivo’s customer service center and received a case number. Chivo’s official Twitter account also contacted Guardado, but as of Dec. 16, it had stopped answering his messages, according to screenshots Guardado provided to CoinDesk.

«

There’s very little reporting about what’s going on on El Salvador. Hard to tell if this is big or limited.
unique link to this extract

China’s digital currency comes to Tencent’s WeChat in expansion push • CNBC

Arjun Kharpal:

»

Tencent-owned WeChat, China’s largest messaging app and one of the country’s biggest payment services, will begin supporting the country’s sovereign digital currency.

China has been working on the digital yuan since 2014 and is yet to roll it out nationwide. But the move by WeChat, which has over 1 billion users, to support the digital currency could provide it with a huge boost if people begin to pay with it.

WeChat may not be that well know to users outside of China, but inside the world’s second-largest economy it is ubiquitous. It is often dubbed a “super app” because many services are wrapped into it. People can use messaging functions and make payments via WeChat Pay, but also hail taxis and order food.

WeChat Pay allows users to show merchants a barcode on their phone to pay for items in store. It can also be used for purchases online. WeChat Pay has over 800 million monthly active users.

To date, the People’s Bank of China, which issues the digital yuan or e-CNY, has done limited trials in certain cities via lotteries where the central bank has handed out small amounts of the currency to some citizens.

But there are now signs that the PBOC is looking to expand usage of the digital yuan, despite no concrete date for a nationwide rollout. This week, the PBOC launched an e-CNY app for users in certain regions and cities in China. That will enable anyone in those areas to download and sign up to use the digital currency. Previously, users could get the app on an invite-only basis.

«

Hmm. An earlier article by CNBC explaining the digital yuan says “payments would be anonymous to some degree, but data analysis tools could help the central bank catch illegal activities.”

“To some degree” is doing a lot of work there.
unique link to this extract

Global spread of autoimmune disease blamed on western diet • The Guardian

Robin McKie:

»

Internationally, it is now estimated that cases of autoimmune diseases are rising by between 3% and 9% a year. Most scientists believe environmental factors play a key role in this rise.

“Human genetics hasn’t altered over the past few decades,” said Lee, who was previously based at Cambridge University. “So something must be changing in the outside world in a way that is increasing our predisposition to autoimmune disease.”

This idea was backed by Vinuesa, who was previously based at the Australian National University. She pointed to changes in diet that were occurring as more and more countries adopted western-style diets and people bought more fast food.

“Fast-food diets lack certain important ingredients, such as fibre, and evidence suggests this alteration affects a person’s microbiome – the collection of micro-organisms that we have in our gut and which play a key role in controlling various bodily functions,” Vinuesa said. “These changes in our microbiomes are then triggering autoimmune diseases, of which more than 100 types have now been discovered.”

Both scientists stressed that individual susceptibilities were involved in contracting such illnesses, ailments that also include celiac disease as well as lupus, which triggers inflammation and swelling and can cause damage to various organs, including the heart.

“If you don’t have a certain genetic susceptibility, you won’t necessarily get an autoimmune disease, no matter how many Big Macs you eat,” said Vinuesa. “There is not a lot we can do to halt the global spread of fast-food franchises…”

«

So the western diet triggers autoimmune diseases but, oh well, don’t bother anyone unnecessarily.
unique link to this extract

Tom Loosemore and BBC iPlayer • Big Bets

Alice Newton Rex talks to Tom, who was the BBC’s Head of Strategic Innovation:

»

In the case of iPlayer, Tom describes the idea of putting TV online as the “obvious next move” – not a stroke of genius from any particular individual. He thinks the really original idea actually happened in 2001, when the BBC put radio online with Radio Player, which allowed you to catch up on seven days of radio. After that, putting telly online was somewhat inevitable, it was just about how and when to do it.

…There’s a skill to protecting and nurturing projects within organisations that might otherwise kill them. For example, he tells me an early internal version of iPlayer was called the BBC Archive Testbed: “we picked a boring name so the lawyers wouldn’t get too nervous”. The early prototypes were built in 2004-5, but it wasn’t until 2006 that iPlayer got escape velocity. He describes the early product itself as terrible, but says it didn’t matter because there was so much momentum by that point. A second version, which turned it into a proper service, was subsequently built and then launched to the public.

So how do you decide whether a big bet is working? We agree it’s the hardest part: you can accidentally stop something promising in its tracks by walking away from an idea too early, or you can mistakenly keep grinding away at an idea long after you should’ve moved on. “The bigger the organisation, the more likely you are to leave it too late,” Tom says ruefully (he has worked in government, after all). “But the worst option of all is when you continually pivot on an idea.” I’m interested in this – pivoting seems like a good idea in some circumstances, or at least superior to sticking with something that you’ve proved won’t work. He clarifies: you can acknowledge you’ve found an important strategic area, but it might have to be addressed by a different product. But he’s seen many teams fail when they kept trying things that were too close to their original idea.

As a rule of thumb, Tom likes to have something in front of users within 3 months, get enough users on it to know whether it has momentum within 6 months, and then by a year he needs to see clear signals of success. In his role as Head of Strategic Innovation, he built a lot of new products – not just iPlayer – and most of them never went anywhere.

«

This is a fascinating series. Unlike Cortana, iPlayer became a huge hit; in many ways the future of the corporation.
unique link to this extract

US police warn of parking meters with phishing QR codes • Bitdefender

Graham Cluley:

»

In a hurry to park your car? Don’t want to fumble around in your pocket to find cash for the parking meter, and don’t have the correct payment app installed on your phone?

Well, think carefully before rushing to scan the payment QR code stuck on the side of the meter – it may well be an attempt by fraudsters to phish your financial information.

Police are warning that they have discovered bogus QR codes stuck onto public parking meters across Austin, Texas – a city where parking meters don’t display QR codes, and only accept payment via coins, cards or a smartphone app.

So what happens if visitors to the city, or those in a rush who are not suspicious, simply scan the bogus QR code without thinking?

The QR codes found by Austin police department directed unsuspecting users to a fraudulent website which would ask for payment details with the false promise that their parking session would be paid for.

The City of Austin checked its parking meters after being notified of a similar QR code scam by officials in San Antonio. They had discovered over 100 parking meters similarly stickered in late December.

«

QR codes really have had quite the year, haven’t they.
unique link to this extract

AP to launch NFT marketplace built by Xooa • Associated Press

»

The Associated Press will launch a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace built by blockchain technology provider Xooa, where collectors can purchase the news agency’s award-winning contemporary and historic photojournalism.

This image of a home covered in ash from a volcano erupting on the Canary island of La Palma, Spain, on Nov. 1, 2021, will be available as an NFT on AP’s NFT marketplace. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

The marketplace and first NFTs are set to debut on Monday, Jan. 31.

The initial collection will feature photography by current and former AP photojournalists and a selection of digitally enhanced depictions of their work. Pulitzer Prize-winning AP images will be included.

“For 175 years AP’s journalists have recorded the world’s biggest stories, including through gripping and poignant images that continue to resonate today,” said Dwayne Desaulniers, AP director of blockchain and data licensing. “With Xooa’s technology, we are proud to offer these tokenized pieces to a fast-growing global audience of photography NFT collectors.”

Each NFT will include a rich set of original metadata offering collectors awareness of the time, date, location, equipment and technical settings used for the shot.

«

You mean.. the EXIF data? The stuff that’s embedded in any digital photo these days? This announcement has gone down like the proverbial cup of cold sick with photographers and anyone who has a working brain.
unique link to this extract

Google exec says Apple is ‘holding back’ customers who text • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

On Saturday, Android boss Hiroshi Lockheimer accused Apple of “using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products,” after a Wall Street Journal report revealed how US teens have turned Apple’s iMessage into a social status symbol that locks Android users out.

Now, Lockheimer is taking a slightly less abrasive stance: the Google executive said Monday that “we’re not asking Apple to make iMessage available on Android. We’re asking Apple to support the industry standard for modern messaging (RCS) in iMessage, just as they support the older SMS / MMS standards.”

“By not incorporating RCS, Apple is holding back the industry and holding back the user experience for not only Android users but also their own customers,” adds Lockheimer, later in the Twitter thread.

That’s still a big accusation, but one that pulls the conversation back into familiar territory: will Apple accept Google’s olive branch to make iMessage more compatible with Android, or will it continue to use lock-in to sell more iPhones?

On the lock-in front, there’s little question about Apple’s motivation. Thanks to the Epic v. Apple trial, the world has now seen confidential emails between Apple executives that show the company is intentionally withholding iMessage in favor of lock-in.

…What’s less clear is whether RCS, the next-gen replacement for SMS that’s championed by Google and incorporates popular features common to iMessage, has any convincing reason for Apple to sign on. That’s likely why Google is creating a little peer pressure of its own.

The Verge has asked Apple if it intends to support RCS literally years with no comment, so we’re not holding our breath.

«

As I observed about Lockheimer’s first tweet, nobody could accuse Google of locking anyone into a single messaging service. Supporting RCS is surely feasible. The question is whether the encryption of RCS (which is a plus) is sufficient incentive for Apple to support it.
unique link to this extract

WIRED’s ‘On Background’ policy • WIRED

»

Many powerful companies make a practice of obfuscating or dodging accountability when speaking to media outlets, by providing information that they refuse to attribute to anyone in particular, sometimes not even to the company itself. For that reason, WIRED is joining the Verge, Quartz, and others in making its editorial standards clearer.

Anyone talking to WIRED reporters in any official capacity does so on the record by default. This means that what you say or write can be quoted and attributed to you by name, not just as “a company spokesperson.” We typically allow anonymity only to sources who could face retaliation or be endangered by the information they provide, and when we do so we explain our reasons to readers. As Julia Angwin, editor in chief of the Markup, has noted, “Corporate spokespeople who are paid to provide information simply don’t meet the criteria for being granted anonymity.”

Sometimes we may agree to have a conversation on background, meaning we can use the information you provide, but will not identify you by name. Conversations are on background only when we agree to it. If you send us a statement “on background” without prior agreement, we may still treat it as on the record.

«

I continue to disagree with American journalists about the practice of naming spokespeople, who have no choice about the lines they’re obliged to say (if they want to stay in their job). But it certainly makes sense that if the spokespeople are talking to you, it should be taken as coming from the company. However, my experience was always that the companies would preface the discussion by saying “this is on background”. I guess the Wired (and others) response will be “no, it isn’t”. We’ll have to see whether this makes the slightest difference to what gets reported.
unique link to this extract

It’s nearly time for the paperback of Social Warming, my latest book. There will be a new foreword (or maybe postscript) to bring it bang up to date. So if you’ve only got the hardback, you might need to buy it again.

How Signal is playing with fire • The Verge

Casey Newton:

»

There’s nothing sinister about putting payments into a messaging app, and Signal is not alone in adding crypto payments to messaging: the company formerly known as Facebook has undertaken a multiyear effort to create a new currency and integrate it with WhatsApp and Messenger. What sets Signal’s effort apart is the combination of end-to-end encryption in messaging and a cryptocurrency with privacy features designed to make any transactions anonymous.

Last year, current and former Signal employees told me they were worried about what that combination would bring to the app. Anonymous transactions would likely attract criminals, they told me, and that in turn would attract regulatory scrutiny. Given that end-to-end encryption already faces legal challenges around the globe, they said, Signal’s addition of anonymous payments was a needless provocation. And it could give more ammunition to lawmakers who want to end encryption as we know it.

To make my own feelings clear: I’m in favor of end-to-end encryption, because in a world of ubiquitous surveillance and rising authoritarianism, I think it’s important that truly private communication systems are widely available. But I also support anti-money-laundering and Know Your Customer (KYC) laws, which are useful in combating terrorists, murder-for-hire plotters, and other harms. If messaging apps are going to add crypto payments, it seems to me they at least ought to do so in a way that is consistent with those laws.

Other supporters of end-to-end encryption have privately lobbied Signal to be more cautious about its payment plans, I’m told. But Signal, which is funded by a nonprofit organization and relies on donations, has forged ahead anyway.

«

Better to ask forgiveness than ask permission, but better not to be regulated out of existence either.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Podcasting hasn’t had a big hit for years, and new ones attract smaller audiences than old ones. Is there a solution?CC-licensed photo by nrkbeta on Flickr.

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

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

Developer sabotages his own apps, then claims Aaron Swartz was murdered • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

The developer who sabotaged two of his own open source code libraries, causing disruptions for thousands of apps that used them, has a colorful past that includes embracing a QAnon theory involving Aaron Swartz, the well-known hacktivist and programmer who died by suicide in 2013.

Marak Squires, the author of two JavaScript libraries with more than 21,000 dependent apps and more than 22 million weekly downloads, updated his projects late last week after they remained unchanged for more than a year. The updates contained code to produce an infinite loop that caused dependent apps to spew gibberish, prefaced by the words “Liberty Liberty Liberty.” The update sent developers scrambling as they attempted to fix their malfunctioning apps.

…There’s also evidence that Squires may have been charged two years ago with reckless endangerment after allegedly starting a fire in his Queens, New York, apartment. According to news articles, a then-37-year-old man named Marak Squires was arrested after being taken to the hospital after authorities allegedly observed him acting erratically as they responded to the fire.

The articles said Squires was a software developer and early bitcoin investor. A month after the fire, Squires reported on Twitter having “lost all my stuff in an apartment fire” and asked for financial support.

…Last week’s sabotage raises concerns about the safety of the software supply chain that is crucial to large numbers of organizations—including Fortune 500 companies. The two sabotaged libraries—Faker.js and Colors.js—created problems for people using Amazon’s Cloud Development Kit. Big companies, critics have long said, benefit from open source ecosystems without adequately compensating developers for their time. In turn, developers responsible for the software are unfairly strained.

Indeed, Squires in 2020 said he would no longer support large companies with work he does for free. “Take this as an opportunity to send me a six-figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it,” he wrote.

The ability of a single developer to throw a wrench into such a large base of apps underscores a fundamental weakness of the current free and open source software structure.

«

So I guess now we also have to check not only for bugs, but for the mental health of developers whose work we rely on. Fun!
unique link to this extract

Facebook’s former elections boss now questions social media’s impact on politics • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz:

»

[Katie Harbath] eventually oversaw a staff of as many as 60 employees that trained political parties in how to best use the platform and helped design the company’s election policy. She says there was a working assumption throughout the company that more Facebook usage would make governments more transparent and expand people’s ability to engage in public discourse.

Ms. Harbath says her doubts about the premise originated in 2016, when elections in the Philippines and the US and the Brexit campaign in the UK were awash in misinformation spread on Facebook.

After that, Ms. Harbath says, her role shifted from primarily trying to promote Facebook as a positive force to more often trying to prevent foreign governments, criminals, troll farms and other bad actors from abusing it.

As public criticism of Facebook mounted, she says, executives put a heavy focus on what internally was called defensibility—forming policies based in part on whether the company would face external attacks or criticism. She says her job became consumed by “escalations”—an internal term for potential public-relations crises and high-profile complaints.

“Eighty% of my time was spent doing escalations,” she says.

A restructuring in her department stripped her of much of her authority over election policy heading into 2020, she said, and the company rejected her proposal to refocus her work on heading off electoral threats before 2024, when a number of major global elections are scheduled. On Jan. 6, she watched the riot at the Capitol unfold on television.

“That was a key day in terms of deciding to leave,” she said. “If I wasn’t going to be able to have impact internally, I needed to go somewhere where I could actually do something.”

«

Harbath features in Social Warming, because she was so blithe about the misinformation that disrupted first the Philippines, and then the Brexit referendum, and then the US elections. It’s telling that the insurrection was the final straw for her. But note what she says: Facebook wasn’t listening to her, one of the most senior people inside the company.
unique link to this extract

The paperback of Social Warming, my latest book, is coming out soon. Or you could just follow the link and have a wonderful hardback.

Five hundred million Avira Antivirus users silently introduced to cryptomining • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

Many readers were surprised to learn recently that the popular Norton 360 antivirus suite now ships with a program which lets customers make money mining virtual currency. But Norton 360 isn’t alone in this dubious endeavor: Avira antivirus — which has built a base of 500 million users worldwide largely by making the product free — was recently bought by the same company that owns Norton 360 and is introducing its customers to a service called Avira Crypto.

Founded in 2006, Avira Operations GmbH & Co. KG is a German multinational software company best known for their Avira Free Security (a.k.a. Avira Free Antivirus). In January 2021, Avira was acquired by Tempe, Ariz.-based NortonLifeLock Inc., the same company that now owns Norton 360.

In 2017, the identity theft protection company LifeLock was acquired by Symantec Corp., which was renamed to NortonLifeLock in 2019. LifeLock is now included in the Norton 360 service; Avira offers users a similar service called Breach Monitor.

Like Norton 360, Avira comes with a cryptominer already installed, but customers have to opt in to using the service that powers it. Avira’s FAQ on its cryptomining service is somewhat sparse. For example, it doesn’t specify how much NortonLifeLock gets out of the deal (NortonLifeLock keeps 15% of any cryptocurrency mined by Norton Crypto).

«

I mean, the difference in effect on your machine of running third-party antivirus and a cryptominer is pretty minimal. They’re both going to bring it to its knees. So you might as well let them fight it out by running both at once.
unique link to this extract

Kosovo seizes hundreds of cryptocurrency mining devices; one person arrested • AFP

»

Kosovo police on Saturday seized hundreds of cryptocurrency mining machines and arrested one person in the tense ethnic-Serb majority north as the country suffered an energy crisis.

Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are created through solving complex equations – an endeavour that consumes enormous amounts of energy.

Tensions between the Serb-majority area and the ethnic Albanian majority government are running high and Kosovo’s government on Tuesday brought in a temporary ban on cryptocurrency mining in an effort to bring down electricity consumption.

During the operation police “confiscated 272 different anti-miner devices used for the production of bitcoin”, a police statement said. One person was arrested, it said.

“The whole action took place and ended without incidents,” Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla said on Facebook.

The confiscated equipment uses as much electricity as 500 homes a month or between €60,000 and €120,000 (US$68,000 and US$136,000), said Finance Minister Hekuran Murati on Facebook.

“We cannot allow the illegal enrichment of some, at the expense of taxpayers,” Murati said.

«

Not sure about “anti-miner devices”, but after the tensions in Kazakhstan (where a lot of cryptominers moved after being booted out of China) this is quite a signal.
unique link to this extract

IBM tries to sell Watson Health (again) • Axios

Sarah Pringle:

»

IBM has resurrected its sale process for IBM Watson Health, with hopes of fetching more than $1bn, people familiar with the situation tell Axios.

Big Blue wants out of health care, after spending billions to stake its claim, just as rival Oracle is moving big into the sector via its $28bn bet for Cerner.

IBM spent more than $4bn to build Watson Health via a series of acquisitions. The business now includes health care data and analytics business Truven Health Analytics, population health company Phytel, and medical imaging business Merge Healthcare.

IBM first explored a sale of the division in early 2021, with Morgan Stanley leading the process.

The WSJ reported at the time that the unit was generating roughly $1 billion in annual revenue, but was unprofitable. Sources say it continues to lose money.

IBM in late 2021 engaged BofA Securities to find a buyer for Watson Health.

Bids were due Jan 4, according to one source who says IBM hopes to select the winner by month’s end. One strategic buyer and several private equity firms are said to be in the mix.

«

Despite winning Jeopardy, Watson has proved to be a total nothingburger when it comes to real applications.
unique link to this extract

Wordle mania and the remixable web • Glitch Blog

Anil Dash:

»

as the New York Times documented, Wordle is just as interesting for the context in which it was made. Josh made it as a gift for his puzzle-loving partner, Palak Shah, and the Times rightly described it as “an act of love”. Being a community of people who make the web, our perspective at Glitch also found a lot of romance in the idea that this is a fast, simple, well-implemented web app. Wordle is a PWA that can install instantly on any device, doesn’t have a ton of extraneous junk loading on the page, and it’s really speedy (a Lighthouse performance score of 95!).

No surprise, then, that Wordle has inspired a host of other creators in the Glitch community and elsewhere to make their own riffs on the idea, all of which bring fun and interesting innovations to the game:

«

Dash (who wrote the seminal “The Web We Lost” post in 2012, about how the promise of Web 2.0 had been squandered – alway worth an occasional re-read) points to all the interesting remixes of the idea of Wordle, just in case you’re sick of the original version, or need something more challenging.
unique link to this extract

Podcasting hasn’t produced a new hit in years • Bloomberg

Lucas Shaw:

»

Dawn Ostroff wants to find more hits. The chief content officer of Spotify is upset that her company isn’t producing enough new popular podcasts, and has been putting pressure on her in-house studios to deliver. I’ve now heard the same message from every corner of the Spotify universe, though no one wanted to talk about it on the record.

It’s hard for new shows to find an audience. Every new show has a smaller audience than its predecessors.

This is not specific to Spotify. Executives at studios large and small echoed the sentiment. While the overall audience for podcasting expands, the audience for individual new shows is shrinking across the board.

None of the 10 most popular podcasts in the U.S. last year debuted in the last couple years, according to Edison Research. They are an average of more than seven years old, and three of the top five are more than a decade old. (“The Joe Rogan Experience,” “This American Life” and “Stuff You Should Know.”)  Only a few podcasts in the top 50 (“SmartLess,” “The Michelle Obama Podcast,” “Frenemies”) are less than two years old. And none of them are in the top 25.

This trend vexes executives and producers across the podcasting industry, who worry they are wasting a lot of money on new shows. Spotify, Amazon, SiriusXM, iHeartMedia and outside investors have plowed billions of dollars into production companies. Spotify has spent more than anyone, paying about $500 million for three studios. Where is all this money going if these companies aren’t producing new hits?

Pretty much everyone agrees on the reason. There are more podcasts than ever before. Spotify hosts more than 3 million podcasts, up from a few hundred thousand just a few years ago. While the vast majority of those new shows are either defunct or have minuscule audiences, there are still way more podcasts than there were just a few years ago.

«

How lovely for the thirsty podcast producers to discover the power law, and especially that later entrants never have the attractive power of early ones. Exactly the same thing happened with blogs. I described the mechanics in Social Warming; it’s part of why people defected to social media.
unique link to this extract

Microsoft hit by defections as tech giants battle for talent to build the metaverse • WSJ

Aaron Tilley:

»

Competitors have been snapping up people with experience developing Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality headsets, sometimes offering to double their salaries, said former Microsoft employees. The Microsoft augmented-reality group employs around 1,500 people, they said.

The LinkedIn profiles of more than 70 former employees on the HoloLens team show they have left Microsoft in the past year. More than 40 joined Meta, formerly known as Facebook, which is making a big push into alternate-reality tech, the LinkedIn profiles show. [Around 100 are reckoned to have left Microsoft’s HoloLens team.]

The departed staffers include some longtime leaders of the team. Charlie Han, who was responsible for taking customer feedback for HoloLens, left over the summer to join Meta. Josh Miller, who worked in the display team, became the display director at Meta in recent months. Mr. Han and Mr. Miller didn’t respond to requests for comment about the moves.

A Microsoft spokesman said the company has been at the forefront of innovation in metaverse technology for years and “will keep advancing state of the art hardware that is more immersive, affordable and in various form factors.”

«

Cortana: too late after Alexa and Google Home. Windows Phone: too late after iOS and Android. (Yes yes Windows Mobile came earlier, but it couldn’t handle the touchscreen world.) HoloLens: too early. Timing counts for so much.

(Style note: the metaverse, not the Metaverse.)
unique link to this extract

Tech startup wants to gamify suing people using crypto tokens • Vice

Maxwell Strachan:

»

Kyle Roche, a trial lawyer and one of the startup’s founders, says: “What I want to do is make the federal court system more accessible for all.”

Roche believes the US federal court system is one of the best in the world, but that navigating it is cost prohibitive for the average American. As a result, he believes, potential whistleblowers are too often hesitant to defy “well-resourced” corporations and other entities due to the potential cost of legal action. Through [startup company] Ryval, Roche wants to “make lawsuits happen that maybe might not have happened.”

However, on its website, Ryval focuses all of its attention on the potential return for investors. “Buy and sell tokens that represent shares in a litigation and access a multi-billion dollar investment class previously unavailable to the public,” the company states. Ryval also promises “50%+ Annual Returns,” though Roche admitted the figure “may be a little high” when Motherboard asked him about it.

“What we do is: tell the story, vet the legal claim, and then allow the public to invest and give you the funds to go and litigate your case,” Roche explained. “And what does the public get in return? The public gets an interest in the outcome of your suit.”

The way it works is a little like a crypto-infused and lawsuit-focused GoFundMe, if the crowd stood to profit from their investment. The company takes advantage of a rule created through former President Barack Obama’s JOBS Act, which allowed a private company to crowdfund up to $5 million from Americans, regardless of their wealth.

…(A caveat: While wealthy and sophisticated “accredited investors” will be able to trade lawsuit tokens immediately, the non-rich will be legally required to agree to a year-long lockup period, according to Insider.)

«

Sure, because what the US really needs is both more people filing lawsuits and more people buying digital nothings.
unique link to this extract

How politics got so polarised • The New Yorker

Elizabeth Kolbert:

»

On June 19, 1954, eleven boys from Oklahoma City boarded a bus bound for Robbers Cave State Park, about a hundred and fifty miles to the southeast. The boys had never met before, but all had just completed fifth grade and came from middle-income families. All were white and Protestant. When they reached the park, the boys were assigned to a cabin at an empty Boy Scout camp. They dubbed themselves the Rattlers.

The following day, a second group of boys—also all white, Protestant, and middle class—arrived at the camp. They were assigned to a cabin that could not be seen from the first. They decided to call themselves the Eagles.

For a week, the two groups went about their activities—swimming, tossing a baseball, sitting around a campfire—unaware of the other. The groups had separate swimming holes, and their meal hours were staggered, so they didn’t meet at the mess hall. As they ate, played, and tussled, each band developed its own social hierarchy and, hence, its own mores. The Rattlers, for instance, took to cursing. The Eagles frowned on profanity.

Toward the end of the week, the two groups learned about each other. The reaction was swift. Each group wanted to challenge the other to a contest, and their counsellors [running the camp] scheduled a tournament.

«

It’s not exactly the Hunger Games, but it’s not that far off either. Even just the rest of the introduction to this book review (for that’s what it is) is riveting.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Steve Jobs in 2007 posed for press photos with the iPhone. How big a revolution did it bring to our everyday lives? CC-licensed photo by Nobuyuki Hayashi 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 12 links for you. Happy new year! We’ve got a lot to get through today, so let’s get started. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The paperback of Social Warming, my latest book, will be out in February. If you’ve been holding off because you hate hardbacks, your wishes will soon be answered!

15 years ago, the iPhone created ‘Big Tech’ • PC Mag

Sascha Segan:

»

In a lot of ways, that iPhone release helped herald in our current era of “Big Tech,” where a few huge platform companies control so much of our software and services. Lots of other factors made it happen, to be sure, but Apple did a few key things to push our tech world into its current centralized state.

Back before the iPhone, carriers dictated a lot of the software preloaded on phones. A lot of that software sucked! But there were also a lot of carriers, which meant a lot of diversity and decentralization.

From 2007, I can think of AT&T, Cingular, T-Mobile, Verizon; Sprint and Nextel with the same ownership but different networks; MetroPCS and Cricket, both then independent companies; US Cellular, Alltel, and Dobson Cellular One. That whole list except the Big Three [AT&T, Sprint, Verizon] is now gone.

Apple broke the carrier control over software—in consumer’s favor!—by loading its own Google and Yahoo! relationships onto that first phone. Big Tech now dealt with Big Tech. And as the iPhone’s influence spread, especially after it became available on all US carriers in 2011, Apple’s sole power to make those deals grew.

…We’re very much now living in a world the iPhone made—a world of user-friendly, strictly controlled platforms in the grip of a small number of private companies.

And honestly, I don’t see how that changes. The current froth over “web3” and distributed organizations misses what made the iPhone great: simplicity and ease. Given a complex, difficult system like the new blockchain-based systems versus Apple’s simple user interfaces, policies, and guidance, consumers will almost certainly pick ease of use.

When the first iPhone came out, I saw it as a revolution. Revolutions, history tells us, often resolve into monarchies. Will the wheel turn again?

«

The answer, as you’ll see in the next link, feels like “nope”.
unique link to this extract

My first impressions of web3 • Moxie Marlinspike

Marlinspike is a very skilled cryptographer who works on the end-to-end encrypted app Signal, and who decided to really find out what the “web3” fuss is about:

»

One thing that has always felt strange to me about the cryptocurrency world is the lack of attention to the client/server interface. When people talk about blockchains, they talk about distributed trust, leaderless consensus, and all the mechanics of how that works, but often gloss over the reality that clients ultimately can’t participate in those mechanics. All the network diagrams are of servers, the trust model is between servers, everything is about servers. Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.

With the shift to mobile, we now live firmly in a world of clients and servers – with the former completely unable to act as the latter – and those questions seem more important to me than ever. Meanwhile, ethereum actually refers to servers as “clients,” so there’s not even a word for an actual untrusted client/server interface that will have to exist somewhere, and no acknowledgement that if successful there will ultimately be billions (!) more clients than servers.

For example, whether it’s running on mobile or the web, a dApp like Autonomous Art or First Derivative needs to interact with the blockchain somehow – in order to modify or render state (the collectively produced work of art, the edit history for it, the NFT derivatives, etc). That’s not really possible to do from the client, though, since the blockchain can’t live on your mobile device (or in your desktop browser realistically). So the only alternative is to interact with the blockchain via a node that’s running remotely on a server somewhere.

«

The point being that the “decentralised” has in fact to rely on very centralised servers. Marlinspike’s elegant post shows that web3 will inevitably become centralised (and in fact already is, very heavily) and also that it’s a complete mess. This blogpost is sure to be the touchstone for the rest of the year on this topic.
unique link to this extract

The development of Cortana with Sandeep Paruchuri • Alice Newton Rex

Alice Newton Rex talks in depth to the person in charge of the development of Microsoft’s voice assistant, who details how its early success inside Windows Phone came about from being small and essentially unregarded, though clearance was still required all the way to the top:

»

The one last hurdle to clear was approval from the CEO, a position which was in the process of being handed over from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella. ‘Ballmer had poor product taste,’ says Sandeep with a slight smile. ‘He wanted the whole thing to be Microsoft branded. And then his parting gift was to try to name it Bingo. But we waited it out.’ Luckily, Satya had different ideas, and was a huge supporter of the project because of his belief in the power of AI. Under his leadership, Cortana got to keep her name and was declared ready to ship.

Cortana was successfully released as part of Windows Phone 8.1. The user reaction was great – it seemed like the scenarios really landed, and people loved the scenarios, including package tracking and smart reminders, which allowed you to e.g. create a reminder to buy flowers next time you passed a flower shop. The investments in making Cortana have a strong personality and great look and feel were also noticed. Between when they started working on Cortana and when it launched, Google had released Google Now, which was based on the same insight about being proactive, but had the opposite approach to persona and approachability.. Reviews described Cortana as ‘smart and witty’ or ‘like Google Now, but with cohesion and polish’.

…We all know that Cortana didn’t have a bright future. Windows Phone itself was discontinued in 2017, and the Cortana apps were turned off for iOS and Android last year. I ask Sandeep what went wrong, after this promising start. He says the decline began immediately. ‘Everything that was right about the first release went wrong for the second release,’ he tells me. No longer did they have a small team (‘us against the world’), working in an iterative way, investing in a great toolkit. For v2, there were hundreds of PMs [product managers] trying to get in on the action, and getting anything done required dozens of cross-company meetings. All of the new people diluted the original ethos they’d built and diluted the focus. They’d worked out how to scale their product but not their culture.

«

That last sentence contains multitudes.
unique link to this extract

Adversarial Wordle • Things Of Interest

»

ADVERSARIAL WORDLE by qntm

An adversarial version of the excellent Wordle.

I’m thinking of a five-letter English word. You have unlimited guesses.

«

Of course Wordle is the hit of the Christmas break. This is the evolution. It’s adversarial in that you’ll never get any correct letters in your first attempt. And probably not your second. It looks at what you’ve typed and chooses – as you continue – a word that doesn’t use those letters, as far as it can. If you use a good strategy, you’ll probably corner it in about seven attempts.
unique link to this extract

Apple at $3tn: the enigma of Tim Cook • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

»

Apple’s ascendancy during the “second coming” of [Steve] Jobs from 1997 to 2011 had set the paradigm for Apple as a disruptive innovator that could upend entire industries with single products. The launches of the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad became the stuff of movies. But Cook, who earned nearly $100m last year thanks largely to stock awards, does not fit this model. His skills lie in areas that popular culture doesn’t really comprehend, let alone appreciate.

“Steve was a visionary firebrand, and Tim is an efficiency expert, an operational guru,” says Ray Wang, chair of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research.

“You need both in a company,” he adds. “You need a person that comes up with the great idea that gets people excited . . . and you need the person who puts it in the market at massive scale.” nous

Cook’s supporters insist he has fundamentally changed the nature of the company. During his time at the helm, Apple’s annual revenues have ballooned from $108bn in the year he took over to $365bn in 2021. Net profits have grown 3.7 times, from $26bn to $95bn.

But more significant is how Cook has built a services juggernaut to eke out every penny of the Apple ecosystem, garnering a steady stream of recurring revenues from App Store fees and nearly 800m customers paying for digital media that expanded during his tenure. That substantially reduced Apple’s dependence on the iPhone — and propelled the company’s share price to a level where its price-to-earnings ratio is now three times higher than what it was a decade ago.

“Tim Cook’s biggest success is the cultivation and the fostering of services, and the degree to which he’s been able to revolutionise the way that the company is perceived in the eyes of investors,” says [WSJ journalist Tripp] Mickle.

«

Mickle has a book on post-Jobs Apple coming out, which we can confidently expect to be a lot better than the dire “Haunted Empire” published in 2014 by another then-WSJ journalist, Yukari Iwatani Kane, which insisted that Apple after Jobs would run into the ground, just like Sony after its founder Akio Morita. (Mickle’s book couldn’t possibly be worse.)

McGee’s analysis here is excellent; the point that Services gives the ship stability is crucial.
unique link to this extract

Podcasters are letting software pick their ads, and it’s already going awry • The Verge

Ashley Carman:

»

The podcast industry is working up to something big; you can see it in the acquisitions. All the industry’s major players have, over the past two years, acquired companies focused on one feature: inserting ads into podcasts.

Of course, podcasting has always primarily depended on ad revenue, so this incoming era has more to do with getting podcast ads to act like the online advertising we see everywhere else. Wherever there’s a website, there can be a targeted ad, and now wherever there’s a podcast, there’s the potential of inserting a targeted ad, too. Whichever company can make that transition happen the fastest, across the most shows, and with the best data, could not only recoup all those millions of dollars in acquisition costs but make more on top of them.

The industry is sprinting toward this programmatic advertising future. However, there are some obstacles along the way, and podcasters are already running into them. The Verge has identified multiple examples of programmatic advertising going wrong, according to sources who asked to remain anonymous over concerns of fraying industry relationships. Ads are showing up in places they shouldn’t, signaling not so much a death knell for the effort, but more of a warning that if the trend continues, early trust between podcast networks and tech companies could fall apart.

Last year, an ad for the TV show The Sex Lives of College Girls popped up on an American Public Media (APM) podcast it shouldn’t have been approved for: a children’s show, a source familiar with the situation tells The Verge. Separately, a science podcaster says ads for BP and ExxonMobil were inserted into their program, despite them explicitly blocking ads for oil and gas companies. In both cases, the ads were served through the Spotify Ad Network, or SPAN, which launched last spring.

«

Companies are reluctant to offer brand advertising with no immediate “call to (profitable) action” on podcasts. There used to be so many mattress ads on podcasts because one sale generated a lot of cash all at once, for a comparatively tiny outlay. Low-return ads didn’t get a look in.
unique link to this extract

Google Home app update makes Speaker Group volume controls much worse • Android Police

Rajesh Pandey:

»

Earlier this week, Google was handed a big blow in its legal tussle with Sonos over patent infringement. The US International Trade Commission found the company guilty of violating Sonos’ IP. Due to this, Google was forced to remove unified Speaker Group volume controls. Going forward, users will have to adjust each speaker’s sound level individually, with the option of controlling it using the phone’s volume buttons completely removed. A new Google Home app update (v2.47.79.5) is now out with the regressions in tow.

Pressing the volume rocker while on the Media screen in the latest Google Home app will adjust your phone’s volume. Previously, the same action changed the sound level of a speaker or an entire speaker group. You must now adjust the speaker output using the virtual slider in the Home app.

I am used to tapping the Cast playback notification on my phone’s notification shade to get to the Media screen in the Home app and then adjust the speaker playback volume. Admittedly, this change makes that process more frustrating, as controlling the volume is no longer as seamless. What was previously a two-tap process will now require my attention and fiddling around with a virtual slider, especially when controlling a speaker group.

You can avoid this change for now by ensuring you don’t install the latest Google Home update. However, this workaround is likely going to be temporary. While it is currently possible to control the full Speaker Group volume directly from your Nest Hub or Nest Hub Max, that functionality will also be pulled in the near future.

«

So Google – which had $136bn in cash and equivalents at the end of 2020 (2021 data isn’t in yet) and operating cashflow of $89bn in the 12 months to December 2020 – couldn’t find the cash to pay for the patents to keep its customers’ systems running as before? How many Google Home devices are out there? Best estimate is about 30m in the US, where this would be relevant – though 8m homes there have multiple units, which accounts for more than half of them.
unique link to this extract

How fake science is infiltrating scientific journals • Sydney Morning Herald

Harriet Alexander:

»

Publishers and researchers have reported an extraordinary proliferation in junk science over the last decade, which has infiltrated even the most esteemed journals. Many bear the hallmarks of having been produced in a “paper mill”: submitted by authors at Chinese hospitals with similar templates or structures. Paper mills operate several models, including selling data (which may be fake), supplying entire manuscripts or selling authorship slots on manuscripts that have been accepted for publication.

The Sydney Morning Herald has learned of suicides among graduate students in China when they heard that their research might be questioned by authorities. Many universities have made publication a condition of students earning their masters or doctorates, and it is an open secret that the students fudge the data. The universities reap money from the research grants they earn. The teachers get their names on the papers as contributing authors, which helps them to seek promotions.

International biotechnology consultant Glenn Begley, who has been campaigning for more meaningful links between academia and industry, said research fraud was a story of perverse incentives. He wants researchers to be banned from producing more than two or three papers per year, to ensure the focus remained on quality rather than quantity.

“The real incentive is for researchers to get their papers published and it doesn’t have to be right so long as it’s published,” Dr Begley said. He recently told the vice-chancellor of a leading Australian university of his frustration with the narrative that Australia was “punching above its weight” in terms of research outcomes. “It’s outrageous,” Mr Begley told the vice-chancellor. “It’s not true.”

“Yes,” the vice-chancellor replied. “I use that phrase with politicians all the time. They love it.”

«

unique link to this extract

The ticking bomb of crypto fascism • In These Times

Hamilton Nolan:

»

The crash of crypto is bound to happen for the same reason that all Ponzi schemes eventually crumble: there is not an infinite supply of new people willing to pay ever-increasing prices for the stuff that you currently own. The more interesting question is not whether many small-time investors will lose a lot of money on their crypto investments, but what will happen when they do?

Here is what will happen when hundreds of thousands of younger investors are smashed by the crypto crash: they will be radicalized. This will not be experienced as simply a decline in prices, because crypto represents much more than a simple investment to its most fervent adherents — it represents a way out of the American trap. It represents the existence of opportunity, the possibility of economic mobility, the validation of the idea that you, a regular, hard working person without connections, can go from the bottom to the top, thanks to nothing but your own savvy choices. When that myth is shattered, disillusionment with the American system will follow. Unfortunately, given the realities of the moment, these newly disillusioned and radicalized and angry and broke people are far more likely to turn to fascism than to socialism.

Crypto, a portfolio of inherently worthless online tokens, is already sustained almost entirely by myth. Its value proposition is so inscrutable that when it melts down, almost any narrative could be crafted to plausibly explain it. It was the Fed! The government! The leftists who hate entrepreneurialism! It was the dark and devious forces of the shadowy deep state! Anything will do. It will enforce the priors of those who placed their faith in crypto as a good substitute for the American dream — a crowd of Barstool Sports readers and tech libertarians and the types of people who used to buy silver bars from Alex Jones before they turned to Bitcoin.

The crypto-evangelist population skews heavily towards a sort of New Age libertarian, anti-government right wing-ism, and when they see their financial dreams evaporate, they will likely set their sights for revenge on the things they already despise. The broad effect will lead to a large number of newly angry, bitter, disillusioned, hopeless people who are too steeped in the culture wars to turn towards working class solidarity, and instead turn towards hate. 

…If the crash strikes, say, six months before the 2024 presidential elections, it could be sufficient fuel to propel Donald Trump or one of his acolytes back into the White House and to further poison the national dialogue with rage and a spirit of vengeance. A fun thing to speculate on.

«

Happy 2022. Oh well.
unique link to this extract

Opinion: the American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare • The Globe and Mail

Thomas Homer-Dixon gives the Canadian perspective of what happens if the US plummets into authoritarianism, or civil war (which look like less and less remote possibilities):

»

A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year we’ve turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of COVID-19, reconciliation, and the accelerating effects of climate change. But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unravelling of democracy in the United States.

We need to start by fully recognizing the magnitude of the danger. If Mr. Trump is re-elected, even under the more-optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable. Driven by aggressive, reactive nationalism, Mr. Trump “could isolate Canada continentally,” as one of my interlocutors put it euphemistically.

Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history. What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country, and the U.S. regime demands them back. Do we comply?

In this context, it’s worth noting the words of Dmitry Muratov, the courageous Russian journalist who remains one of the few independent voices standing up to Mr. Putin and who just received the Nobel Prize for Peace. At a news conference after the awards ceremony in Oslo, as Russian troops and armour were massing on Ukraine’s borders, Mr. Muratov spoke of the iron link between authoritarianism and war. “Disbelief in democracy means that the countries that have abandoned it will get a dictator,” he said. “And where there is a dictatorship, there is a war. If we refuse democracy, we agree to war.”

«

unique link to this extract

Clubhouse’s explosive growth has slowed. Its CEO does not care • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy and Miles Kruppa:

»

Ahead of publication, Clubhouse disputed the App Annie figures [of about 28m downloads in total, 920k in November], which do not include downloads to tablet devices and do not include re-installs or app updates. Clubhouse said its own data shows 1.8m downloads in November. It declined to share download figures for other months. It also declined to share an active user number.

Davison remains unconcerned. “We’ve gone from a single community of beta testers last year to a global network of many different communities,” he said, pointing to recent growth in geographies such as Thailand. “It’s a big graph now with different clusters that are growing at different times.”

He added that over the course of summer alone, the number of conversation “rooms” created a day more than doubled from 300,000 to 700,000, driven by a rise in the number of private groups in particular.

After he declined to share a more up-to-date figure, the company later said this was “700,000+” rooms per day, adding that there was an “acceleration in growth in recent weeks”.

Despite this, Davison denied ever seeking out Clubhouse’s dizzying rise in the first place, citing the decision to make the app invite-only at first, until July this year. “We’ve never tried to grow. We’ve only tried to not grow,” he said. “I think that when you scale online communities, if you go too quickly, things can break.”

«

No idea why there’s any pretence that Clubhouse is like Radio 4. It’s long since raced right to the bottom – it’s a haven for cryptogrifters and the rest. But it’s probably small enough that it won’t burn through the investment cash for a while. We’ll check back in three months unless something happens.
unique link to this extract

What the hell is this company the 76ers just partnered with? • Defector

Maitreyi Anantharaman and Chris Thompson:

»

It’s worth taking a few moments to dig around in the history of this Color Star operation [which just signed a deal with the famous basketball team to “collaborate on content featuring exclusive interviews”]. This company proposes to operate a metaverse, and thus to facilitate the refashioning of your human identity, to host as much as you are willing to relocate of your moment-to-moment social engagement away from the physical world, and to occupy a frankly alarmingly substantial part of your very experience of living. Proposing such a thing ought to require some sort of burden of proof, if not a straitjacket. If nothing else, we ought at least to know something about those inviting us to digitize and monetize our infinitely precious lives. Are these Metaverse Lords sufficiently grounded in whatever fields might conceivably make a person qualified to operate, uhh, existence itself? Or are they, for example, a hastily retrofitted construction materials outfit hoping to cash in on a sudden frenzied pan-cultural lurch into blockchain hell?

The Sixers spokesperson pointed out that the company is traded on NASDAQ, which it is; shares of Color Star Technology Co., Ltd. closed Wednesday [near the end of December] at $0.52. Certain facts can be learned about Color Star from a trove of boring old filings the company has made over time to the Securities and Exchange Commission since Color Star began issuing shares in 2018. According to a summary found in the company’s 2019 annual report, Color Star began its life way back in 2005, as TJS Wood Flooring, and in 2007 was subsequently incorporated (like so many companies seeking maximally favorable business conditions) in the state of Delaware. A year later, but still long before TJS Wood Flooring became Color Star: Administrator Of The Metaverse, it was renamed China Advanced Construction Materials Group, after something called a “reverse acquisition transaction.” In 2013, China Advanced Construction Materials Group did something called a “reincorporation merger” with a wholly owned subsidiary, and was suddenly operating out of Nevada. At this point the company still at least postured as if straightforwardly operating in the construction industry, and in fact would continue doing so through the end of 2019.

«

It’s simultaneously hilarious and terrifying that a serious company like the 76ers would sign a deal with what looks like a bunch of chancers like this. Then again, English cricket once happily signed up with a complete fraudster, so maybe it’s something about sports.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Amazing but true – the news agency Reuters used to have a dedicated journalist “in” Second Life. It wasn’t a success. Will the metaverse offer better? CC-licensed photo by Deryck Hodge on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. A sort of look ahead. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

This is the last Overspill of 2021. Thanks for all the links, feedback and support. Back (spirits willing) on January 10, when we’ll have found out whether CES 2022 went ahead.

Last chance for charity time!
It’s nearly Christmas, which is a good time for giving. I’d suggest all or any of:
• Shelter (or equivalent in your country)
• National Deaf Children’s Society (or equivalent in your country)
• Wikipedia (it’s an invaluable, unique resource)
• the Internet Archive (ditto)
• any dog rescue centre. Dogs are a source of joy and inspiration: watch the adorable Lollipop and then try to deny that. Here’s Lollipop’s home.

The automatic muse • ROUGH TYPE

Nicholas Carr:

»

In the fall of 1917, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, now in middle age and having twice had marriage proposals turned down, first by his great love Maud Gonne and next by Gonne’s daughter Iseult, offered his hand to a well-off young Englishwoman named Georgie Hyde-Lees. She accepted, and the two were wed a few weeks later, on October 20, in a small ceremony in London.

Hyde-Lees was a psychic, and four days into their honeymoon she gave her husband a demonstration of her ability to channel the words of spirits through automatic writing. Yeats was fascinated by the messages that flowed through his wife’s pen, and in the ensuing years the couple held more than 400 such seances, the poet poring over each new script. At one point, Yeats announced that he would devote the rest of his life to interpreting the messages. “No,” the spirits responded, “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.” And so they did, in abundance. Many of Yeats’s great late poems, with their gyres, staircases, and phases of the moon, were inspired by his wife’s mystical scribbles.

One way to think about AI-based text-generation tools like OpenAI’s GPT-3 is as clairvoyants. They are mediums that bring the words of the past into the present in a new arrangement. GPT-3 is not creating text out of nothing, after all. It is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by its interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3 we are, in a way, communing with the dead. One of Hyde-Lees’ spirits said to Yeats, “this script has its origin in human life — all religious systems have their origin in God & descend to man — this ascends.” The same could be said of the script generated by GPT-3. It has its origin in human life; it ascends.

«

GPT-3 is very likely to impose itself on more and more of our daily lives, even if we don’t see it (marketing material? Opinion articles? Adverts?), in 2022. Take note.
unique link to this extract

The world’s biggest offshore wind farm is up and running • Singularity Hub

Vanessa Bates Ramirez:

»

Two and a half years ago, the Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm started generating power. Located in the North Sea off the coast of Grimsby, England, it was completed in 2020, with 174 turbines and a generating capacity of 1.2 gigawatts. It was the biggest offshore wind farm in the world at the time, and now its sister site, Hornsea 2, has launched as well.

The site generated its first power over the weekend, and when complete, will have 165 turbines capable of generating 8 megawatts each, for a total of 1.32 gigawatts of electricity. According to Orsted, the Danish energy firm running the sites, Hornsea 1 and 2 will together be able to power over 2.3 million homes.

2.3 million homes in the UK are equivalent to far fewer homes in the US; Americans are serious energy hogs, with average annual electricity consumption per household in 2020 hovering around 10,715 kWh, almost triple that of the UK’s 3,731 kWh. We should be working harder to scale back on our giant appliances, around-the-clock air conditioning, and ever-ready hot water—but that’s a separate conversation.

Besides being the biggest operational wind farm in the world, Hornsea also takes the crown on another designation: it’s the farthest from shore, which means it takes a lot of cables to get the energy generated by those spinning blades into the national grid. Hornsea 1 sits 75 miles (120 kilometers) from shore, Hornsea 2 55 miles (89 km). The offshore cables feed into onshore cables, which terminate at a substation in Killingholme, a town about two hours’ drive from Manchester. Unlike their not-too-far-away floating neighbors in Scotland’s Hywind farm, Hornsea’s turbines are anchored to the ocean floor.

Despite its distance from shore, Hornsea’s location was chosen very deliberately, as wind speeds in the area average 16-22 miles per hour; for comparison’s sake, the top 3 windiest cities in the US get gusts of around 13 mph.

«

Linked to Hornsea One going live in September 2019. Lot of progress in two years. Can it help with electricity prices, which are still spiking as gas prices leap up? Another big one for 2022.
unique link to this extract

Intel apologizes after asking suppliers to avoid China’s Xinjiang region • WSJ

Liza Lin:

»

US semiconductor giant Intel apologized after setting off a social-media backlash with a letter asking suppliers to avoid sourcing from the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has conducted a campaign of forcible assimilation against religious minorities.

In a letter to global suppliers, dated this month and published in several languages on its website, Intel called on its business partners to steer clear of the remote northwestern region of China, noting that “multiple governments have imposed restrictions on products sourced from the Xinjiang region. Therefore, Intel is required to ensure our supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region.”

By midweek, the letter had been singled out by irate Chinese social-media users and a nationalist state-run tabloid, denouncing Intel’s unwillingness to conduct business involving Xinjiang.

On Thursday, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker said its letter was written only to comply with US law and didn’t represent Intel’s stance on Xinjiang.

«

In other words, “our apology wasn’t a reflection of what we think.” US-China tensions (especially over Xinjiang) are going to be another source of tension for technology in 2022.
unique link to this extract

November 2008: Exclusive: why Reuters left Second Life, and how Linden Lab can fix it • Business Insider

Eric Krangel was assigned to “report” on Second Life, which your parents will explain to you was an early version of the metaverse:

»

For a year and a half, I reported under the byline “Eric Reuters” in Second Life, before settling in at my new home here at SAI.

So what happened? Is Second Life dying? No, but the buzz is gone. For all the sound and fury over recent price hikes and layoffs at Linden Lab, Second Life has a community of fanatically loyal users. Since Linden Lab derives its revenue from user fees, not advertisements, Second Life is much more likely to survive the Web 2.0 shakeout than most other startups.

It’s hard to say what, if anything, Linden Lab can do to make Second Life appeal to a general audience. The very things that most appeal to Second Life’s hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let’s not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my “beat,” I’d get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I’d right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.

«

His advice on how to improve things included:

»

Abandon the idea that Second Life is a business app. I wasn’t in Second Life to play, I was there on assignment for Reuters. The login server would crash. I’d try to reach sources, but Second Life’s IM window would hang on “waiting” all day when trying to figure out who was online. “Teleports” — the ability to move from point to point anywhere in Second Life — would stop working and I’d get locked out of my own office. These weren’t one-offs, they were my daily, first-hand, happens-all-the-time experiences. For all its bugs, Second Life is tolerable as a playground, but enterprise users will never and should never use it for business. Re-focus on the core mission: Keeping the hobbyists happy and converting potential recruits into hardcore (read: fees-paying) users.

«

So now we’re trying with enterprise users, but in smaller spaces. The question of whether this time round there is one unified metaverse (what Second Life tried), multiple interoperable ones or multiple incompatible ones (I’ll plump for the latter) might start to shake out in 2022. It’s going to be another centralised/decentralised argument.
unique link to this extract

Alexa is nagging you more because Amazon knows you don’t care about its new features • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

If you regularly use an Alexa device, you’ve probably been upsold by Amazon’s assistant at some point. Ask Alexa to carry out some basic task like setting a timer, and it will finish its response with a cheery “By the way, did you know I could [insert feature you’ve never heard of here].” As highlighted in a recent report from Bloomberg, this is because Amazon knows that users aren’t really getting stuck into the full range of Alexa’s capabilities.

Bloomberg’s report is based on internal Amazon docs, and features some interesting statistics about Alexa usage. Here are the ones we found most eye-catching:

• In 2020, Amazon determined that 25% of US households have at least one Alexa device, with this rising to 27% for Amazon Prime customers.
• Christmas is when a lot of customers buy new Alexa devices, but keeping people engaged can be tough. Per Bloomberg, Amazon found in some years that 15% to 25% of new Alexa devices were no longer active by just the second week of use.
• Last year, Amazon concluded that the market for smart speakers had “passed its growth phase,” and estimated it would expand only 1.2% annually in future.
• In 2018, Amazon projected that it would lose $5 on average per Alexa device sold, and that by 2028 it hoped this would be $2-per-unit profit. The company mainly wants to generate revenue from Alexa devices by using them to direct people to other Amazon services.
• Alexa devices with screens are used more: 74% of users who have an Alexa device with a screen use it weekly, compared to 66% of Echo users, and 56% of Echo dot owners. That suggests a problem with discoverability and usability for voice interfaces.
• In a planning doc from 2019, Amazon noted that Alexa users discover half of all the features they will ever use within three hours of activating a new device. For most users there are just three main use-cases: playing music, setting timers, and controlling lights.

Taken together, these statistics don’t paint the rosiest picture for Alexa’s future.

«

As Benedict Evans once observed, the voice interface is as inscrutable as a blinking cursor in a terminal: there’s no clue what it can do, and it’s even worse than a command line at telling you when you get things wrong and what the right incantation is.

Expect a lot more ads on Echos. If it’s this bad for Alexa devices, probably even worse for Google’s – and more so for Apple (though it at least makes it back on the price). And this is like the Kindle: all the excitement, but in reality little use. (Also: turn off Alexa’s unwanted suggestions.)
unique link to this extract

Jack Dorsey goes on unfollowing frenzy after Web3 beef • Coindesk

Cheyenne Ligon:

»

To the uninitiated, it sounds like a bunch of rich guys arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

But beyond Twitter drama, Block Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey’s public sparring with venture capitalists over “Web 3″ serves as a proxy for a long-running debate – not only about which cryptocurrencies are best but what they are good for.

The contretemps highlights important questions about what a truly decentralized internet would really look like, and what role different stakeholders have in building it. Dorsey, a longtime bitcoin aficionado, appears to have aligned himself with the so-called maximalists, a camp highly suspicious of any rival to the original cryptocurrency and any non-monetary application of the underlying technology.

Both sides of the Web 3 debate bemoan the current state of the internet, dominated by a handful of large platforms (not least of all Twitter, where Dorsey stepped down as CEO last month). But the maximalists distrust the Web 3 crowd’s use of crypto tokens as a way to fund such projects. The fact that VCs are big holders of these tokens is, to the maximalists, damning, a classic case of “meet the old boss, same as the new boss.”

Web 3 advocates, which include but are not limited to VCs, counter that a variety of approaches is needed to make good on the internet’s liberating promise; that tokens can align participants’ interests in a network; that Web 3 developers’ reliance on VCs is a perverse consequence of outdated securities laws; and that while Bitcoin was a bona fide breakthrough, its utility is limited and the purists are being shortsighted.

«

Fair explanation of the divide. This is going to be a very big topic in 2022.
unique link to this extract

Street Fighter II, The World Warrier [sic] • Fabien Sanglard

Sanglard is writing a series about Street Fighter II and the CPS-1:

»

One of my favourite anecdotes about Street Fighter II is Akiman’s account of an issue discovered shortly before shipping.

»

Just three days before the deadline, I discovered something horrible. I had made a mistake with the subtitle “World Warrior”, mis-spelling it “World Warrier.”

«

– Akiman, Lead graphic design on SF2 (translated by Shmuplation)

To fully understand the issue, we need to dig into how the arcade hardware works. The CPS-1 is a super tile drawing machine. It can draw a lot of tiles but cannot alter them. They are taken from the GFX ROM as they are and sent to the screen (although they can be flipped horizontally or vertically).

The GFX ROM and the 68000 instructions ROM as burned separately. The problem Akiman describe is that the GFX ROM had been burned but he could still make changes to the instructions.

But how could he fix the mistake if the artwork was set in stone at this point?

«

All that’s available is the tiles used to create all the characters in the game. A fun story (thanks Ravi for the link).
unique link to this extract

Porsche’s synthetic eFuel could make ICE cars as clean as EVs • Car and Driver

Sebastian Blanco:

»

Porsche’s eFuels are made out of CO2 and hydrogen and are produced using renewable energy. The final result is a liquid that an engine will burn the same as if it was gasoline made from crude oil, but an eFuel can be produced in a climate-neutral manner, at least in theory. Speaking at the recent launch of the new 911 GT3, Porsche vice president of Motorsport and GT cars Frank Walliser said the company will have its first small test batch—just 130,000 liters, or 34,340 gallons—of eFuel ready by 2022.

“Synthetic fuel is cleaner and there is no byproduct ,and when we start full production we expect a CO2 reduction of 85 percent,” Walliser told the U.K. publication Evo. “From a ‘well to wheel’ perspective—and you have to consider the well-to-wheel impact of all vehicles—this will be the same level of CO2 produced in the manufacture and use of an electric vehicle.”

One of eFuel’s big benefits is that you can pump it into a standard gasoline-powered vehicle without needing to make any adjustments to the engine. Porsche’s eFuel is not meant just for roadgoing vehicles, either. The newest Porsche 911 GT3 Cup race car can run on synthetic fuels, which Porsche said “significantly lowers CO2 emissions under racing conditions.”

“This technology is particularly important because the combustion engine will continue to dominate the automotive world for many years to come,” said Michael Steiner, a member of Porche’s executive board for R&D, said in a statement in September. “If you want to operate the existing fleet in a sustainable manner, eFuels are a fundamental component.”

Porsche is not the first automaker to investigate cleaner petroleum-substitute fuels, by any means. Audi produced its first batch of e-diesel in 2015, for example, and Bentley, Mazda, and McLaren have all said positive things about synthetic fuels. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz has taken an opposing stance, with R&D chief Markus Schäfer having told the U.K. publication Autocar in 2020 that e-fuel is not a viable option and that the automaker is focusing solely on electrification.

«

I’d really like to know more about this eFuel. Carbon dioxide isn’t hard to come by, but hydrogen? Normally only from electrolysing water or cracking oil. And what’s the process that creates a..hydrocarbon? All seems very roundabout.
unique link to this extract

Facebook may be dangerously unprepared for Libya’s upcoming presidential election, documents show • Rest of World

Vittoria Elliott:

»

Facebook is the most popular social platform in Libya, with more than 5 million users in a country of 7 million people, according to DataReportal, an organization that collects data around internet and social media usage around the world. The apparent HNEC [High National Election Commission of Libya] hack was just the latest example of how the platform has become a central focal point for disinformation, misinformation, and inflammatory speech leading up to the Libyan presidential election — the first in the country’s history.

Twelve experts, including social media and conflict analysts, told Rest of World that in the months leading up to the December 24th election, Facebook appears to be woefully unprepared to manage Libya’s complex combination of hate speech, polarized media, active conflict, and fragile electoral politics. Experts and analysts told Rest of World that they fear that the country might erupt into conflict at any time.

Earlier this year, Facebook labeled Libya a “Tier 3” country, meaning that the company has likely not been taking a proactive, “war-room” style approach to the upcoming election. Instead, the company would be taking action only in response to reports from users or “trusted partners,” civil society organizations that have a direct line to the company — an approach, experts said, that fails to reckon with the severity of the circumstances.

“[The] situation in Libya is illustrative of a bigger problem,” a social media analyst who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of their work around Libya, told Rest of World. “The system that Facebook has in place right now to determine which countries are high risk, is leading to an underinvestment in countries where the risks of violence are some of the highest.”

«

Sigh. Those elections are today. Consistent as ever, Facebook, despite years of warning.

Have a wonderful break. Back in two weeks.
unique link to this extract

You could always buy my latest book, Social Warming, about how social networks affect society, democracy, politics and journalism.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When the AI system GPT-3 was asked to write a paper about robots not replacing humans for law work, it cited one of the first shows to mention the internet. We don’t know why. CC-licensed photo by Ben Sutherland 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. Nearly there. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Charity time!
It’s nearly Christmas, which is a good time for giving. I’d suggest all or any of:
• Shelter (or equivalent in your country)
• National Deaf Children’s Society (or equivalent in your country)
• Wikipedia (it’s an invaluable, unique resource)
• the Internet Archive (ditto)
• any dog rescue centre (dogs are a source of joy and inspiration: watch the wonderful Lollipop and then try to deny that). Here’s Lollipop’s home.

US Army creates single vaccine against all COVID and SARS variants, researchers say • Defense One

Tara Copp:

»

Within weeks, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research expect to announce that they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all its variants, even Omicron, as well as from previous SARS-origin viruses that have killed millions of people worldwide. 

The achievement is the result of almost two years of work on the virus. The Army lab received its first DNA sequencing of the COVID-19 virus in early 2020. Very early on, Walter Reed’s infectious diseases branch decided to focus on making a vaccine that would work against not just the existing strain but all of its potential variants as well.

Walter Reed’s Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine, or SpFN, completed animal trials earlier this year with positive results. Phase 1 of human trials, which tested the vaccine against Omicron and the other variants, wrapped up this month, again with positive results that are undergoing final review, Dr. Kayvon Modjarrad, director of Walter Reed’s infectious diseases branch, said in an exclusive interview with Defense One. 

Unlike existing vaccines, Walter Reed’s SpFN uses a soccer ball-shaped protein with 24 faces for its vaccine, which allows scientists to attach the spikes of multiple coronavirus strains on different faces of the protein.

“It’s very exciting to get to this point for our entire team and I think for the entire Army as well,” Modjarrad said. 

The vaccine’s human trials took longer than expected, he said, because the lab needed to test the vaccine on subjects who had neither been vaccinated nor previously infected with COVID.

«

First, the lab would have received RNA sequencing, not DNA sequencing. And the idea of a vaccine for *all potential variants* is a bit overplayed. They seem to have a (non-mRNA) vaccine that can be adapted. But the mRNA vaccines can be adapted too. Still: this is definitely a good thing.
unique link to this extract

Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet? • Protocol

David Pierce:

»

In every way that matters, Automattic is a reflection of Mullenweg (you could say he puts the “Matt” in Automattic). He started building web software because he wanted a place to store and share his photos; he’s a blogger to the core, and loves anything that aids in the free expression of ideas on the internet. He loves jazz, which is why WordPress releases are named for jazz musicians. He loves to read and write and work from anywhere, so he turned Automattic into a company that supports bloggers and promotes remote work. He buys companies that make products he likes, and companies that have missions he believes in. Most of all, he believes that open-source software is the future of everything. And he’s betting on it every way he can.

Eighteen years after he first started working on WordPress, Automattic is more powerful than ever. It’s a $7.5bn company, one of the biggest private companies in the industry. And yet its founding idea — that software should be available to everyone and editable by anyone, that communities can build great things together, that walled gardens always eventually fall — seems more tenuous than ever. There’s another 17-year-old company named Facebook that flies in the face of everything Mullenweg believes in, and is threatening to own the future of the internet.

Most people will tell you it feels like the future of tech hangs in the balance. But the way Mullenweg sees it, open is still going to win. It’s not a matter of if, only when. And all he’s trying to do is help make it happen a little faster.

«

Mullenweg is all for the decentralised web, and when you look at how many sites use WordPress (even if it’s often hidden) you realise that his vision is a bit like that of Linux.
unique link to this extract

What was the first TV show to reference the internet? • The Atlantic

Adrienne LaFrance:

»

Even as dial-up Internet connections went mainstream, television representations of the web lagged. Computers appeared on television mostly as props, boxy monitors sitting dark on desks. The arrival of Internet represented a huge cultural shift, but it was barely a plot point in the 1990s—with some exceptions.

The X-Files had to have been among the first shows to use the web in a storyline, in “2Shy,” which originally aired in November 1995. The episode features a mutant serial killer who sweet-talks self-conscious women online, convinces them to meet in-person, then pulverizes their flesh for sustenance. (Moral of the story: Chat with strangers online and an alien will turn your body into goo.)

A year later, in 1996, an episode of Friends treats an online romance between one of the show’s male leads and a mystery woman as amusing and bizarre. “Well, we haven’t actually met,” Chandler says of his new love interest. “We stayed up all night talking on the Internet.” The audience laughs. Monica shouts “Geek!” More laughter.

Then, later in the episode, there’s this exchange between Chandler and Phoebe, as Chandler chats online:

Phoebe: How’s your date with your cyber-chick going? [Gestures at laptop] Ooh, hey. What is all that?

Chandler: Oh, it’s a website. It’s the, uh, Guggenheim Museum. See, she likes art, and I like funny words.

Phoebe: What does she mean by “HH”?

Chandler: [Sheepishly] It means we’re holding hands.

“You know,” Phoebe concludes, “I think it’s so great that you are totally into this person, yet for all you know she could be like 90 years old, or have two heads, or it could be a guy… It could be, like, a big, giant guy.”

«

Friends really is deeply embedded in the web, as the next link shows.
unique link to this extract

Will machines replace us? Machine-authored texts and the future of scholarship • Law, Technology and Humans

Benjamin Alarie, Arthur Cockfield and GPT-3, writing in a legal journal:

»

We present here the first machine-generated law review article. Our self-interest motivates us to believe that knowledge workers who write complex articles drawing upon years of research and effort are safe from AI developments. However, how reasonable is it to persist in this belief given recent advances in AI research? With that topic in mind, we caused GPT-3, a state-of-the-art AI, to generate a paper that explains “why humans will always be better lawyers, drivers, CEOs, presidents, and law professors than artificial intelligence and robots can ever hope to be.” The resulting paper, with no edits apart from giving it a title and bolding the headings generated by GPT-3, is reproduced below. It is imperfect in a humorous way. Ironically, it is publishable “as-is” only because it is machine-generated. Nevertheless, the resulting paper is good enough to give us some pause for thought. Although GPT-3 is not up to the task of replacing law review authors currently, we are far less confident that GPT-5 or GPT-100 might not be up to the task in future.

«

In their comments ahead of the article, the humans note that

»

the article is not suitable as a law journal article. It lacks citations to supporting sources and exhibits odd assumptionsin some parts (as with its discussion of [the TV series] Friends). GPT-3 also demonstrates gender bias when it indicates, “For instance, most people instinctively know that a woman who is crying during an argument isn’t necessarily telling the truth.”

«

To be honest, it reads more like something written by someone not quite sober. They know the words, but not the order for them. See for yourself.
unique link to this extract

The secret Uganda deal that has brought NSO to the brink of collapse • FT via Ars Technica

Mehul Srivastava:

»

In February 2019, an Israeli woman sat across from the son of Uganda’s president and made an audacious pitch—would he want to secretly hack any phone in the world?

Lt. General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, in charge of his father’s security and a long-whispered successor to Yoweri Museveni, was keen, said two people familiar with the sales pitch.

After all, the woman, who had ties to Israeli intelligence, was pitching him Pegasus, a piece of spyware so powerful that Middle East dictators and autocratic regimes had been paying tens of millions for it for years.

But for NSO, the Israeli company that created Pegasus, this dalliance into East Africa would prove to be the moment it crossed a red line, infuriating US diplomats and triggering a chain of events that would see it blacklisted by the commerce department, pursued by Apple, and driven to the verge of defaulting on its loans, according to interviews with US and Israeli officials, industry insiders, and NSO employees.

A few months after the initial approach, NSO’s chief executive, Shalev Hulio, landed in Uganda to seal the deal, according to two people familiar with NSO’s East Africa business. Hulio, who flew the world with the permission of the Israeli government to sell Pegasus, liked to demonstrate in real time how it could hack a brand-new, boxed iPhone.

…The blacklisting, which came in November, means that NSO cannot buy any equipment, service, or intellectual property from US-based companies without approval, crippling a company whose terminals ran on servers from Dell and Intel, routers from Cisco, and whose desktop computers run on Windows operating systems, according to a spec sheet from a sale to Ghana, in West Africa.

«

Notice “industry insiders” in there – I suspect that’s Apple spilling the beans, on a very background basis, because Apple really hates NSO because of what NSO has done to the iPhone’s reputation for security.

And it’s also an amazing story of hubris: the Ugandan government hacked US diplomats there. Bad move.
unique link to this extract

Risk of hospital stay 40% lower with Omicron than Delta, UK data suggests • The Guardian

Ian Sample and Heather Stewart:

»

The Omicron variant of coronavirus appears to be milder, with a 15%-20% reduced chance of a hospital visit and at least a 40% lower risk of being admitted overnight, the first UK data of its kind has showed.

But as daily Covid cases topped 100,000 for the first time on Wednesday, experts warned that high transmissibility means the NHS is still at risk of being overwhelmed.

In what was described by scientists as a “qualified good news story”, two studies on Wednesday pointed to a lower risk of hospitalisation with Omicron.

An Imperial College outbreak modelling team led by Prof Neil Ferguson analysed hospitalisations and vaccine records among all PCR-confirmed Covid cases in England between 1 and 14 December. The dataset included 56,000 cases of Omicron and 269,000 cases of Delta.

Their report found that the risk of any attendance at hospital was 15% to 20% lower with Omicron versus Delta, and 40%-45% lower when the visit resulted in admission for at least one night. For the small percentage of people who had neither been previously infected with Covid nor vaccinated, the risk of hospitalisation was about 11% lower for Omicron versus Delta.

Ferguson said that while it was “good news”, the assessment did not substantially change Sage modelling pointing to 3,000 daily hospitalisations in England at the peak of the wave next month without restrictions beyond the plan B measures currently in place.

«

unique link to this extract

Americans widely distrust Facebook, TikTok and Instagram with their data, poll finds • The Washington Post

Heather Kelly and Emily Guskin:

»

Most Americans say they are skeptical that several Internet giants will responsibly handle their personal information and data about their online activity. And an overwhelming majority say they think tech companies don’t provide people with enough control over how their activities are tracked and used. The survey was conducted in November among a random sample of 1,122 adults nationwide.

According to the survey, 72% of Internet users trust Facebook “not much” or “not at all” to responsibly handle their personal information and data on their Internet activity. About 6 in 10 distrust TikTok and Instagram, while slight majorities distrust WhatsApp and YouTube. Google, Apple and Microsoft receive mixed marks for trust, while Amazon is slightly positive with 53% trusting the company at least “a good amount.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Only 10% say Facebook has a positive impact on society, while 56% say it has a negative impact and 33% say its impact is neither positive nor negative. Even among those who use Facebook daily, more than three times as many say the social network has a negative rather than a positive impact.

«

Not surprising that people trust Amazon; what is there not to trust – ok, apart from all the fake reviews and multiple fake brands? At least Amazon delivers tangible stuff, or video content. Whereas Facebook’s deliverables are a lot harder to specify.

Though I bet those people saying they think Facebook is a net negative haven’t deleted their accounts. (The survey makes interesting reading, mostly to spot the leading questions on topics such as whether devices listen to you.)
unique link to this extract

If you’re looking for books, I’d always recommend Social Warming, my latest book, about the effects social networks are having on society. Here’s a mini-review on Twitter.

The Spectator Covid Tracker • The Spectator

»

The Spectator data tracker. Updated daily

«

This is interesting, and has been going for a while. This link is to the Sage (UK scientific committee advising government on emergencies) scenarios – note, not predictions – for what would happen under various circumstances, v what happened in reality.

Of course the scenarios don’t match the reality (they’re way worse) because you model bad things in scenarios, where people ignore you, so you know how prepared you might have to be. Like you’re going on a long journey, and you need to know what you’ll do if you can’t refuel at your first planned stop. Not what happens if everything goes wonderfully.

It’s all using public data, so it’s perfectly legitimate. Showing the gap doesn’t show a failure of scenarios, though. It shows the success of vaccination.
unique link to this extract

New Log4J flaw caps year of relentless cybersecurity crises • WSJ

David Uberti and Dustin Volz:

»

cyberattacks on major technology providers and the interconnected world of software and hardware that power the global economy continued at a relentless pace in 2021, according to US officials and security experts. Instead of one company being victimized at a time like in a traditional data breach, thousands were often exposed simultaneously. Businesses, hospitals and schools also worked to defend themselves against an onslaught of ransomware attacks, which increasingly reap $10m or more in extortion payments.

The annus horribilis culminated this month with discovery of a flaw in an obscure but widely used internet code known as Log4j, which one senior Biden administration official said was the worst she had seen in her career. The latest vulnerability comes as U.S. officials warn corporate leaders of a potential surge of cyberattacks while businesses slow their operations during the holiday season.

The string of incidents highlights how decades of digital transformation have linked business and government computer systems in opaque and sometimes surprising ways that will create new vulnerabilities. Major disruptions are certain to continue, cybersecurity officials said.

“Network defenders are exhausted,” said Joe Slowik, threat-intelligence lead at the security firm Gigamon. New attention and investment in cybersecurity hasn’t improved the status quo, he said. “Money is flowing into the field, but largely on technical solutions while the core need—more capable people—remains hard to address.”

«

Do we ever expect this to improve – to reach a state where we say “no, really, things actually got better in online security”? I can’t think there’s ever been a year where that happened. In some fields, perhaps, but overall no – and the discovery that NSO creates a computer from a bug in a compression algorithm suggests that our capabilities at exploiting flaws will only grow.
unique link to this extract

Amazon, Meta scrap CES plans in Las Vegas after Covid surge • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

Amazon, Meta Platforms, Pinterest, Twitter and several news outlets have cancelled plans to attend the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas, a response to surging Covid-19 cases around the world.

The show, put on by the Consumer Technology Association, is still scheduled to get underway in early January. But efforts to return to normal after an online-only event this year have been hindered by the raging omicron variant.

“Due to the spike in Covid cases across the country in the past week, we’ve decided to cancel our in-person presence at CES next month,” Twitter said in a statement. “We’ll continue to actively monitor the situation into the new year and find other opportunities to connect with our clients and partners.”

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, echoed those remarks. “Out of an abundance of caution and care for our employees, we won’t be attending CES in-person due to the evolving public health concerns related to Covid-19,” Meta said. The company is exploring how it can participate virtually.

Amazon and its smart-home subsidiary Ring did likewise. The retail and technology giant said that “due to the quickly shifting situation and uncertainty around the Omicron variant, we will no longer have an on-site presence at CES.”

T-Mobile US, a CES sponsor, said Tuesday it will “significantly limit” its in-person presence at the show. And chief executive officer Mike Sievert will no longer be giving a keynote speech at the event, either in-person or online. 

“The vast majority of our team will not be traveling to Las Vegas,” the wireless carrier said. The company “looks forward to an in-person CES 2023, which we hope includes an on-stage keynote in front of a live audience.”

«

CES is also, though, a place for Shenzhen companies to find buyers for their goods. Both buyers and sellers will surely be expecting a busy 2022. So while the top-line companies might not be there, there will be plenty of folk from the trenches of electronics.
unique link to this extract

What are FFP2 masks, mandatory in some European countries? • The Economist

»

FFP stands for “filtering face piece”. It is a European standard for mask efficiency, ranging from one, the lowest grade, to three, the highest. FFP2 masks filter at least 94% of all aerosols, including airborne viruses such as covid-19. America’s N95 and China’s KN95 masks provide similar levels of protection. These disposable masks have several layers of different fabrics, including a polypropylene filter, made by “melt-blowing” polymer to create miniscule, irregular fibre patterns that can trap the smallest airborne particles. A study published in December by the Max Planck Institute, a German research organisation, found well-fitting FFP2 masks reduced the risk of infection with covid-19 to 0.1%. Cloth or medical masks, on the other hand, merely disrupt the airflow of the speaker and trap the largest aerosol particles in their woven material. Their efficacy varies wildly depending on the design and fabric used: tight-fitting, multi-layered masks made from dense materials are much more effective than single-layer linen masks. One study in the Journal of Education and Health Promotion found surgical masks were three times more effective at preventing inhalation of aerosols than homemade cloth ones. Another study, in JAMA Internal Medicine, a journal, compared different cloth masks and found that their efficacy at containing viral particles ranged from 26% to 79%.

«

I wonder at this “reduced to 0.1%” – compared to what? (This is the paper.) FFP2 masks are now very cheap in Europe, though when wearing them you do look as though you’ve come to put foam insulation in the cavity walls.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess which site displaced Google as the busiest in 2021, according to CloudFlare? CC-licensed photo by Solen Feyissa on Flickr.

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

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

Still a few days left for charity time! It’s nearly Christmas, which is a good time for giving. I’d suggest all or any of:
• Shelter (or equivalent in your country)
• National Deaf Children’s Society (or equivalent in your country)
• Wikipedia (it’s an invaluable, unique resource)
• Internet Archive (ditto)
• any dog rescue centre. Dogs are a source of joy and inspiration: take a look at the wonderful Lollipop, who is completely indifferent to his nonfunctioning back legs, and then try to deny that.
Here’s Lollipop’s home.

TikTok got more traffic than freakin’ Google in 2021 • Gizmodo

Brianna Provenzano:

»

TikTok is truly unstoppable: The video-sharing platform just pushed Google aside to become the most popular website in the world, according to web performance and security company Cloudflare’s 2021 Year in Review internet traffic rankings.

TikTok cracked Cloudflare’s list of top 10 sites last year, coming in at seventh in popularity behind the .coms for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix and Amazon. For 2021, the order of that list is largely unchanged—Amazon jumped up one slot, switching places with Netflix—aside from TikTok’s surge to the top.

In a blog post, Cloudflare noted that comparing the numbers between the two years could yield potentially misleading results, since the service only culled data from September to December in 2020 (compared to all 12 months being accounted for in 2021). According to Cloudflare, TikTok first peaked in the global traffic rankings on Feb. 17, 2021, followed by a few more days in March and June and then, finally, a more permanent stay at the top beginning in late August.

The app’s popularity has surged during the pandemic; while it initially attracted a teenaged audience set on coordinating lip sync and dance videos, TikTok has since piqued the curiosity of users of all ages and demographics, who flock to the app for its cooking hacks, memes, and spirituality content, to name just a few topics.

«

The Cloudflare blogpost is absorbing in its own way, but what’s evident is that TikTok simply leapfrogged all the other sites, and pushed them down; the traffic back and forth to its servers must be colossal. (I can’t find the point at which Google became the largest site in the world; certainly before 2010, at a guess.)

Mark this: a Chinese site running an opaque algorithm choosing content to show to more than a billion people is now the No.1 website in the world. Also: “pivot to video”, indeed. (It started as a music lipsyncing site.)
unique link to this extract

If you’re after some Christmas reading, you could try Social Warming, my latest book, about how social networks are changing everything. TikTok is just a bigger harbinger.

Behind Manchin’s opposition, a long history of fighting climate measures • The New York Times

Jonathan Weisman and Lisa Friedman:

»

Mr. Manchin, who defied gale-force political headwinds in 2010 by running for the Senate on his opposition to President Barack Obama’s climate change legislation, killed a provision in Build Back Better that would have imposed stiff penalties on electric utilities that continued to burn coal and natural gas.

But even with the stick dropped from the House’s bill, West Virginia’s coal interests were working hard to kill off the measure’s carrot, a package of tax credits to make clean energy more financially competitive, and, by extension, struggling coal even less so. Their lobbyists talked frequently to Mr. Manchin.

With every Republican opposing the bill in the evenly divided Senate, Democratic leaders could not afford to lose a single vote, and Mr. Manchin has said he had concerns about energy issues from the start.

“I said, this is absolutely a very, very far-reaching piece of legislation which changes so many categories in American culture and American society, revamping the entire tax code and revamping the entire energy policies for our country — and the social platforms that we use to support people,” he told a West Virginia broadcaster on Monday.

West Virginia coal and gas, and policies designed to stop their burning, have always had a special place in Mr. Manchin’s politics. A Manchin family-owned business has made a small fortune selling waste coal from abandoned mines to a heavily polluting power plant in the state. The blind trust in which Mr. Manchin’s interests lie held between $500,000 and $1m last year, according to his most recent disclosure form. The company, Enersystems, valued at between $1m and $5m, delivered the senator $492,000 in dividends, interest and business income in 2020, the May disclosure states.

«

In 2018, Manchin defeated his Republican opponent by 29,000 votes, to represent a state ranking 40th in population: it has 1.8 million residents. (That’s about twice as many as Birmingham, but a whole lot less than London.)

He gets to decide what happens to millions of people. It’s utterly unrepresentative, as is the Senate.

Related: via Andrew Curry, Gen Z thinks the political system (among other things) is broken. Manchin is the proof.
unique link to this extract

Discovery of AirTag tracking device prevents double theft of truck • Fox 7 Austin

Rudy Koski:

»

A Fayette County Sheriff’s deputy was flagged down in Ellinger this week by a man reporting an AirTag in his truck that turned out to be stolen out of Harris County.

FCSO Lt. David Beyer told FOX 7 the man had told the deputy he was heading to work in Austin when he got an alert on his iPhone that he was being tracked.

“He got bamboozled, he got taken,” said Lt. Beyer.

An Apple AirTag was found between the passenger seat and center console. Investigators determined the truck, which the man had been purchased a few hours earlier in Houston, was actually a stolen vehicle.

Lt. Beyer believes a double steal was about to be in play. “I’m sure the individuals who had the tracking device in there probably had a key to it so all they had to do was follow this guy, to where ever the car was parked, get in it, take off in it,” he said.

The rightful owners of the stolen truck picked it up Thursday morning and the man who bought the stolen truck is out his $800 down payment. The theft case has been handed over to authorities in Houston.

Used car dealers have been using tracking devices for years, mainly for customers with bad credit, in case the vehicle has to be repossessed. La Grange mechanic Duane Evans installs tracking devices for car dealers. They’re typically connected to a power source to keep transmitting and increases the range.

“A lot of people get behind on their car payments, say I’ll take it out to my ranch, out here in the country or somewhere, hide the car until I catch up on the payments, and all of a sudden a wrecker comes pulling up the driveway, and they go, how in the world did you find this car, and its like, isn’t technology really grand,” said Evans.

«

Via Neil Cybart, who has been digging around the question of what’s going on with the police reports about AirTags in cars as preparations for theft. (There was another thread about this at the weekend, by a woman who claimed she kept getting warnings about a “device travelling with you”. She thought it might be a creep at a bar; more likely it’s either the dealer in case of a repo, or a jealous boyfriend.)

Seems like AirTags’ potential misuses or marginal uses are coming clearer. They’re not even a year old yet.
unique link to this extract

Understanding the Impact of Apache log4j vulnerability • Google Online Security Blog

James Wetter and Nicky Ringland, Open Source Insights Team:

»

As of December 16, 2021, we found that 35,863 of the available Java artifacts from Maven Central depend on the affected log4j code. This means that more than 8% of all packages on Maven Central have at least one version that is impacted by this vulnerability. (These numbers do not encompass all Java packages, such as directly distributed binaries, but Maven Central is a strong proxy for the state of the ecosystem.)

As far as ecosystem impact goes, 8% is enormous. The average ecosystem impact of advisories affecting Maven Central [the most significant Java repository] is 2%, with the median less than 0.1%.

Direct dependencies account for around 7,000 of the affected artifacts, meaning that any of its versions depend upon an affected version of log4j-core or log4j-api, as described in the CVEs. The majority of affected artifacts come from indirect dependencies (that is, the dependencies of one’s own dependencies), meaning log4j is not explicitly defined as a dependency of the artifact, but gets pulled in as a transitive dependency.

«

It’s sort of like Omicron, but for security vulnerability.
unique link to this extract

Now in your inbox: political misinformation • The New York Times

Maggie Astor:

»

A few weeks ago, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, falsely claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation’s social safety net, would include Medicare for all.

It doesn’t, and never has. But few noticed Mr. Crenshaw’s lie because he didn’t say it on Facebook, or on Fox News. Instead, he sent the false message directly to the inboxes of his constituents and supporters in a fund-raising email.

Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. But email — one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people — teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice.

The New York Times signed up in August for the campaign lists of the 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022 whose websites offered that option, and read more than 2,500 emails from those campaigns to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used to help fill political coffers.

Both parties delivered heaps of hyperbole in their emails. One Republican, for instance, declared that Democrats wanted to establish a “one-party socialist state,” while a Democrat suggested that the party’s Jan. 6 inquiry was at imminent risk because the G.O.P. “could force the whole investigation to end early.”

But Republicans included misinformation far more often: in about 15% of their messages, compared with about 2% for Democrats. In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s.

«

Strictly it should be called political disinformation, because (as Nina Jankowicz pointed out, on a related topic) “there is malign intent driving it, whether profit or power”.
unique link to this extract

The year of garbage internet trends • Vox

Rebecca Jennings:

»

Sea shanties [a big thing from, errr, January 9th to 23rd] are the framework with which I view a great many things that happened in 2021, because so many of them were entirely meaningless fads: blips on the radar lasting only for a moment but just long enough to obscure some larger, more important picture. It is fascinating to trace the origins of these glitches of nothingness: inconsequential tweets that turned into inconsequential TikToks that turned into inconsequential news articles that somehow, suddenly seemed more consequential than anything else that day.

In 2021 the race to identify the next fad became a bloodsport: Trendwatching, and, to a slightly lesser extent, trend naming, have become such popular hobbies on social media that even professional trend forecasters are beginning to tire of it. “Last spring there was a trend going around of people talking about the trends they hate,” recalls Mandy Lee, a trend analyst and popular fashion TikToker under the username @oldloserinbrooklyn, “and I was like, ‘How is this the content that’s going viral?’ Ironically, it’s a trend about a trend, therefore it becomes a trend.”

In October, Lee made a video predicting that the “indie sleaze” aesthetic, widely regarded as the American Apparel-slash-Cobrasnake hipster early-Lady Gaga vibe popular in the mid 2000s to the early 2010s, might be heading for a resurgence now that the Y2K McBling aesthetic has gone mainstream. The video went viral, and within days media publications from Dazed to the Daily Mail began writing trend stories citing her video. But they weren’t really stories about what’s currently happening — they were stories about what could soon be a fashion trend.

«

This will only get worse: shorter and shorter, faster and faster.
unique link to this extract

Octopuses keep surprising us; here are eight examples • Natural History Museum

Lisa Hendry:

»

Scientists use the size of an animal’s brain relative to its body as a rough guide to its intelligence, as it gives an indication of how much an animal is ‘investing’ in its brain.

It’s not a perfect measure, as other factors such as the degree of folding in the brain also play a role, but smarter animals tend to have a higher brain-to-body ratio.

An octopus’s brain-to-body ratio is the largest of any invertebrate. It’s also larger than many vertebrates, although not mammals.

Octopuses have about as many neurons as a dog – the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) has around 500 million. About two thirds are located in its arms. The rest are in the doughnut-shaped brain, which is wrapped around the oesophagus and located in the octopus’s head.

Octopuses have demonstrated intelligence in a number of ways, says Jon. ‘In experiments they’ve solved mazes and completed tricky tasks to get food rewards. They’re also adept at getting themselves in and out of containers.’

There are also intriguing anecdotes about octopuses’ abilities and mischievous behaviour.

‘I remember reading one about a lab where all the fish were going missing from their tank,’ says Jon. ‘The staff set up a little video camera and it turned out that one of the octopuses was getting out of its tank, going to the other tank, opening it, eating the fish, closing the lid, going back to its own tank and hiding the evidence.’

There is footage of similar sneaky behaviour and ingenious problem-solving happening in the wild.

«

Andrew Curry (him again!) made the point that octopuses are essentially aliens we’ve learnt to communicate with. Certainly there’s no justification for eating them when we know this. (I bet the first human-written book they learn to read will be titled “How to Serve Octopus”.)
unique link to this extract

Woola raises €2.5M seed led by Future Ventures to replace bubble wrap with wool • TechCrunch

Mike Butcher:

»

Some 55 billion parcels are shipped in bubble wrap every year. Plastic bubble wrap is reliant on fossil fuels and 98% of plastic packaging is single-use. You can imagine the adverse environmental impact of all this plastic.

The founders of Woola were running an online e-commerce store and saw the packaging problem firsthand. The lack of options in sustainable and scalable protective packaging led to them re-discovering wool — an unused resource that is elastic and regulates temperatures and humidity.

The result was their startup, which uses leftover sheep wool to replace bubble wrap. These wool-based packages can be reused, repurposed, or returned by the end user, with the ultimate goal of making the solution “closed-loop” so nothing goes to waste.

«

This is, of course, good, but it should be noted that the photo accompanying the story is marvellous.
unique link to this extract

Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic, study finds • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

»

Microbes in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic, according to a study.

The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.

The study is the first large-scale global assessment of the plastic-degrading potential of bacteria and found that one in four of the organisms analysed carried a suitable enzyme. The researchers found that the number and type of enzymes they discovered matched the amount and type of plastic pollution in different locations.

The results “provide evidence of a measurable effect of plastic pollution on the global microbial ecology”, the scientists said.

Millions of tonnes of plastic are dumped in the environment every year, and the pollution now pervades the planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. Reducing the amount of plastic used is vital, as is the proper collection and treatment of waste.

But many plastics are currently hard to degrade and recycle. Using enzymes to rapidly break down plastics into their building blocks would enable new products to be made from old ones, cutting the need for virgin plastic production. The new research provides many new enzymes to be investigated and adapted for industrial use.

«

Question is, once you get bacteria that can eat plastic, how do you stop them? Bacteria aren’t exactly the most cooperative of beasts. Or else you’ll have the bacteria chomping the plastic, and then you’ll need to zap the entire area before they chew up the cars, planes, electrical insulating wire…
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In happier times – for her at least – Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes was fêted. Now a jury is deciding whether she is a fraudster. CC-licensed photo by TechCrunch on Flickr.

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

Charity time! It’s nearly Christmas, which is a good time for giving. I’d suggest all or any of:
• Shelter (or equivalent in your country)
• National Deaf Children’s Society (or equivalent in your country)
• Wikipedia (it’s an invaluable, unique resource)
• the Internet Archive (ditto)
• any dog rescue centre (dogs are a source of joy and inspiration: watch the wonderful Lollipop and then try to deny that). Here’s Lollipop’s home.

Better paywalls won’t save us from what’s coming • Nieman Journalism Lab

Sam Guzik:

»

Over the summer, researchers at Google published a paper laying out a vision for a new type of search engine. Instead of delivering users a list of links in response to their query, a natural language model would directly summarize information from multiple sources on the Internet.

That aligns with a broader shift in how users are searching for information. More than 40% of internet users around the world say that they use voice search — whether deployed in AI assistants or as a feature in browser-based search engines. That suggests that consumers are getting more comfortable interacting with their devices by speaking commands (and hearing the results).

As we contend with how natural language search interfaces will upend what we know about audience strategy, we also need to prepare for a world where users increasingly consume news on wearable devices.

The evidence tells us that these trends will continue in 2022. Users will spend more time with devices without screens. They will get information directly from AI assistants that can summarize information without sending the user to a news website. The question for us is: What are we going to do about it?

How will we fund our newsrooms if users’ browsing habits change and they don’t hit paywalls as they do today? What’s the value of news if users engage with devices that give them an always-on stream of information? How will the value of our newsgathering change if users spend more time on immersive digital platforms that record their interactions automatically?

«

This partly explains why news organisations are very keen to have audio output (The Times in London has been very active, creating its own internet and digital radio station) which can then be relayed over smart speakers as needed. The shift to non-screen systems (whether voice or other) plus the automatic summarisation of content from multiple sources really creates a question of how you can create value from news.
unique link to this extract

Facebook failing at Finnish moderation • Yle Uutiset

»

A Facebook data leak has revealed that Finnish-language moderation rests with a handful of moderators, eleven people working in Berlin. While the social media giant praises the efficiency of its automated moderation tools, documents obtained by Yle show that these are of little use when it comes to small languages like Finnish.

The company’s ability to detect hate speech is not as good as Facebook has led users to believe. Moderation for languages like Finnish is often half-baked, a fact apparent in thousands of pages of leaked internal Facebook documents obtained by Yle.

These documents show that Facebook has not developed Finnish-language automated moderation for things like hate speech, violence and nudity.

Facebook has always wanted to keep the inner workings of its moderation secret. It has, for example, not wanted to say how many workers it has moderating content in different languages. It has also refused to reveal in which languages it employs automatic moderation.

The company turned down two separate requests from Yle to discuss how it carries out Finnish-language moderation.

Globally Facebook employs some 15,000 people whose job it is to trawl through published posts. These moderators, who mainly work through subcontractors, scrutinise content in 70 different languages.

When it comes to Finnish moderators, we now know there’s about ten of them working in Berlin.

«

Finland’s population is more than 5.5 million. Also: moderation problems grow geometrically as the network grows linearly.
unique link to this extract

If you want a review/recommendation of Social Warming, my latest book on the effects of Facebook and other social netowrks on society and democracy, there’s one here from John Naughton. Thanks John!

Google ending OnHub router support & Home control in 2022 • 9to5Google

Abner Li:

»

Before Google Wifi was announced alongside the original Pixel phone, Google a year earlier released OnHub-branded routers from Asus and TP-Link. In late 2022, Google will end support for OnHub routers that will be seven years old at that time.

In August of 2015, Google unveiled a router manufactured by TP-Link ($199.99) running its software and featuring a “front-facing antenna reflector that acts like a satellite dish” to deliver the fastest possible speeds to everything in that direction. This was followed by an Asus model ($219.99) later that October with a physical gesture/wave over the top starting device prioritization, while OTAs added various new features. After Google Wifi launched, both often saw simultaneous updates.

Meanwhile, Google offered shells to customize the TP-Link version, including those from designer studios. It was quite wild, and could vaguely be seen as a precursor to the interchangeable bases that the first-generation Home speaker offered.

At six years old, currently, Google said “a lot has changed” in the router landscape, and that it will end support for them on December 19, 2022. This is according to emails that customers (via Droid-Life) have been receiving and a new support document.

Until that date, “your OnHub router will continue to work as normal,” but without security updates for new software features. The last combined OnHub and Google Wifi update came in October of 2019, while Google and Nest Wifi have had several OTAs since then.

«

As of one year from now, the routers will produce a Wi-Fi signal, but you won’t be able to manage them through the Google Home app: no updating Wi-Fi settings, add new Wi-Fi devices, or run speed tests.

“A lot has changed” in routers? Apart from Apple getting out of the business, the competition has only got more intense.
unique link to this extract

How China surveils the world • MIT Technology Review

Mara Hvistendahl speaks to Samantha Hoffman of the Australian Strategy Policy Institute, who has written a report on Chinese data-gathering:

»

Q: What is the CCP doing with all of this data?
A: The CCP collects data in bulk and worries about what to do with it later. Even if it’s not all immediately usable, the Party anticipates better technical ability to exploit the data later on. 

Large data sets can reveal patterns and trends in human behavior, which help the CCP with intelligence and propaganda as well as surveillance. Some of that data is fed into tools such as the social credit system. Bulk data, like images and voice data, can also be used to train algorithms for facial and voice recognition. 

The CCP’s methods are not that different from what we see in the global advertising industry. But instead of trying to sell a product, the CCP is trying to exert authoritarian control. It’s using capitalism as a vehicle to access data that can help it disrupt democratic processes and create a more favorable global environment for its power. 

Q: Why is this a threat outside China?
A: Citizens of liberal democracies are rightly concerned with how tech companies abuse their data, but at least in liberal democracies there are growing restraints on how data is used. In China, where the party-state literally says that the purpose of the law is to “strengthen and improve the Party’s leadership,” technology is deployed to extend the political power of the party-state and developed according to that standard. The Party talks about its intent to shape global public opinion in order to protect and expand its own political power. At the same time, Chinese tech companies collect data in support of such efforts. Anyone living in a liberal democracy should be concerned about the ramifications this has for freedoms and privacy. 

Q: So should we all delete TikTok from our phones?
A: I will not put it on mine. TikTok is a good example of a seemingly benign app that can give the CCP a lot of useful data.

«

The article is paywalled. Unfortunately if your Javascript breaks, so does the paywall.
unique link to this extract

Exclusive: Polish opposition duo hacked with NSO spyware • Associated Press

Frank Bajak and Vanessa Gera:

»

The aggressive cellphone break-ins of a high-profile lawyer representing top Polish opposition figures came in the final weeks of pivotal 2019 parliamentary elections. Two years later, a prosecutor challenging attempts by the populist right-wing government to purge the judiciary had her smartphone hacked.

In both instances, the invader was military-grade spyware from NSO Group, the Israeli hack-for-hire outfit that the US government recently blacklisted, say digital sleuths of the University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab internet watchdog.

Citizen Lab could not say who ordered the hacks and NSO does not identify its clients, beyond saying it works only with legitimate government agencies. But both victims believe Poland’s increasingly illiberal government is responsible.

A Polish state security spokesman, Stanislaw Zaryn, would neither confirm nor deny whether the government ordered the hacks or is an NSO customer.

Lawyer Roman Giertych and prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek join a list of government critics worldwide whose phones have been hacked using the company’s Pegasus product.

«

Becoming harder and harder for NSO to justify its actions. Wonder if this will lead to more sanctions from other countries (the EU?) and what effect those would have. If it’s a software company, how do sanctions affect it, exactly?
unique link to this extract

A COVID-denying kickboxing world champion just died from Covid • Vice

David Gilbert:

»

Fred Sinistra, 40, was unvaccinated and would not even use the term COVID-19, his coach Osman Yigin told Belgian outlet SudInfo. Instead, he dismissed COVID-19 as “a little virus” and railed against government restrictions. 

But after the kickboxer contracted COVID-19, Yigin said he told Sinistra that if he did not admit himself to hospital, he would no longer train the former world champion. Sinistra did go to the hospital, and posted several pictures of himself on Facebook and Instagram inside an intensive care ward in Liège. 

But in a video posted on Facebook on Nov. 24, Sinistra is clearly struggling to catch his breath as he railed against the pandemic, dismissed COVID-19, and claimed that a “little virus” was not going to stop him. “I have no time to waste with lazy people,” Sinistra wrote in an accompanying caption.

On November 26,  Sinistra said he was “disgusted” that a planned fight on December 4 had been cancelled. “A warrior never abdicates, I will come back even stronger,” Sinistra wrote. Days later, he discharged himself from the hospital and returned home where he reportedly treated himself with oxygen.  

On December 13, Sinistra replied to comments on his Facebook page, writing: “Thank you all for your support. I’m home recovering, as I should. I will come back a thousand times stronger.”

Three days later Sinistra’s death was announced by his partner on his Facebook page.

«

Not the sort of person you’d expect to die from Covid. But the ways this virus messes with your body is essentially impossible to predict.
unique link to this extract

The future is not only useless, it’s expensive • Gawker

Dan Brooks:

»

this is why the future, be it NFTs or Memoji or the howling existential horror of the Metaverse, looks so ugly and boring: it reflects the stunted inner lives of the finance and technology professionals who produced it. As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer.

It is also obviously a pyramid scheme, in which the need for a salable commodity is imperative and endlessly renewed, but the commodity itself does not matter because it is useless — not even useless the way all art is useless, because you can get the images and whatever grains of nourishment your hungry little soul might find in them for free, but useless the way a canceled stamp is useless, useless like a receipt or an envelope that has been torn open. NFTs are an occasion for commerce masquerading as art, just as so many ostensibly meaningful experiences of the 21st century turn out to be occasions to spend money masquerading as life.

That’s how they feel to me, anyway. Presumably there is someone out there right now — not [NFT hawker Sean] Lennon but one of this followers, someone who consistently refers to him as “Sean Ono Lennon, whose dad was John Lennon from the Beatles, one of the greatest bands of all time” at a speed 1.5 times faster than normal talking — who saw SkullxNFT and experienced it as some of the most beautiful and emotionally moving art in history, right up there with the Mona Lisa and Avengers: Endgame.

«

unique link to this extract

Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 • O’Reilly

Tim O’Reilly is the guy who defined “Web 2.0” (among other things), so he’s the one to ask about the whole “Web3” thing:

»

During my career, we have gone through several cycles of decentralization and recentralization. The personal computer decentralized computing by providing a commodity PC architecture that anyone could build and that no one controlled. But Microsoft figured out how to recentralize the industry around a proprietary operating system. Open source software, the internet, and the World Wide Web broke the stranglehold of proprietary software with free software and open protocols, but within a few decades, Google, Amazon, and others had built huge new monopolies founded on big data.

Clayton Christensen generalized this pattern as the law of conservation of attractive profits: “When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

Blockchain developers believe that this time they’ve found a structural answer to recentralization, but I tend to doubt it. An interesting question to ask is what the next locus for centralization and control might be. The rapid consolidation of bitcoin mining into a small number of hands by way of lower energy costs for computation indicates one kind of recentralization. There will be others.

…None of the examples in the article [in the NYT about crypto] focus on the utility of what is being created, just the possibility that they will make their investors and creators rich.

And it’s not just mainstream media that’s doing breathless reporting about the money to be made as if the creation of actual value were irrelevant. Stories from those who’ve gone down the “crypto rabbit hole” are eloquent on the subject of access to riches

«

“I tend to doubt it” isn’t really what you want to hear from O’Reilly. (Though of course this will be dismissed by the believers as “not getting it”.)
unique link to this extract

Jury in Elizabeth Holmes’s fraud trial has begun deliberations • The New York Times

Erin Griffith:

»

A jury on Monday began deliberating the merits of the fraud trial against Elizabeth Holmes, the entrepreneur accused of lying to investors and patients about her blood testing start-up, Theranos.

Ms. Holmes’s trial has stretched nearly four months, with testimony from dozens of witnesses including scientists, chief executives and a four-star general. The proceedings have come to represent a defining moment for the tech industry and its culture of overly optimistic salesmanship.

The jury of eight men and four women is debating whether prosecutors have shown, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Ms. Holmes committed nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud while pitching Theranos to investors and patients. Her former business partner and boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani, was indicted alongside her in 2018. Both have pleaded not guilty. Mr. Balwani faces trial next year.

Each of the 11 counts carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, though they would most likely be served concurrently. Deliberations are scheduled for Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.

Ms. Holmes’s case stands out for its rarity: Few tech executives have been indicted over fraud, fewer have gone to prison and even fewer than that have been women.

«

First time for everything, of course. The big question is whether the prosecution managed to pin responsibility on Holmes, who tried to deflect everything onto Balwani.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

The Echo Show from Amazon is a sort of iPad for making video calls. Should Apple follow suit? CC-licensed photo by Rosenfeld Media on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Hello, I’m not on the train. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Charity time! It’s nearly Christmas, which is a good time for giving. I’d suggest all or any of:
• Shelter (or equivalent in your country)
• National Deaf Children’s Society (or equivalent in your country)
• Wikipedia (it’s an invaluable, unique resource)
• the Internet Archive (ditto)
• any dog rescue centre (dogs are a source of joy and inspiration: watch a different video of Lollipop and then try to deny that). Here’s Lollipop’s home.

How panic over rumored school shooting threats went viral • The Verge

Mia Sato:

»

On Thursday, officials across the country were responding to viral posts on social media saying schools would be the target of shootings on December 17th. Some canceled classes or allowed kids to stay home. Others said they would increase police presence on campus. And some simply said they were monitoring the situation. But just about everyone was united in one message: the threats officials were hearing about were deemed to be not credible.

TikTok, meanwhile, was awash in videos: “POV your parents are making you stay home because of the December 17th trend,” reads one post. “Guys stay safe; I’m staying home,” says another. “Hope everybody is okay.”

Now into Friday afternoon, there thankfully haven’t been reports of widespread violence at schools, and TikTok has begun to remove some of the more alarming warnings on its platform about the potential for violence. But it’s still unknown where the warnings started — or if threats of violence even existed in the first place.

It’s easy to see how the concern spread, though, since people who saw warnings of school violence on TikTok were likely primed to react. The rumors were spreading just weeks after a deadly school attack. And viral threats have a history of taking hold when they prey on what people worry about the most, especially when the source is thought to be a new technology.

“We can think about media panics going back several centuries, potentially, but at least over the past 100 years,” James Walsh, associate professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, who has written about social media and societal panic, tells The Verge. “Adult society has always been concerned about how new media content or new media technologies are going to corrupt young, impressionable minds.”

«

In a hyperconnected world, these panics can wash across a nation in no time at all. And TikTok is supremely tuned for it. Paying attention to it?
unique link to this extract

Omicron puts spotlight on UK’s use of rapid tests to stem Covid spread • Financial Times

Hannah Kuchler:

»

Lateral flow tests return results faster than PCRs and are far cheaper — but less accurate. The rapid tests contain a strip of antibodies that turns red if it reacts with the plentiful protein that makes up the virus’ shell. PCR tests detect the presence of virus earlier and in smaller quantities because they amplify the sample and pick out genetic signatures. In the UK, people are advised to have a PCR test to confirm a positive result.

The sheer number of cases of Covid-19 in the UK — up 44% to 534,415 in the past seven days means that LFTs will pick up more cases, but they will also miss more people who could spread the disease.

Tom Lewis, a medical microbiologist at North Devon district hospital, said the tests were most useful if you understand how likely it is that you are infected — and the probability someone is carrying the virus has changed “overnight”. 

If you assume 1 in 100 people is now infected, he said, there will be an average of four people at risk of spreading the virus at a 400-person event. Based on experience, lateral flow tests will pick up only two.

“That doesn’t sound much, but two people are now moving around in that room with Covid and infectious . . . they have about a 50% chance of transmitting, probably higher now with the Omicron variant. It’s definitely a transmission event,” he said.

But he said the tests make people feel safe. “The lateral flows are a massive confidence trick,” he added.

«

Basically the diagram says it:
unique link to this extract

Apple should sell bigger iPad for smart home; Amazon Echo Show 15 review • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman with his weekly opinion column (though Bloomberg affects a neutrality that would make the BBC whistle):

»

It has iMacs on desks, iPads and MacBooks in backpacks, Apple Watches on wrists, iPhones in pockets, Apple TVs in living rooms and AirPods in ears. In the future, it may have headsets on faces and self-driving cars on roads.

But Apple has been a laggard in one key area: the home. It’s way behind rivals such as Amazon and Alphabet Inc.’s Google in smart speakers and related devices—and not by design. Apple knows the importance of the home market.

That’s why it launched HomeKit in 2014, letting customers control appliances from iPhones and iPads, and debuted the HomePod smart speaker in 2017. The initial HomePod was a flop, but a newer $99 version has sold better. HomeKit also has picked up some steam by gaining support for more types of accessories.

Still, Apple has just 5% of the smart speaker market, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Amazon, with its Alexa voice assistant, accounts for 69% of sales, with Google coming in second at 25%. 

And Apple lacks a do-it-all home hub—a device with a screen—making it all the harder to catch up.

Apple could learn a thing or two from its rivals. After testing out Amazon’s new Echo Show 15 and the Facebook Portal—from the company now calling itself Meta Platforms Inc.—I think I know the path forward: a giant iPad.

I have found the Echo Show 15—with its large display—to be a compelling device for checking the weather, controlling smart home appliances, watching security footage, and reading notes and lists each morning. While widgets are currently limited on the device, I do think the big touch screen is a compelling platform if Amazon and developers choose to take advantage of it.

«

A classic of the genre, where the genre is “deciding things Apple should make” (see also: netbook, gaming laptop, etc etc) and “spending Tim Cook’s money”.
unique link to this extract

Ten lessons in productivity and brainstorming from The Beatles • Fluxx Studio Notes

Tom Whitwell:

»

The first part of Peter Jackson’s epic Beatles documentary Get Back is a masterclass in facilitation and creative management. Paul McCartney tries a stoned, grumpy band through writing, arranging, recording and performing dozens of songs within a short deadline.

He’s using the Design Thinking playbook, 20 years before it was written…

«

The ten lessons that Whitwell draws out are excellent, and make really good points. One thing you’re probably not aware of (I wasn’t; haven’t watch the documentary) is this:

»

The deadlines on the project are absurd. They have to write, record and perform an album of songs in 12 days. As Paul says “we’ve got to do it methodically this one… we’ve got to get some system to get through 20–30 songs.”

«

Astonishing productivity.
unique link to this extract

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Developer GSC Game World U-turns on NFTs • Kotaku

Luke Plunkett:

»

STALKER 2 developers GSC Game World announced yesterday that they’d be adding NFTs to the game. Public reception was, as you’d imagine, not kind.

NFTs (and the blockchain itself) are an environmental disaster, a pump-and-dump scam, and a pointless assault on existing technologies and systems that don’t need fixing. So whichever approach you want to come at them from—or all three if you like, I’m not here to stop you—they suck.

I think fan reaction was best summed up by this top-voted comment on Reddit, which simply said:

They literally had to do nothing to keep me hyped for that game and still fucked it up.

You would think that a video game studio connected to the internet in any way in 2021 would have seen this coming, but then [there’s a tweet pointing out that the game doesn’t have any female characters, and then they got into NFTs].

Anyway, 24 hours after making the announcement, and having taken flak for all of those 24 hours, the studio decided it was time to tweet out an “apology” letter. Of course it didn’t actually apologise for anything, aside from a perceived “miscommunication”…

… Not long after publishing the tweet (and being called out all over again) GSC went and deleted it.

An hour later they instead, announced the decision to “cancel anything NFT-related in STALKER 2,” with an incredible statement. After outlining in their earlier tweet how NFTs were going to help fund development, this time they essentially blame fans for depriving GSC Game World of a scammy source of revenue:

«

Game folk really, really don’t like NFTs.
unique link to this extract

Notes on Web3 • Robin Sloan

Where “Web3” is the platform of cryptocurrency systems being built on top of everything else:

»

Here are my notes on Web3:

• It’s for kids. I mean that in a good way! I think Web3 has res onated pow er fully with young peo ple because it feels like some thing gen uinely new, and it feels like it can be theirs. Who could argue with those feelings? Not me.

• I think Web3 is pro pelled by exhaus tion as much as by excite ment. This isn’t appar ent on the surface, but I believe it’s there, lurk ing just below. If you are 22 years old, Twit ter has been around for about as long as you’ve known how to read. YouTube is fixed as firmly as the stars. I honestly don’t know how that feels, but I wonder if it’s claustrophobic?

• I have vivid mem o ries of the fer ment of the late 2000s, a new social net work flar ing up every week! I lived in San Francisco; they were build ing them in South Park. That fun froth hard ened into a com pact drama tis per sonae that has remained basi cally unchanged for years now. So, here comes Web3 — and the basic emo tional appeal of NEW OPTIONS can not be overstated.

• Many Web3 boost ers see them selves as disruptors, but “tokenize all the things” is noth ing if not an obe di ent con tin u a tion of “market-ize all the things”, the cam paign started in the 1970s, hugely suc cessful, ongoing. I think the World Wide Web was the real rupture — “Where … is the money?”—which Web 2.0 smoothed over and Web3 now attempts to seal totally.

• A large frac tion of Web3’s mag net ism comes from the value of the under ly ing cryptocurrencies. Therefore, a good diag nos tic ques tion to ask might be: would you still be curi ous about Web3 if those cur ren cies were worthless, in dol lar terms? For some peo ple, the answer is “yes, absolutely”, because they find the foun da tional puz zles so compelling. For others, if they’re honest, the answer is “nnnot reallyyy”.

«

There’s plenty more too. This seems a good outline of the desire that’s driving so many people to call it “Web3” (which also includes “people don’t seem to believe us when we say it’s like the early web, so maybe if we say it’s like Web 2.0 then they’ll be impressed”).
unique link to this extract

Open letter from The BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg • The BMJ

Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbas:

»

We are Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of The BMJ, one of the world’s oldest and most influential general medical journals. We are writing to raise serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party providers on behalf of Facebook/Meta.

In September, a former employee of Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, began providing The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.

The BMJ commissioned an investigative reporter to write up the story for our journal. The article was published on 2 November, following legal review, external peer review and subject to The BMJ’s usual high level editorial oversight and review.[1]

But from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context … Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”

Readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.[2]

We find the “fact check” performed by Lead Stories to be inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.

— It fails to provide any assertions of fact that The BMJ article got wrong

— It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials”

— The first paragraph inaccurately labels The BMJ a “news blog”

— It contains a screenshot of our article with a stamp over it stating “Flaws Reviewed,” despite the Lead Stories article not identifying anything false or untrue in The BMJ article

— It published the story on its website under a URL that contains the phrase “hoax-alert”

«

And that’s not the worst of it. The social networks haven’t covered themselves in glory at all in their fact checking in the past two years.
unique link to this extract

Sidewalk Labs products will be folded into Google proper • Engadget

Kris Holt:

»

Alphabet’s smart city project is winding down and Google will take over its products. Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff announced the news in a letter, in which he noted he is stepping down for health-related reasons. A spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that Sidewalk Labs products will be folded into Google, though Alphabet plans to spin out Canopy Buildings as a separate company.

“Starting next year, Sidewalk products Pebble, Mesa, Delve, and Affordable Electrification will join Google, becoming core to Google’s urban sustainability product efforts,” Doctoroff wrote. “These products will continue to be led by Sidewalk Labs President of Urban Products Prem Ramaswami and Chief Technology Officer Craig Nevill-Manning, both Google alumni, and the teams will continue to execute on their vision and serve customers.”

Pebble is a vehicle sensor system designed to manage curb and parking space, and Delve is centered around bolstering real estate development with the help of AI. Mesa sensors are designed to help save energy, while Affordable Electrification is about managing home energy use. Canopy Buildings, meanwhile, focuses on “factory-automated mass timber construction.”

«

Hard to tell whether this means that Sidewalk is a success or not. It isn’t successful enough after six years to stand on its own, but then nothing that gets big enough within the Alphabet umbrella is going to be let to carry on. (The exception could have been Waymo, the self-driving car bit.) I’d guess this means that it’s mostly going to languish – never getting anything like the attention that it did as a stand-alone division.
unique link to this extract

John Henry HyperCard Sampler • They Might Be Giants

Jon Uleis takes us back to 1994:

»

They Might Be Giants has just completed a new album, John Henry, which will be in the stores this August, but you don’t have to wait until then to experience the twenty new songs (interpretive snippets in extremely crappy lo-fidelity) presented here for your listening enjoyment!

«

The original was a Hypercard product (well, it was 1994) but Uleis has rewritten it in HTML5. Neat! (It’s not the real music, of course, but this is to some extent a dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs thing.
unique link to this extract

Find out if 5G is worth the upgrade: a multi-country analysis • Speedtest

»

The holidays are nearly here and with them the desire to treat yourself or a loved one to an upgraded phone, just because. The first question you’re likely to ask yourself as you browse new models is “To 5G or not to 5G?” Once you check the Ookla 5G Map™ to see if your operator has deployed 5G in your area, you’ll probably want to know if the 5G speeds are worth the extra cost. We’ve analyzed Speedtest Intelligence® data from the most popular Android and iPhone devices around the world during Q3 2021 to help you see if it’s worth the upgrade. Click a country from the list to jump down to the related analysis.

• Australia
• Bahrain
• Canada
• China
• France
• Japan
• Saudi Arabia
• South Africa
• South Korea
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom
• United States

Our analysis includes data on the five 4G Android devices in each country with the largest number of results during Q3 2021 as well as the five most popular 5G-capable Android devices. We have also compared the iPhone 13 to the iPhone 11. Even the fastest device can only perform at the level of the network it’s on. For that reason, speeds for the same device vary widely from country to country in the data below.

«

Generally, it’s faster. Quite a bit faster. But hardly worth the trouble of buying a new phone (or moving country) specifically. Speaking of 5G…
unique link to this extract

Anti-5G necklaces found to be radioactive • BBC News

»

Mobile networks use non-ionising radio waves that do not damage DNA.
Despite this, there have been attacks on transmitters by people who believe they are harmful.

The products identified included an “Energy Armor” sleeping mask, bracelet and necklace. A bracelet for children, branded Magnetix Wellness, was also found to be emitting radiation.

“Don’t wear it any more, put it away safely and wait for the return instructions,” the [Dutch authority fo nuclear safety and radiation protection] ANVS said in a statement.

“The sellers in the Netherlands known to the ANVS have been told that the sale is prohibited and must be stopped immediately, and that they must inform their customers about this.”

Conspiracy theories have fuelled a market of “anti-5G” devices that are typically found to have no effect.

In May 2020, the UK’s Trading Standards sought to halt sales of a £339 USB stick that claimed to offer “protection” from 5G.

«

Classic. It could only be better if you had to paint a sign on (being sure to lick the paintbrush tip first).
unique link to this extract

If you’re still looking for a Christmas book, either as a gift or for yourself, how about Social Warming, my latest book, on how social networks are affecting our society just as global warming is affecting the climate.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified