Using an Apple AirTag to track your car keys is probably wise. But what if criminals hide an AirTag in your car with a view to stealing it later, because they’ll know where it is? CC-licensed photo by ajay_suresh 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. Projected onto your brain. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple’s iPhone successor comes into focus • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»

Accomplishing full AR [augmented reality] in a lightweight, easily worn device is a technical challenge that has defeated all comers, but this won’t be the case forever, says Hugo Swart, vice president of XR and the metaverse at Qualcomm. (“XR” is an industry term that encompasses augmented, mixed and virtual reality.) In 10 years, we will be close to the “holy grail” of augmented-reality glasses that are both light enough for prolonged and everyday use, and as capable as today’s bulky AR and VR headsets, he adds.

Mr. Swart has a unique vantage point on the industry, since he oversees the division at Qualcomm that provides the microchips that power devices including Meta’s latest Oculus Quest 2 headset, Vuzix’s Shield glasses, Microsoft’s HoloLens 2, and Niantic’s forthcoming device, among others.

Mr. Swart thinks one solution for AR is to have a lot of the required computing happen on a device everyone already has—their smartphone—and connecting with the headset via the new Wi-Fi 6e standard. That could enable fast, high-bandwidth connection between the two that allows the phone to do most of the processing work.

Mr. Hanke says Niantic and other companies are working on such solutions, in order to bring full AR to a glasses-like form factor. “Doing this means a fair amount of mass and heat dissipation that doesn’t have to go on your head anymore,” he adds.

That approach also would play to Apple’s strengths, given the iPhone’s popularity. And, if Apple does opt to offload much of the necessary processing to the iPhone to keep its smart glasses svelte, it could further entrench the iPhone as the dominant mobile device in many markets, says Mr. Boland, the analyst. As growth in demand for smartphones slows, Apple’s strategy has been to sell more and more accessories, like watches and headphones, and adding smart glasses to that growing list just makes sense, he adds.

«

AR has been around for quite a while: I was trying AR ski goggles back in early 2012, and they were a lot more convenient than trying to operate a phone with ski gloves on. At the time, everyone thought AR glasses were just around the corner; turned out Google Glass was a bust (mostly), but batteries and chip efficiencies, especially Apple’s, have moved on a lot since then.

Best guess is a launch of some sort by the end of 2022 – though remember that the Apple Watch was announced but not released for months, and its v1 was dire. This could be the same: a slow burn to success.
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Earth is getting a black box to record our climate change actions, and it’s already started listening • ABC News

Nick Kilvert:

»

When an aeroplane crashes, it’s left to investigators to sift through the wreckage to recover the black box. It’s hoped the recorded contents can be used to help others avoid the same fate.

And so it is with Earth’s Black Box: a 10-metre-by-4-metre-by-3-metre steel monolith that’s about to be built on a remote outcrop on Tasmania’s west coast.

Chosen for its geopolitical and geological stability, ahead of other candidates like Malta, Norway and Qatar, the idea is that the Tasmanian site can cradle the black box for the benefit of a future civilisation, should catastrophic climate change cause the downfall of ours.

If that sounds unhinged, it’s worth remembering that we’re currently on track for as much as 2.7C of warming this century. Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they’ll almost invariably tell you it’s not worth thinking about. Plenty of past civilisations and empires have collapsed in the face of less.

So what is this black box? Artistic installation? Academic experiment? Or something else?

The project is completely non-commercial, and the guiding design principle is functionality, according to Jim Curtis from Clemenger BBDO. “Obviously it’s really a powerful concept when you say to someone, ‘Earth’s got a black box’. Because they’re like, ‘Why does it need a black box?'” said Mr Curtis, who’s collaborating on the project with University of Tasmania researchers, among others. “But first and foremost, it’s a tool.”

The box will be made from 7.5-centimetre-thick steel, cantilevered off granite, according to Jonathan Kneebone, co-founder of artistic collective the Glue Society, which is also involved. “It’s built to outlive us all,” he said. “If the worst does happen, just because the power grids go down, this thing will still be there.”

The box will be filled with a mass of storage drives and have internet connectivity, all powered by solar panels on the structure’s roof. Batteries will provide backup power storage. When the sun is shining, the black box will be downloading scientific data and an algorithm will be gleaning climate-change-related material from the internet. 

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The artist’s impression makes it look as though it fell from the sky. Good call not siting it in Malta or Qatar. That must have been a tough call, looking at their geopolitical and geological stability. Ahem.
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China-based Covid disinformation operation pushed fake Swiss scientist, Facebook says • NBC News

Kevin Collier:

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China-based propagandists created an elaborate online disinformation campaign this year centered on an internet persona claiming to be a Swiss biologist to mislead the public about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, Facebook researchers said Wednesday.

Going by the name Dr. Wilson Edwards, the persona wrote on Facebook that the U.S. was putting undue political pressure on the World Health Organization to blame China for the coronavirus. But Edwards isn’t a real person, which Switzerland’s embassy in Beijing made clear in August.

Facebook researchers said they found evidence that the person was the creation of a Chinese cybersecurity company.

Although the character got little attention in the West, he was credulously cited in Chinese state-sponsored media as a whistleblower on world health policy.

Facebook said it had traced that account’s creation to Sichuan Silence Information Technology, a company in central China. According to its website, Silence was founded in 2000 and offers a wide range of information security services — and it counts China’s Ministry of Public Security among its customers. An inquiry sent to an email address on the company’s website bounced back as undeliverable.

A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in an email that “China has shown a scientific, professional, serious and responsible attitude from the very beginning” in global efforts to research the origins of Covid-19, but did not address specifics about the Facebook account.

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Other nonexistent people: the fake professor who died from Covid; the nonexistent columnist who wrote on geopolitics, part of a Middle East propaganda campaign.
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Google contractor says she was fired for talking about pay • Protocol

Anna Kramer:

»

A contractor at Google staffing firm Modis claims she was fired from her job for “ungoogley” behavior after asking about holiday pay at a meeting with management, according to a charge filed with the National Labor Relations Board by a lawyer for the Alphabet Workers Union.

Tuesday Carne said in an interview with Protocol that she was fired after just nine days of working in the data contracting facility in South Carolina. Carne’s termination letter (which Protocol reviewed) called her behavior at the meeting “unacceptable and ‘ungoogley'” and claimed that her behavior was the reason for her firing.

Modis Engineering faced a similar charge from former Google contractor Shannon Wait, who was terminated after posting on Facebook about pay and working conditions at a South Carolina data center in February. Modis almost immediately gave Wait her job back and was forced to settle the charges in April, agreeing to post large signs in the Berkeley County facility where she worked that said workers have the right to ask questions about and discuss pay and working conditions. Google relies heavily on temporary, vending or contract staff (TVCs) to fill positions in its data centers and has long received criticism from those workers, who feel as if they are treated like second-class Google citizens.

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Yes, me too: WTH is “ungoogley” (or unGoogle-y) behaviour, exactly?
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Welcome to Mars! Frequently Asked Questions • New Yorker

Nicky Guerreiro and Ethan Simon:

»

What do I do for work?
Like all Mars residents, you will be employed by The Corporation. You will enjoy an exciting career in a fast-paced and collaborative mine shaft.

I don’t want to work in a mine shaft.
Sounds like someone should have finished dental school.

Do I get paid?
Good news! As a utopia, Mars has no need for money. In exchange for the lithium you mine, The Corporation will provide you with a daily ration of gruel. The amount of gruel you receive will be determined by how much lithium you extract, and by whether you can curry favor with a small group of benevolent billionaires.

Is this slavery?
You worry too much.

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Satire, but sometimes reality has a strange habit of getting on the same bus as satire.
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Apple AirTags linked to increasing number of car thefts, Canadian police report • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

Apple’s AirTags are being used in an increasing number of targeted car thefts in Canada, according to local police.

As outlined in a news release from York Regional Police, investigators have identified a new method being used by thieves to track down and steal high-end vehicles that takes advantage of the AirTag’s location tracking capabilities. While the method of stealing the cars is largely conventional, the purpose of the AirTag is to track a high-end car back to a victim’s residence where it can be stolen from the driveway.

Since September 2021, police officers in York Region alone have investigated five incidents where suspects used AirTags in thefts of high-end vehicles. Thieves target any particularly valuable vehicles they find in public places and parking lots, placing an AirTag in an out-of-sight area, such as in the tow hitch or fuel cap, in the hope that it will not be discovered by the car’s owner.

Thieves have no way to disable Apple’s anti-tracking features that alert users when an unfamiliar nearby AirTag is tracking their location, but not all victims receive or act on the notification, or have an iPhone.

«

Clever – really, properly innovative! – use of AirTags, though there’s a lot more to it: from the York police release:

»

Thieves then track the targeted vehicles to the victim’s residence, where they are stolen from the driveway.

Thieves typically use tools like screwdrivers to enter the vehicles through the driver or passenger door, while ensuring not to set off alarms. Once inside, an electronic device, typically used by mechanics to reprogram the factory setting, is connected to the onboard diagnostics port below the dashboard and programs the vehicle to accept a key the thieves have brought with them.

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“While ensuring not to set off alarms” covers a lot of ground there. John Gruber ponders the broader question: how do the police know that AirTags were used?
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A mysterious threat actor is running hundreds of malicious Tor relays • The Record

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

Since at least 2017, a mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network in what a security researcher has described as an attempt to deanonymize Tor users.

Tracked as KAX17, the threat actor ran at its peak more than 900 malicious servers part of the Tor network, which typically tends to hover around a daily total of up to 9,000-10,000.

Some of these servers work as entry points (guards), others as middle relays, and others as exit points from the Tor network.

Their role is to encrypt and anonymize user traffic as it enters and leaves the Tor network, creating a giant mesh of proxy servers that bounce connections between each other and provide the much-needed privacy that Tor users come for.

Servers added to the Tor network typically must have contact information included in their setup, such as an email address, so Tor network administrators and law enforcement can contact server operators in the case of a misconfiguration or file an abuse report.

However, despite this rule, servers with no contact information are often added to the Tor network, which is not strictly policed, mainly to ensure there’s always a sufficiently large number of nodes to bounce and hide user traffic.

But a security researcher and Tor node operator going by Nusenu told The Record this week that it observed a pattern in some of these Tor relays with no contact information, which he first noticed in 2019 and has eventually traced back as far as 2017.

Grouping these servers under the KAX17 umbrella, Nusenu says this threat actor has constantly added servers with no contact details to the Tor network in industrial quantities, operating servers in the realm of hundreds at any given point.

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Briefly and approximately: traffic arriving in the Tor network is encrypted by each successive server until it hits its target server, and then the encryption is unwound as the message pings back. Like layers of an onion (hence The Onion Router), each in theory unviewable by the previous one. But if you control a lot of the paths through, you can unwrap the encryption as you like. State actor, do we think?
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Xinjiang: Twitter closes thousands of China state-linked accounts spreading propaganda • The Guardian

Helen Davidson:

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Twitter has shut down thousands of state-linked accounts in China that seek to counter evidence of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, as part of what experts called an “embarrassingly” produced propaganda operation.

The operations used photos and images, shell and potentially automated accounts, and fake Uyghur profiles, to disseminate state propaganda and fake testimonials about their happy lives in the region, seeking to dispel evidence of a years-long campaign of oppression, with mass internments, re-education programs, and allegations of forced labour and sterilisation.

The networks were found to share themes and content, but often used repurposed accounts dedicated to pornography or Korean soap operas with little engagement except when they were amplified by Chinese diplomats and officials. Twitter is banned inside China but officials frequently operate accounts overseas.

According to analysts at thinktank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), the content from the 2,160 accounts that Twitter closed down was often “embarrassingly” produced but provided a level of “implausible deniability” which muddied the waters around the issue.

The accounts linked to Chinese operations were in two sets, the largest being a network of 2,048 accounts amplifying the Chinese Communist party’s narratives related to Xinjiang, and the second set of 112 accounts connected to “Changyu Culture,” a private company that ASPI said appeared to be contracted by the Xinjiang regional authority to create videos of Uyghurs supporting the government.

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‘Patience is crucial’: why we won’t know for weeks how dangerous omicron is • Science

Kai Kupferschmidt:

»

a private lab called Lancet Laboratories had noticed that routine polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for SARS-CoV-2 were failing to detect a key target, the S gene, in many samples, a phenomenon previously seen with Alpha, another variant of concern. When Lancet sequenced eight of these viruses, it found out why: The genome was so heavily mutated that the test missed the gene.

Lancet shared the genomes with the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa (NGS-SA), which called an urgent meeting on 23 November. “We were shocked by the number of mutations,” says Tulio de Oliveira, a virologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and NGS-SA’s principal investigator. After the meeting, de Oliveira says, he called South Africa’s director general of health and “asked him to inform the minister and president that a potential new variant was emerging.” The team sequenced another 100 randomly selected sequences from Gauteng in the next 24 hours. All showed the same pattern. After informing the government, de Oliveira and his colleagues presented their evidence at a press conference on the morning of 25 November. On 26 November, the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the virus a “variant of concern” and christened it omicron.

…One reason for concern about omicron is that sequenced samples indicate it has rapidly replaced other variants in South Africa. But that picture might be skewed. For one, sequencing might have been focused on possible cases of the new variant in recent days, which could make it appear more frequent than it is. PCR data provide broader coverage and a less biased view, but there, too, samples with the S gene failure indicate a rapid rise of Omicron.

The rising frequency could still be due in part to chance. In San Diego, a series of superspreading events at a university resulted in an explosion of one particular strain of SARS-CoV-2 earlier this year, [infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research, Kristian] Andersen says: “It was thousands of cases and they were all the same virus.” But the virus wasn’t notably more infectious. South Africa has seen relatively few cases recently, so a series of superspreading events could have led to the rapid increase of Omicron. “I suspect that a lot of that signal is explained by that and I desperately hope so,” Andersen says. Based on a comparison of different omicron genomes, Andersen estimates the virus emerged sometime around late September or early October, which suggests it might be spreading more slowly than it appears to have.

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Exclusive: US State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware • Reuters

Christopher Bing and Joseph Menn:

»

The iPhones of at least nine US State Department employees were hacked by an unknown assailant using sophisticated spyware developed by the Israel-based NSO Group, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The hacks, which took place in the last several months, hit US officials either based in Uganda or focused on matters concerning the East African country, two of the sources said.

The intrusions, first reported here, represent the widest known hacks of US officials through NSO technology. Previously, a list of numbers with potential targets including some American officials surfaced in reporting on NSO, but it was not clear whether intrusions were always tried or succeeded.

Reuters could not determine who launched the latest cyberattacks.

NSO Group said in a statement on Thursday that it did not have any indication their tools were used but canceled the relevant accounts and would investigate based on the Reuters inquiry.

“If our investigation shall show these actions indeed happened with NSO’s tools, such customer will be terminated permanently and legal actions will take place,” said an NSO spokesperson, who added that NSO will also “cooperate with any relevant government authority and present the full information we will have.”

NSO has long said it only sells its products to government law enforcement and intelligence clients, helping them to monitor security threats, and is not directly involved in surveillance operations.

«

Let’s figure out how this story appeared: the “four people” are in the US State Department or those who look after their phones, and this story didn’t leak accidentally; the implication in the story is that Apple told the State Department, which is as a result angry. The US is gunning for NSO now; the new export ban announced is probably at least in part the result of this.
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Christmas shopping? You could do worse than getting yourself (or a friend; or both of you, why not?) a copy of Social Warming, my latest book, about how the incessant use of social networks is affecting society, politics and the media.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: we’re now at the stage where it’s not even worth bothering with a $150m cryptocurrency heist because you know there’ll be a bigger one along tomorrow.

The top YouTubers are spending seven-figure amounts on their videos – such as MrBeast’s recreation of Squid Game which offered $456,000 of prizemoney. CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer 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. And here we are again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

MrBeast is changing the economics of YouTube • Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter

Simon Owens:

»

If you want a snapshot of how much the YouTuber ecosystem has matured in recent years, look no further than MrBeast’s latest video: “$456,000 Squid Game In Real Life!”

Posted on November 24, it’s the fastest non-music video to reach 100 million views, but that’s not what makes it remarkable.

Let’s first consider what went into making the video. As MrBeast explains in the beginning, “I recreated every single set from [Netflix’s] Squid Game in real life, and whichever one of these 456 people survives the longest wins $456,000.”

And these weren’t hastily thrown together props. From watching the video, it’s clear that his team built elaborate sets that spanned tens of thousands of square feet. They also fabricated hundreds of costumes and pulled together a sophisticated tech infrastructure that allowed them to track who had been eliminated. Their devotion to the original source material is extraordinary.

Then there’s the prize money. We’re not just talking about the $456,000 grand prize. After the second elimination round, he informs the 90 people who were eliminated that they will each leave with $2,000. A few minutes later, in an effort to thin out the herd, he offers up $4,000 to anyone who will voluntarily leave. Several dozen take him up on his offer. At some point in the video, he reveals that he spent $3.5m to produce it. According to some estimates, that’s more than what it costs to produce an average episode of a cable drama.

While this may be MrBeast’s most expensive video to date, it’s by no means an anomaly. In a recent episode of the Colin and Samir Show, he detailed all the expenses that go into each video, from the full-time production crews to the custom-built sets to the money he gives away to contestants. Oh, and he also bought two huge warehouses for $10m.

«

But did he recoup his investment? That’s the question we’re not seeing answered. YouTube won’t tell.
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Crypto fork uses dog meme to raise $60 million, then the funds go missing • The Block

Tim Copeland:

»

A newly launched crypto project that raised $60m overnight appears to have lost the funds in what may have been a phishing attack.

The project was called AnubisDAO and it was promoted as a fork of OlympusDAO — a cryptocurrency backed by the assets in its treasury. AnubisDAO was first announced on October 28 with the launch of a Discord server and a Twitter account, which ended up only making a few tweets. The supposed fork was themed around Anubis, an egyptian god of death that has a dog’s head, a branding similar to other dog-themed memecoins.

Despite the lack of website, investors plowed into the token sale, putting $60m in ETH into it.

The token sale was supposed to continue, with more investors putting in ETH and receiving anubis tokens (ANKH) in return, for a 24 hour period.

But at 11:58 UTC — around 20 hours into the sale — the liquidity in the pool (which enables investors to buy and sell the tokens) was removed. The $60m in ETH that had been put into the token sale so far was then sent to a different address.

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On one level: how completely stupid would you have to be. On another: they’re just meaningless nonexistent “tokens” and a lot of that $60m will have been transferred from other meaningless nonexistent tokens. At least, I really hope so.
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The coronavirus in a tiny drop • The New York Times

Carl Zimmer and Jonathan Corum:

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To better understand the coronavirus’s journey from one person to another, a team of 50 scientists has for the first time created an atomic simulation of the coronavirus nestled in a tiny airborne drop of water.

To create the model, the researchers needed one of the world’s biggest supercomputers to assemble 1.3 billion atoms and track all their movements down to less than a millionth of a second. This computational tour de force is offering an unprecedented glimpse at how the virus survives in the open air as it spreads to a new host.

“Putting a virus in a drop of water has never been done before,” said Rommie Amaro, a biologist at the University of California San Diego who led the effort, which was unveiled at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis last month. “People have literally never seen what this looks like.”

How the coronavirus spreads through the air became the subject of fierce debate early in the pandemic. Many scientists championed the traditional view that most of the virus’s transmission was made possible by larger drops, often produced in coughs and sneezes. Those droplets can travel only a few feet before falling to the floor.

A 3-D simulation of a cough producing both large droplets and tiny aerosols.The New York Times
But epidemiological studies showed that people with Covid-19 could infect others at a much greater distance. Even just talking without masks in a poorly ventilated indoor space like a bar, church or classroom was enough to spread the virus.

Those findings pointed to much smaller drops, called aerosols, as important vehicles of infection. Scientists define droplets as having a diameter greater than 100 micrometers, or about 4 thousandths of an inch. Aerosols are smaller — in some cases so small that only a single virus can fit inside them. And thanks to their minuscule size, aerosols can drift in the air for hours.

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(Thanks G for the link.)
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How much has quantum computing actually advanced? • IEEE Spectrum

Dan Garisto:

»

There’s now a new behemoth quantum computing company, “Quantinuum” thanks to the merger of Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum. And today, Google’s Sycamore announced another leap toward quantum error correction.

A curmudgeon might argue that quantum computing is like fusion, or any promising tech whose real rewards are—if even achievable—decades off. The future remains distant, and all the present has for us is smoke, mirrors, and hype.

To rebut the cynic, an optimist might point to the glut of top-tier research being done in academia and industry. If there’s new news each week, it’s a sign that sinking hundreds of millions into a really hard problem does actually reap rewards.

For a measured perspective on how much quantum computing is actually advancing as a field, we spoke with John Martinis, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the former chief architect of Google’s Sycamore.

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I read this interview and was none the wiser about how much quantum computing has actually advanced. I couldn’t tell whether it can do anything, everything or nothing.
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The FTC is suing to block Nvidia’s $40bn purchase of Arm • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

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Nvidia’s $40bn acquisition of Arm just ran into another massive hurdle: the Federal Trade Commission, which announced on Thursday that it’s suing to block the merger from going through due to concerns that the combined companies would “stifle competing next-generation technologies.” The suit comes after an FTC investigation into the deal following complaints from Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm shortly after the merger was announced.

“The FTC is suing to block the largest semiconductor chip merger in history to prevent a chip conglomerate from stifling the innovation pipeline for next-generation technologies,” said FTC Bureau of Competition director Holly Vedova in a statement. “Tomorrow’s technologies depend on preserving today’s competitive, cutting-edge chip markets. This proposed deal would distort Arm’s incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia’s rivals. The FTC’s lawsuit should send a strong signal that we will act aggressively to protect our critical infrastructure markets from illegal vertical mergers that have far-reaching and damaging effects on future innovations.”

The FTC’s complaint notes that Nvidia already uses Arm-based products for several areas, including high-level advanced driver systems for vehicles, Arm-based CPUs for cloud computing, and DPU SmartNICs (networking products used in datacenters). The concern is that by acquiring Arm, Nvidia would gain an unfair advantage in those markets.

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For my money, a better first three paragraphs than the NY Times version of the same story.
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Ex-Google workers sue company, saying it betrayed ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto • NPR

Bobby Allyn:

»

Three former Google employees have sued the company, alleging that Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” amounts to a contractual obligation that the tech giant has violated.

At the time the company hired the three software engineers, Rebecca Rivers, Sophie Waldman and Paul Duke, they signed conduct rules that included a “Don’t be evil” provision, according to the suit.

The trio say they thought they were behaving in accordance with that principle when they organized Google employees against controversial projects, such as work for US Customs and Border Protection during the Trump administration. The workers circulated a petition calling on Google to publicly commit to not working with CBP.

Google fired the three workers, along with a fourth, Laurence Berland, in November 2019 for “clear and repeated violations” of the company’s data security policies. The four deny they accessed and leaked confidential documents as part of their activism.

In the lawsuit filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court on Monday, Rivers, Waldman and Duke argue that they should receive monetary damages because the company allegedly retaliated against them when they tried to draw attention to Google’s “doing evil,” the suit states.

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Yet more evidence that the US is oversubscribed with lawyers willing to take on anything, no matter how stupid. Even if “Don’t be evil” was a provision for employees (and I’d expect even that to be challenged, if Google really feels like it), that doesn’t mean it applies to the company. They’d have to show that particular employees who implemented those projects they don’t like were breaching the contract.
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Interesting research, but no, we don’t have living, reproducing robots • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

Scientists on Monday announced that they’d optimized a way of getting mobile clusters of cells to organize other cells into smaller clusters that, under the right conditions, could be mobile themselves. The researchers call this process “kinematic self-replication,” although that’s not entirely right—the copies need help from humans to start moving on their own, are smaller than the originals, and the copying process grinds to a halt after just a couple of cycles.

So, of course, CNN headlined its coverage “World’s first living robots can now reproduce.”

This is a case when something genuinely interesting is going on, but both the scientists and some of the coverage of the developments are promoting it as far more than it actually is. So, let’s take a look at what has really been done.

…Being inherently lazy, the researchers decided to model their behavior using computers, implementing an evolutionary algorithm that created variations of shapes that were then tested for their ability to herd cells using a physics simulator.

(Unfortunately, a researcher involved in the work who is in the Department of Computer Science told CNN that this combination of algorithm and modeling is an AI. If scientists want the public to understand what they’re doing better, it would help if they actually gave the public accurate information.)

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Seems like this is a.. relief? Overhyped work misunderstood by someone. (Thanks Clive H for the link.)
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Gucci digitally outfits Gen-Z in metaverse foray with Roblox • AP News

Colleen Barry:

»

Anyone whose virtual alter ego is wandering around the Roblox online game platform these days might run into other avatars sporting Gucci handbags, sunglasses or hats.

The digital-only items were part of a limited Gucci collection for Roblox, a step by the fashion house that prides itself on Italian craftsmanship to enter an expanding virtual space where many of its youngest admirers already are at home.

Players in the metaverse — where virtual worlds, augmented reality and the internet meet — say the big-name fashion collaboration represents a new era of virtual-real world interplay, a space in which smart product placement meets the desire of consumers to express their personalities in the virtual world.

While the Gucci Garden space on Roblox was open for two weeks last month, the platform’s 42 million users could spend from $1.20 to $9 on collectible and limited-edition Gucci accessories. Items were hidden in the virtual Gucci Garden, which echoed real-world Gucci Garden exhibitions in Florence and other global cities.

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No, no, no, no. Can we blame this on quantitative easing or something? It feels as though there is far too much money sloshing around desperately looking for something, anything to be spent on, however pointless. Although it has been noted that the vile Gucci jacket worn by the character Kendall Roy at his party in Succession in this week’s episode costs something like $6,900. So maybe Roblox players are getting off lightly.
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Instagram is Facebook now • Embedded

kate lindsay:

»

Because I like and follow a contestant from the latest season of Love Island, Instagram decided to interrupt my feed with a picture from a UK retailer called B&M (whose top trending product is currently a gin bottle shaped like a high heel). The post it recommends is a blocky, boomer-esque text meme about a man named “Jeff Snowball” that I’d like to see fact checked. It is, put plainly, ugly and out-of-place and I don’t want it on my feed. 

Not all of the suggested posts are that bad, but they do appear every eight or so images—not including the handful of sponsored posts that show up in between. I’m getting almost as much content that I didn’t choose to see as content I did, and that is not Instagram. That’s Facebook. 

Instagram and Facebook are of course both part of the same company, Meta, and so I guess it was inevitable that this day would come. As Casey Lewis of After School recently told me, “I feel like [how] when I was just out of college I had to be on Facebook because that’s sort of where people’s birthdays were, Instagram is sort of that for [Gen Z], where they don’t really want to.” And Instagram knows this. Which is I guess why I’m confused that they’ve opted for the same strategy that made Facebook a boomer breeding ground. 

Mostly, it’s weird to recognize that my time on Instagram is coming to an end, and that what I’m looking at now will be an internet artifact I stumble upon years from now. Or worse, never recover at all. 

«

There’s a certain air of desperation to the way that Instagram now throws absolutely anything it “thinks” (OK, calculates) you might be interested in at you. The reason must be that “engagement” is dropping off, so the “you might be interested” algorithms have been turned up to 11. The effect for me, as for Lindsay, is to make me wish even more fervently for a reverse-chronological option. Instagram doesn’t offer that, however.
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Executive leading Meta’s faltering digital currency project quits • Financial Times

Dave Lee:

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David Marcus, the Meta executive tasked with launching its faltering digital currency project, has announced that he will leave the company at the end of the year.

The departure comes after Meta, Facebook’s parent company, suffered a string of setbacks in its attempts to launch ambitious cryptocurrency products, including a new digital token, Diem.

In a series of tweets posted on Tuesday morning, Marcus [aged 48] said he planned to launch “something new” outside the social networking giant, and that his “entrepreneurial DNA has been nudging me for too many mornings in a row to continue ignoring it”.

…Diem, first announced in 2019 under the name Libra, immediately attracted the attention of financial regulators and politicians concerned about broad issues associated with cryptocurrencies such as money laundering. It was also launched against the backdrop of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other privacy missteps at Facebook.

Early backers of the project, including Mastercard and PayPal, abandoned the initiative as regulatory pressures mounted.

In May, the Diem Association, an independent body set up to run the currency, said it would significantly narrow its scope, dropping its application to the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority to operate as a global payments service and focusing instead on the US.

«

The concern (maybe only my concern? But I bet I wasn’t alone) was that if Facebook became the issuer and regulator and overseer of a global currency, everything we’d seen before in terms of manipulation and disinformation would look like a vicarage tea party. The regulatory pressure makes an interesting contrast with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, where there’s less leverage feasible.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad?
• Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see?
• How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online?
• What can we do about it?
• Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?

Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: glad so many people found the “film dialogue” link helpful. Let me know the other things that bug you and maybe a solution will pop up.

Is the Million Dollar Homepage the real precursor of NFTs? It’s certainly redolent of one new scheme. CC-licensed photo by charlene mcbride 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. Found in many countries. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The real reason China is pushing “digital sovereignty” in Africa • Rest Of World

Yinka Adegoke:

»

it is the evolution of the “Digital Silk Road,” a term coined by Xi in a 2015 state white paper, that has quietly become a contentious topic for China-Africa watchers. The Digital Silk Road (DSR) includes everything from cross-border e-commerce, smart cities, and fintech apps through to big data, internet of things, smartphones, and undersea cables. These projects don’t grab headlines like shiny new Chinese-built airports and railways or spark panicked fears of China’s “debt trap diplomacy.” But the unfettered influence of Chinese firms developing every step of the digital ecosystem in nearly all African countries has become a growing point of concern, particularly for China’s rivals in the United States.

As Motolani Agbebi, a researcher at Tampere University in Finland, told Rest of World, significant Chinese involvement in Africa’s telecoms sector actually predates DSR. Between 1999 and 2001, Huawei and ZTE first started working consistently on the continent, supported by China’s “go out policy,” which promoted the internationalization of Chinese companies.

But the ongoing pandemic, which has forced African governments and their citizens online to participate in remote work, schooling, and delivery of government services, has underscored Africa’s dependence on Chinese tech. “There’s no doubt that technology infrastructure and the broader Digital Silk Road initiative are far more important to China today in regions like Africa than they were even just a few years ago,” said Eric Olander, managing editor of The China Africa Project.

«

Earlier this week the head of MI6 – that’s the chief of the UK’s counterintelligence service – spoke in public for the first time, and on China he warned about “data traps” and “debt traps”. This seems a bit like both together.
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WTA suspends tournaments in China amid concern for Peng Shuai • The Guardian

Vincent Ni:

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The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) has announced the suspension of all tournaments in China amid concerns about the safety of the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, following weeks of a high-profile row with Beijing over the player’s wellbeing.

“With the full support of the WTA Board of Directors, I am announcing the immediate suspension of all WTA tournaments in China, including Hong Kong,” said the WTA chairman, Steve Simon, announcing the decision in a statement on Wednesday.

“In good conscience, I don’t see how I can ask our athletes to compete there when Peng Shuai is not allowed to communicate freely and has seemingly been pressured to contradict her allegation of sexual assault. Given the current state of affairs, I am also greatly concerned about the risks that all of our players and staff could face if we were to hold events in China in 2022.”

Early last month , 35-year-old Peng, a former doubles world No 1, used a post on Chinese social media website, Weibo to accuse 75-year-old Zhang Gaoli, a former Chinese vice-premier, of having coerced her into sex . Her lengthy post was quickly deleted by the censors, and Peng disappeared from public for more than two weeks as the WTA and colleagues said they were unable to reach her.

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What’s been notable throughout this saga has been how the WTA hasn’t had to be pushed into taking this position. Even though there’s a lot of money at stake, which usually leads to sharp intakes of breath from sponsors, it has been forthright about this in a way that shames US basketball’s pusillanimous stance over a tweet referencing Taiwan by one of its bosses.
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The metaverse, latency, and metalatency • Domos

Magnus Olden:

»

Are you annoyed by timing issues, like two people starting to talk simultaneously on video conference calls? Well, you are in for a new magnitude of frustration. Or maybe you are thinking that Video Conferences work surprisingly well and that the step from Video Conference to Interactive VR is easy?

This blog points out some facts around why delivering any Metaverse will be near impossible over the internet. Some of the technological building blocks and incentive structures of the internet are poorly suited for a Metaverse (or anything massively interactive). I will describe why:

• The Metaverse is different: Massive interactive VR will have more demanding network requirements than current applications, especially latency-wise. And there will be latency! 

• We create latency for each other. End-to-end Congestion Controls, the core mechanism for self-regulation of usage over the internet, relies on inducing latency. Additionally, the internet runs on shared infrastructure or frequencies, and Internet Services Providers have no incentives or simple means to change that.

• We create latency for ourselves. This is amplified in shared networks. Guaranteed latency propositions ignore these limitations and a couple of other elephants in the room.

• Removing that last 10% of variable latency is orders of magnitude more complex than removing the first 90%. It’s like asking Usain Bolt to shave another second off his 100 meter time.

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Although, although, we used to think that the internet was just Full Up and we couldn’t get anything down the pipes and voice calls were impossible and video calls moreso, yet things improve. It might be that the real improvement needs to happen at the centres – the servers – rather than the edge, once fibre is ubiquitous.
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Qualcomm’s new always-on smartphone camera is a privacy nightmare • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

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“Your phone’s front camera is always securely looking for your face, even if you don’t touch it or raise to wake it.” That’s how Qualcomm Technologies vice president of product management Judd Heape introduced the company’s new always-on camera capabilities in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor set to arrive in top-shelf Android phones early next year.

Depending on who you are, that statement can either be exciting or terrifying. For Qualcomm, it thinks this new feature will enable new use cases, like being able to wake and unlock your phone without having to pick it up or have it instantly lock when it no longer sees your face.

But for those of us with any sense of how modern technology is used to violate our privacy, a camera on our phone that’s always recording images even when we’re not using it sounds like the stuff of nightmares and has a cost to our privacy that far outweighs any potential convenience benefits.

Qualcomm’s main pitch for this feature is for unlocking your phone any time you glance at it, even if it’s just sitting on a table or propped up on a stand. You don’t need to pick it up or tap the screen or say a voice command — it just unlocks when it sees your face. I can see this being useful if your hands are messy or otherwise occupied (in its presentation, Qualcomm used the example of using it while cooking a recipe to check the next steps). Maybe you’ve got your phone mounted in your car, and you can just glance over at it to see driving directions without having to take your hands off the steering wheel or leave the screen on the entire time.

The company is also spinning it as making your phone more secure by automatically locking the phone when it no longer sees your face or detects someone looking over your shoulder and snooping on your group chat. It can also suppress private information or notifications from popping up if you’re looking at the phone with someone else.

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A follow-on from yesterday’s piece about concerns over surveillance. Here it comes down the road, sooner than you expected.
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Cutting a Banksy into 10,000 (digital) pieces • The New York Times

Robin Pogrebin:

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In the latest example of art market disruption, a prominent former auction executive teamed up with cryptocurrency experts in May to purchase the 2005 Banksy painting “Love Is in the Air” for $12.9m and now plans to sell off 10,000 pieces of it as NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.

The executive, Loic Gouzer, who upended the traditional auction format while he was at Christie’s — most notably orchestrating the sale of a $450.3 million Leonardo da Vinci painting in a contemporary art auction in 2017 — has helped found the company Particle, a platform that merges art and technology with a goal of reaching a broader pool of potential buyers.

…If successful, the venture could help fuel a burgeoning category of competition in the art market, with consortiums of multiple buyers challenging the pre-eminence of billionaire collectors at a time when the pandemic has accelerated online commerce. NFTs have become increasingly popular, accounting for one-third of online sales, or two% of the overall art market, according to the database Artprice.

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Aiming for a $1,500 price tag on each (not very big) square. You know, they could do much the same with a blank web page where each pixel (or collection of them) was sold off to bidders – you could probably get a million dollars or so, easy.
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Omicron found in US — plus 23 other countries in 5 of 6 global regions • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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The omicron coronavirus variant has now been detected in at least 24 countries in five of six global regions—and as of this afternoon, that includes the United States.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed this afternoon that the first US case was detected in a person in California who had returned to the US from South Africa on November 22 and tested positive on November 29. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco carried out genomic sequencing identifying the omicron variant in the person, and the CDC confirmed that sequencing.

The CDC reported that the person was fully vaccinated and had only mild symptoms that are improving. In a press briefing Wednesday afternoon, top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said it appeared the person had not yet received a booster shot. Public health experts suggest that booster shots will significantly improve protection against the new, still poorly understood variant.

All of the person’s close contacts are being followed, Fauci added, and all have tested negative so far.

The detection of omicron in the US is unsurprising to health officials. “It was just a matter of time before the case of omicron would be detected in the United States,” Fauci said. But, “we know what we need to do to protect people,” he added, listing vaccination, boosting, and masking.

«

Turned out it wasn’t a vaccination drive in rich countries that defeated delta. It was a new variant. Nature defeating us yet again. (Side note: apparently the initial and second “O” in omicron should be short – like in “hot”, not “lone”.)
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A different kind of Covid vaccine is about ready to roll • NPR

Joe Palca:

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When Operation Warp Speed began spending billions of dollars to facilitate the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, it chose three vaccine technologies to back: mRNA vaccines being developed Pfizer and Moderna, a viral vector vaccine proposed by Johnson & Johnson, and protein subunit vaccines to be made by Sanofi and Novavax.

The first two technologies were successful, and there are now billions of vaccine doses in this country and around the world.

A year ago, Novavax was confident its vaccine would also be out there.

“We have a massive number of people working on scaling up our vaccine,” Gregg Glenn, Novavax’s president of research and development said in an interview in September 2020. “I am very optimistic by the year-end we’ll have a lot of product and we’re talking about more than 2 billion doses in 2021.”

But Glenn’s optimism was misguided. A large study of the vaccine took longer to complete than was hoped, and the company ran into manufacturing problems.

«

You’re wondering what a subunit vaccine is. From a link in the story:

»

Rather than injecting a whole pathogen to trigger an immune response, subunit vaccines (sometimes called acellular vaccines) contain purified pieces of it, which have been specially selected for their ability to stimulate immune cells. Because these fragments are incapable of causing disease, subunit vaccines are considered very safe. There are several types: protein subunit vaccines contain specific isolated proteins from viral or bacterial pathogens; polysaccharide vaccines contain chains of sugar molecules (polysaccharides) found in the cell walls of some bacteria; conjugate subunit vaccines bind a polysaccharide chain to a carrier protein to try and boost the immune response. Only protein subunit vaccines are being developed against the virus that causes COVID-19.

Other subunit vaccines are already in widespread use. Examples include the hepatitis B and acellular pertussis vaccines (protein subunit), the pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (polysaccharide), and the MenACWY vaccine, which contains polysaccharides from the surface of four types of the bacteria which causes meningococcal disease joined to diphtheria or tetanus toxoid (conjugate subunit).

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Different from mRNA, which has code (the RNA) telling your cells how to make bits of the virus.
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Here’s why movie dialogue has gotten more difficult to understand (and three ways to fix it) • Slashfilm

Ben Pearson:

»

I reached out to several professional sound editors, designers, and mixers, many of whom have won Oscars for their work on some of Hollywood’s biggest films, to get to the bottom of what’s going on. One person refused to talk to me, saying it would be “professional suicide” to address this topic on the record. Another agreed to talk, but only under the condition that they remain anonymous. But several others spoke openly about the topic, and it quickly became apparent that this is a familiar subject among the folks in the sound community, since they’re the ones who often bear the brunt of complaints about dialogue intelligibility. 

“It’s not easy to mix a movie,” says Jaime Baksht, who took home an Oscar for his work on last year’s excellent “Sound of Metal” and previously worked on Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma.” “Everybody thinks you’re just moving levers, but it’s not like that.”

This problem indeed goes far beyond simply flipping a switch or two on a mixing board. It’s much more complex than I anticipated, and it turns out there isn’t one simple element that can be singled out and blamed as the primary culprit.

“There are a number of root causes,” says Mark Mangini, the Academy Award-winning sound designer behind films like “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Blade Runner 2049.” “It’s really a gumbo, an accumulation of problems that have been exacerbated over the last 10 years … that’s kind of this time span where all of us in the filmmaking community are noticing that dialogue is harder and harder to understand.”

Join me and these industry experts as we sort through that “gumbo” and identify some of the most prominent reasons it has become more difficult to, in the paraphrased words of Chris Tucker’s Detective Carter in “Rush Hour,” understand the words that are coming out of characters’ mouths.

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Great news for subtitle writers though.
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DeepMind AI software collaborates with humans on mathematical breakthroughs • New Scientist

Matthew Sparkes:

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AI software has collaborated with mathematicians to successfully develop a theorem about the structure of knots, but the suggestions given by the code were so unintuitive that they were initially dismissed. Only later were they discovered to offer invaluable insight. The work suggests AI may reveal new areas of mathematics where large data sets make problems too complex to be comprehended by humans.

Mathematicians have long used computers to carry out the brute force work of large calculations, and AI has even been used to disprove mathematical conjectures. But creating a conjecture from scratch is a far more complex and nuanced problem.

To disprove a conjecture an AI simply needs to churn through vast numbers of inputs to find a single example that contradicts the idea. In contrast, developing a conjecture or proving a theorem requires intuition, skill and the stringing together of lots of logical steps.

UK-based AI company DeepMind, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has previously had success in using AI to beat humans at games of chess and Go, as well as solving the structures of human proteins. Now the firm’s scientists have shown that AI can provide human mathematicians with promising leads to develop theorems. That work has led to a conjecture in the field of topology and representation theory, and a proven theorem about the structure of knots.

Unlike most neural network research, in which an AI is fed large amounts of examples and learns to spot or create similar inputs, the AI here examined existing mathematical constructs for patterns. DeepMind says that its AI found both previously known and novel patterns and guided human mathematicians toward new discoveries.

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Centaurs: humans and machines working together. (There’s also a series of Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4 about AI. Definitely worth your time, as are the programmes by [Adam] Rutherford and [Hannah] Fry examining the ideas from the lectures further.)
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Why subscription Twitter is a terrible idea, Twitter bans sharing private photos and videos, Twitter and free speech • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

I promised that I was going to be ok with being wrong more often, and this week very well may be an excellent example! What are all of the reasons why a new business model for Twitter might be a bad idea?

Retention: This is the most obvious issue. Would that many people who use Twitter actually pay? I threw out the possibility that Twitter would lose a third of its users, but lots of folks think that Twitter would lose far more, even up to 90%. This would obviously be fatal, not simply from a revenue perspective, but from a content perspective.

The question is where all of those people would go; there obviously would be significant market demand for a free alternative. Another startup is probably the best guess, but I do wonder the extent to which the relatively idealistic world into which Twitter launched in 2006 was a critical factor in building a platform that is ground zero for information for nearly everything, from every point of view. That is what will be hard to replicate (and, as someone who was there in the early days noted, Twitter did evolve very rapidly in its early days, so saying it was “perfect” right off the bat isn’t quite right).

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He also says that Growth (how do you add users?) and Risk (adding the Retention and Growth downsides together means a potentially big risk) are the other two problems. (This is from the subscription version of the newsletter, so not open to everyone.)
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad?
• Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see?
• How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online?
• What can we do about it?
• Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?

Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sure, you could use a cheap sticker to cover your webcam. But isn’t that just paranoia, and aren’t there cameras always on everywhere already? CC-licensed photo by Quinn Comendant on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Very much here with you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

What can the metaverse learn from Second Life? • IEEE Spectrum

Edd Gent:

»

IEEE Spectrum: Second Life was almost like a proto-metaverse. Why do you think it didn’t break through to the mainstream?

[Former chief architect of Second Life, Philip] Rosedale: It’s interesting to note that Second Life is, in my opinion, still the largest and the closest thing to a metaverse that we have as it relates to grown-ups. The environments that are used by kids, such as Roblox, are very interesting as well but very different in terms of what they offer. If you talk about people wanting to go to a live concert, or wanting to go shopping or something like that, I think Second Life is still US $650 million a year in transactions and a million people using it. But Second Life didn’t grow beyond about a million people. It’s been growing more with COVID, but as you say, it didn’t break out, it didn’t become a billion people. And the hope that Facebook has is that there’ll be a billion people using a metaverse.

So I think the reason why it didn’t, and this reason is still very true today, is simply that most adults are not yet comfortable engaging with new people, or engaging socially, in a multi-player context online. I’ve worked on this a lot and it’s been incredibly rewarding for the people for whom it has worked. And even work we did more recently with High Fidelity, which was very similar—a full VR environment, but with the headsets rather than with desktop—there are small groups of people that have gotten immense pleasure or opportunity to make money, and things like that, out of these environments.

But they’re still not for everybody. People are not able to communicate with facial and body language yet, in a way that is anywhere near adequate. And I think that it’s a very steep cliff. If you have the alternative, to have your social life happen in the real world, I think a great majority of people make that choice, and it’s a binary choice. They don’t split their social life partly between the real world and partly online. I think that’s the reason why we don’t see the breakout yet, and nothing that Facebook has said or demonstrated changes what I just said.

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The point about facial expressions is a big one that I hadn’t thought of before, but we take so much from how people respond facially in a meeting. Even the annoyance of Zoom does let you get some of that information. A half-body avatar, nope.
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Omicron variant was in the Netherlands a week before South Africa reported it • NPR

Bill Chappell:

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The omicron coronavirus variant was already in the Netherlands a week before South Africa reported the new variant to the World Health Organization, according to a Dutch health agency.

The variant was recently identified in retests of samples that were taken on Nov. 19 and 23, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, or RIVM, announced on Tuesday.

Revelations about the variant’s existence in Europe before it was reported in Africa add a new twist to questions about where and how the variant originated — and whether travel bans on South Africa and its neighbors are an appropriate response to the variant.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa says his country is being punished for detecting the variant and informing global health authorities about it.

“You do not try and contain a virus through imposing bans unscientifically and indiscriminately,” Ramaphosa said on Tuesday, adding that measures such as testing all travelers are the best tools for combating the pandemic.

South African officials raised the alarm about the heavily mutated variant, B.1.1.529, on Nov. 24. Two days later, the WHO classified it as a variant of concern and dubbed it omicron.

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Clear that there has been community transmission for ages (relative to incubation). Where it really originated is anyone’s guess. But it certainly strengthens the case for not naming variants after the places where they were first identified.
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Why you should cover your webcam • The Washington Post

Tatum Hunter, with a pretty daft (and paranoid) article – judge by the headline – which does nevertheless have this interesting observation:

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it’s only a matter of time before smart glasses are part of our everyday lives, according to [CEO and fcofounder of nonprofit security company XR Safety Initiative, Kayya] Pearlman. And that’s not to mention the camera-enabled connected devices springing up in our homes, cities and workplaces.

We’re heading toward an era of “constant reality capture,” she said, in which people and companies will be recording wherever we go. It raises privacy questions we haven’t yet tackled.

“What happens to our privacy when these [webcam] covers are just completely a historical phenomenon, and nobody cares anymore because everything is recorded anyway?” she said. “We’re moving into this culture where the question of ‘Should I have a mechanical cover to shut off any camera that could be spying on me?’ is moot.”

For Pearlman, real privacy is a matter of context, control and choice: In what context am I willing to be recorded? What control do I get over the data that’s captured? And was I given a choice to opt out?

Right now, companies make those types of privacy decisions, not consumers. In the future, that needs to change, Pearlman said.

“I think we need to open, decentralize and make these decisions collectively so that billions of people don’t feel powerless when these choices are taken away,” she said.

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Doesn’t matter whether you decentralise it or not. What matters is what the default is: if it’s on by default, it’ll stay on for over 90% of users. Ditto for off. (Unless somehow you make users choose one or the other with neither preferred early on.) In effect, companies always make the decision.
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Eleven cities that have joined the car-free revolution • Fast Company

Adele Peters:

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Commuters in Los Angeles now spend 119 hours each year stuck in unmoving traffic; in Moscow, they spend an average of 210 hours, or nine entire days. There are as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the U.S. (eight times more than there are cars), often on valuable urban land that could otherwise be used—along with excess road space—for housing or parks. Pollution from tailpipes is linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths globally each year. SUVs, alone, now emit more than 700 megatons of greenhouse gases annually, more than the total emissions of the U.K. and the Netherlands. More than 1.25 million people are killed in road crashes each year.

In response, some cities and neighborhoods are beginning to rethink where cars can go—and redesigning streets to prioritize other uses, from public transportation to parks. It’s happening around the world, including on major streets in cities like San Francisco and New York, but happening at the largest scale in several European cities. Here are a few of the most interesting examples.

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She starts with “Amsterdam”, and then says that it’s not actually car-free, which is definitely an annoying way to start a list of car-free cities. It’s going car-fewer, which is progress at least.
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When is a new tech ‘ahead of its time’ — or just doomed? • OneZero

Clive Thompson:

»

There are two related questions here: a) Could this new prototype ever work well enough and affordably enough that it could be in wide(r) use? And more alchemically, b) does it offer enough people a sufficiently interesting and useful new ability that they’d change their behavior around it? Do we desire this new thing?

I think b) is, of the two, the much harder question to answer. There are a lot of convoluted reasons why a technology becomes desirable. Sometimes it’s because the tech solves a problem that’s low on Maslow’s pyramid, like clean-water engineering. Everyone wants that. (Indeed, many technologies that are critical to basic existence are often infrastructural and civic.) But even with many consumer technologies — i.e. when you’re buying something that isn’t for basic survival — you can detect when a new tech triggers a novel, previously latent desire.

Personal cameras did that. In the late 19th century, people were very familiar with photography, but the demand for owning and carrying around a camera wasn’t obvious until the Brownie came out. Suddenly, everyday people discovered photography was delightful for personal expression, and a way to document the arc of their lives.

But other times in consumer tech, b) is much trickier to discern. GPS chips in our phones: Did people really want that? On the one hand, GPS gives your phone enormous utility, as with turn-by-turn maps. On the other hand, GPS lets authorities track your every move, which most people find icky. Worse, the market tends to seal off options, making it difficult to know whether people really prefer the current state of affairs.

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A lot of these questions are more easily analysed by what Steven Johnson calls “adjacent technologies” – finding what things are easily integrated or repurposed for an existing need. GPS had been around a long time before it found its way into phones; the adjacent technology was chip fabs capable of turning out chips that could analyse them by the multimillion. But to know what the adjacent technologies are, you need to be really immersed in all of them.
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World’s first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say • CNN

Katie Hunt:

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The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce — and in a way not seen in plants and animals.

Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04in) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal.

Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering said they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science.

“I was astounded by it,” said Michael Levin, a professor of biology and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University who was co-lead author of the new research.

“Frogs have a way of reproducing that they normally use but when you … liberate (the cells) from the rest of the embryo and you give them a chance to figure out how to be in a new environment, not only do they figure out a new way to move, but they also figure out apparently a new way to reproduce.”

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Has anyone there read Jurassic Park? Frogs tend to be important to Life Finding A Way.
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Moorfields patient receives world’s first 3D printed eye • Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

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A Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust patient was the first person in the world to be supplied solely with a fully digital 3D printed prosthetic eye on 25 November 2021. He first tried his eye on 11 November alongside a traditional acrylic prosthetic. By going home on 25 November with just his printed eye, he is the first patient to use a 3D printed eye as their sole prosthetic.

A 3D printed eye is a true biomimic and a more realistic prosthetic, with clearer definition and real depth to the pupil. Unlike traditional methods, it uses scans of the eye instead of an invasive mould of the eye socket, so difficult for children that they can need a general anaesthetic.

Crucially, the production process is much faster. Traditional acrylic prosthetic eyes are hand-painted and take about six weeks to complete. With 3D printing, once a scan has been taken, the prosthesis can be printed within two and a half hours. It is then sent to an ocularist to finish, polish and fit. The whole process takes just two to three weeks.

Steve Verze, the first patient, is an engineer in his 40s from Hackney.

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Given the way 3D printing has fallen out of the public consciousness, it’s worth remembering that it does actually have great uses. It’s widely used for reconstructive surgery (teeth and skulls) and, of course, for eyes too now.
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Amazon couldn’t protect your data, internal documents show • Reveal News

Will Evans:

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According to internal documents reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and WIRED, Amazon’s vast empire of customer data – its metastasizing record of what you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa and who’s at your front door – had become so sprawling, fragmented and promiscuously shared within the company that the security division couldn’t even map all of it, much less adequately defend its borders.

In the name of speedy customer service, unbridled growth and rapid-fire “invention on behalf of customers” – in the name of delighting you – Amazon had given broad swathes of its global workforce extraordinary latitude to tap into customer data at will. It was, as former Amazon chief information security officer Gary Gagnon calls it, a “free-for-all” of internal access to customer information. And as information security leaders warned, that free-for-all left the company wide open to “internal threat actors” while simultaneously making it inordinately difficult to track where all of Amazon’s data was flowing.

To be clear: This story is not about Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing wing that manages data for millions of enterprises and government agencies, which has its own, separate information security apparatus. It’s about the online retail platform used by hundreds of millions of ordinary consumers. And on that side of Amazon’s business, InfoSec staffers warned of an unnerving “inability to detect security incidents.”

By the time DeVore started testifying about Amazon’s long-standing commitment to privacy and security, the dangers that the security division had identified weren’t just theoretical. According to Reveal and WIRED’s findings, they were real, and they were pervasive. Across Amazon, some low-level employees were using their data privileges to snoop on the purchases of celebrities, while others were taking bribes to help shady sellers sabotage competitors’ businesses, doctor Amazon’s review system and sell knock-off products to unsuspecting customers. Millions of credit card numbers had sat in the wrong place on Amazon’s internal network for years, with the security team unable to establish definitively whether they’d been unduly accessed.

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Though I suppose you could sort of intuit some of it from the way that they’re so quick on the chat function to go over your purchases and find what you’ve got a problem with. The “God Mode” is so commonplace in startup companies it’s hard to remove once they grow.
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‘I am not gonna die on the internet for you!’: how game streaming went from dream job to a burnout nightmare • The Guardian

Keza MacDonald:

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The fact is that, especially for up-and-coming streamers trying to make it in the crowded world of playing video games on the internet, the camera is almost never off. Sticking to a regular schedule is the best way to build an audience on Twitch, and those schedules regularly involve at least eight hours of continuous streaming, five days a week or more. “My sleep schedule shifted into the North American time zone because most of the people who were viewing my channel at the time were there,” says 36-year-old Cassie, a founder of the Black Twitch UK network, who has been streaming for five years under the name GeekyCassie. “I would do my day at work, nap a bit, and then stream for up to eight to 12 hours at night-time. I’d be absolutely beat, and then get up and do my work again … People burn out and then they don’t enjoy it any more.”

At that time Cassie was living at home with her mum, whose cooking and care enabled these ridiculous hours. “There’s absolutely no way that I would do that now. I don’t really feel like we should be encouraging it,” she says. “I see [young streamers] do things like 24‑hour live gaming marathons, then have an hour’s sleep, and then later that day I’ll see photos of them skating outside on Insta. I’m like: ‘How are you doing this? What is going on!?’”

“Burnout is an incredibly real thing in gaming,” says Imane Anys, AKA Pokimane, who has put in thousands of hours to become the most popular female streamer on Twitch, with 8.4 million subscribers. “A streamer sets their own work hours and it can be easy to fall into the trap of streaming eight to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s frightening because people grind crazy long hours, and see results – hence why so many do it. I’ve veered away from doing extreme hours of livestreaming in an effort to upkeep my mental health and I’ve found that it aids in the longevity of my career.” Now she streams in shorter bursts, but even so, she only “usually” takes a day off a week to spend with friends or relaxing.

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Twitter has a new CEO; what about a new business model? • Stratechery

Ben Thompson has a modest proposal:

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one of the biggest challenges facing would-be Twitter clones is not simply that a complete lack of moderation leads to an overwhelming amount of crap, but also that the sort of person who thrives on Twitter very much wants to know everything that is happening in the world, including amongst those outside of their circle. Being stuck on a text-based social network that only has some of the information to be consumed is lame; having access to anyone and everything, for better or worse, is a value prop that only Twitter can provide.

This, then, is the other thing that often baffles analysts: Twitter has one of the most powerful moats on the Internet. Sure, Facebook has ubiquity, Instagram has influencers, and TikTok has homegrown stars, but I find it easier to imagine any of those fading before Twitter’s grip on information flow disappears (in part, of course, because Twitter has shown that it’s a pretty crappy business).

So let’s review: there is both little evidence that Twitter can monetize via direct response marketing, and reason to believe that the problem is not simply mismanagement. At the same time, Twitter is absolutely essential to a core group of users who are not simply unconcerned with the problems inherent to Twitter’s public broadcast model (including abuse and mob behavior), but actually find the platform indispensable for precisely those reasons: Twitter is where the news is made, shaped, and battled over, and there is very little chance of another platform displacing it, in large part because no one is economically motivated to do so.

Given this, why not charge for access?

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: just me, or was there not really that much informed followup on Jack Dorsey leaving Twitter? Or maybe it was in the wrong part of the news cycle.

The pricey exercise company Peloton may face an endless uphill battle to retain users in the face of inevitable churn. CC-licensed photo by Dana L. Brown on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. In sequence. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Jack Dorsey: the outgoing Twitter CEO with an artist’s vision • The Guardian

Dan Milmo with some background on the guy who sent the first tweet and has now stepped aside as Twitter CEO:

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Dorsey’s artistic mindset was cited, pointedly, when he was removed as chief executive for the first time in 2008. According to Nick Bilton’s book Hatching Twitter, Williams said to him: “You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter. But you can’t be both.” Dorsey would apparently intersperse his chief executive duties with breaks for hot yoga and sewing classes.

Dorsey came back as executive chairman in 2011, having set up payment company Square – today worth $100bn – in the meantime. Twitter struggled in the wake of its 2013 flotation, which made Dorsey a billionaire, and he replaced Dick Costolo as chief executive in 2015 while relinquishing the executive chairman role.

Dorsey leaves the company with 210 million daily active users and annual revenues of $3.7bn. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he is worth $12.3bn, ranked 174th among the ranks of the world’s super-wealthy. He still owns 2.3% of Twitter.

But unrest had been building about Dorsey’s priorities. In 2019 Dorsey surprised staff and investors by announcing plans to move to Africa for up to six months a year. Announcing the move during a month-long trip to the continent, he tweeted, from Addis Ababa: “Sad to be leaving the continent … for now. Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!). Not sure where yet, but I’ll be living here for 3-6 months mid 2020. Grateful I was able to experience a small part.”

Dorsey, who remains a cryptocurrency enthusiast, dropped the plan after coronavirus arrived. But it wouldn’t have dissuaded the activist investor firm Elliott Management from its view that Twitter was a business in need of more focus at the top.

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Hard to know precisely what led him to leave, but I’d guess it was seeing a couple of projects (audio, monetisation) come to fruition. After which, he’s probably going to focus on Square and crypto.
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Twitter’s an important social network for its effects on society: it was one of the first places where people discovered they could create widespread polarisation over a topic through social media. Buy Social Warming, my latest book, and find out what it was – and more.

UK ICO issues provisional view to fine Clearview AI Inc more than £17m • ICO

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The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has today announced its provisional intent to impose a potential fine of just over £17m on Clearview AI Inc – a company that describes itself as the ‘World’s Largest Facial Network’. In addition, the ICO has issued a provisional notice to stop further processing of the personal data of people in the UK and to delete it following alleged serious breaches of the UK’s data protection laws.

Today’s announcement follows a joint investigation by the ICO and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), which focused on Clearview AI Inc’s use of images, data scraped from the internet and the use of biometrics for facial recognition. Customers of Clearview AI Inc can also provide an image to the company to carry out biometric searches, including facial recognition searches, on their behalf to identify relevant facial image results against a database of over 10 billion images.

The images in Clearview AI Inc’s database are likely to include the data of a substantial number of people from the UK and may have been gathered without people’s knowledge from publicly available information online, including social media platforms. The ICO also understands that the service provided by Clearview AI Inc was used on a free trial basis by a number of UK law enforcement agencies, but that this trial was discontinued and Clearview AI Inc’s services are no longer being offered in the UK.

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Reckoned to be the ICO’s largest fine, imposed for multiple reasons (which are listed) including “failing to have a process in place to stop the data being retained indefinitely”. Well, that’s your problem – it’s the internet. It tends to do that.
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Collapse of UK energy firms could cost each household extra £120 • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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Consumers in England, Scotland and Wales could be on the hook for a total of £3.2bn to cover the costs left behind by bust gas and electricity providers, on top of paying for record gas and electricity market prices, according to analysts at Investec.

The bank warned of a “substantial” burden on households to provide a safety net for the customers of bust suppliers, including the largest to go under so far, Bulb Energy, which plunged into a special administration process last week.

“The meltdown in the supply market is likely to see substantial additional costs land on every GB household, hardly welcome when fuel poverty is an issue, inflation is an issue, and commodity costs look set to push energy bills up,” the wealth management group Investec said.

Energy bills had already climbed from an average of £1,138 a year to £1,277 a year from last month under the energy regulator’s price cap, which is used to limit price rises for 11 million homes that pay for a standard dual-fuel tariff by direct debit.

The increase, which has raised concerns among fuel poverty campaigners that hundreds of thousands of additional households will be unable to pay their bills, is expected to be followed by an even steeper price in April.

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Two points of note: First, Ambrose is listed as the “energy correspondent”, which is a title I don’t think I’ve seen before. Second, the article has an embedded table of “UK energy suppliers that have gone bust in 2021”, which stretches back to January: there are 25 on the list (plus two which didn’t supply domestic customers) covering a total of 4.3 million households. The smallest had 600 customers.

More and more this looks like a failure to set up an adequate regulation regime requiring sufficiently capitalised businesses; they were relying on cashflow, but the jump in energy prices linked to the regulator-imposed price cap killed them. Who imposed the price cap? The Tory government. Who set up the Ofgem regulatory regime? Same answer. Bad regulation is indistinguishable from a failed market.
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Whistleblower Frances Haugen still believes in Silicon Valley • WIRED

Steven Levy met Haugen, as it happened, when she worked at Google and he went on a world tour with Marissa Mayer and a group including Haugen in 2007. Subsequently she was diagnosed with coeliac disease which led to a serious clot in one leg, leaving her unable to walk for a long time and requiring physical therapy. She left Google because her manager didn’t take her ailment seriously:

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SL: In those jobs after Google and before Facebook, had your view of tech companies soured?

FH: I still feel very positively about most Silicon Valley tech companies. I don’t think there’s an inherent rot or something like that. I do believe that there is a need for transparency across any power, any platform that has a lot of power. And then I think we need slightly different relationships with them.

SL: By 2019 Facebook had already suffered scandals and had very public defections. Yet you joined that tainted company.

FH: I got approached by a recruiter in December of 2018. I said the only thing I would work on is civic misinformation. I think we need a lot more people working inside Facebook to fix Facebook’s problems. I strongly encourage people to work at Facebook.

SL: Hold on. Even after you unearthed all those damning documents, you’re urging people to join Facebook?

FH: People question whether you can be a person with integrity and work at Facebook. If anything, Facebook is a flat enough organization that if a lot of people came there determined to fix it, I think they would actually have a positive impact.

SL: Yet you left.

FH: I did because I couldn’t stay any longer and continue to live in Puerto Rico [where I moved for health reasons]. I still live with severe pain every day, because I was paralyzed beneath my knees. Even being back in the Bay Area right now is shockingly hard for me because it’s cold and damp here, and really painful every day that I’m here. And so I had to choose between being in a place where I was much more comfortable or working at Facebook.

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Australia to introduce new laws to force media platforms to unmask online trolls • Reuters

Melanie Burton:

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Australia will introduce legislation to make social media giants provide details of users who post defamatory comments, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Sunday.

The government has been looking at the extent of the responsibility of platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, for defamatory material published on their sites and comes after the country’s highest court ruled that publishers can be held liable for public comments on online forums.

The ruling caused some news companies like CNN to deny Australians access to [the news organisations’] Facebook pages.

“The online world should not be a wild west where bots and bigots and trolls and others are anonymously going around and can harm people,” Morrison said at a televised press briefing. “That is not what can happen in the real world, and there is no case for it to be able to be happening in the digital world.”

The new legislation will introduce a complaints mechanism, so that if somebody thinks they are being defamed, bullied or attacked on social media, they will be able to require the platform to take the material down.

If the content is not withdrawn, a court process could force a social media platform to provide details of the commenter.

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I think the writing here is loose: the intro should say “users who post *allegedly* defamatory comments”. It doesn’t say proof has to be supplied before the content gets removed or identities unmasked. And it’s hardly as if the tech companies don’t take content down; it’s just they tend to use slightly different criteria.
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What is a Peloton supposed to do, exactly? • She’s A Beast: A Swole Woman’s Newsletter

Casey Johnston:

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I read this piece on The Verge about the growing tension between users connected exercise device like Pelotons and the companies that make those devices. Essentially, Peloton is stumbling more that its business projections projected, because customers have not been as loyal as the company thought they would be. For one thing, users are starting to chafe at the idea that they need to subscribe to the device in order for it to be useful, and more specifically that they can’t watch anything except the closed-ecosystem, preprogrammed content on the big built-in screens.This includes Peloton, but also the newer models of NordicTrack treadmills, the Tonal strength device that has to be professional adhered to wall studs, and more. NordicTrack owners have gone to war with the company over the fact that it shut down a hack that allowed owners to watch Netflix on the device’s screen. 

The Verge piece mostly focuses on the fact that the subscription-oriented devices are a hassle: Not only are they completely rigid about their users having subscriptions to the platform, but it’s hard to transfer ownership of the bikes. The relatively delicate built-in screens also make them, hilariously to me, difficult to even move around, let alone from one owner’s house to a new owner’s house. 

But there is more here on the issue of motivation, which is a constant challenge for people trying to make a habit of exercise. The question that the hand-in-glove operation of these Peloton-type gadgets with the infotainment platform that are their workout classes actually begs is, do they ever really deliver on the dream of a set-it-and-forget-it relationship with working out, a truly independent and autonomous approach to exercise, if they also encourage and require the subscription?

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A follow-on from yesterday’s 80/20 piece. Personally I think Peloton looks wildly expensive. Alternatives like Zwift are cheaper and in many ways better.
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Could this revolutionary idea pay our climate change debt and supercharge CO2 reductions? • Forbes

David Vetter:

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What if we could accelerate decarbonization and the removal of carbon dioxide from the air, achieving global climate targets, all without saddling future generations with trillions of dollars of debt?

That’s a question being considered by researchers in Oxford who have developed a novel idea for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions—by treating them like financial debt.

The key to the concept: issue carbon emitters such as oil companies with debt instruments called carbon removal obligations (CROs). While these would be tradeable, such obligations would gather interest over time, effectively charging emitters for storing CO2 in the air. The payments on the debt could be used to pay for carbon dioxide removal as such technologies become available at scale.

The brainchild of PhD researcher Johannes Bednar of the Austrian International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in conjunction with the University of Oxford, the concept for carbon removal obligations offers a reversal of the current situation, in which polluters are free to emit greenhouse gases while making vague promises about decarbonizing operations and using carbon capture technologies that don’t yet exist. This means current generations are able to pass the buck of ever higher concentrations of CO2 on to future generations to deal with. The costs of reversing the damage done by today’s carbon polluters have been estimated at some $535 trillion—many times the size of the entire global economy.

CROs, on the other hand, immediately put the responsibility for carbon removal onto the emitter.

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Nice idea, which would of course need everyone to implement it together, and if we’ve learnt anything, doing this with nation states is like trying to herd cats that are presently asleep in front of a steamroller.

Also, Could Forbes Stop Writing Headlines Which Invite The Answer No?
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Origin story: how Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and more celebs started Planet Hollywood • Esquire

Kate Storey:

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In the mid-nineties, I visited the Orlando Planet Hollywood. I was around ten. I can recall museum-cased memorabilia above my head—I don’t know from which movie. Probably something I wasn’t allowed to see. It didn’t matter. These were real, actual props from movies. And surely, I imagined, movie stars hung out at this crowded central-Florida restaurant all the time. I begged my parents for a T-shirt, which I held on to for years. At that point, Planet Hollywood merch was highly coveted. “For a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah, I managed to get Planet Hollywood to sell me one of the official wool-and-leather jackets. They weren’t for sale, so it was a huge deal,” remembers journalist and author Linda Stasi. “When we gave it to him, people were literally cheering and touching it. The jacket was so rare at the time and Planet Hollywood was so cool that it was like giving a kid a solid-gold Rolex.” A vintage Planet Hollywood leather jacket or bomber can go for as little as sixty dollars on eBay today.

Tourists still flooded into the flagship Manhattan restaurant. The wait was always at least twenty minutes. Sometimes it was a couple hours. Patrons complained, yet they waited behind the velvet rope (a nice Hollywood touch) for the chance to sit underneath one of the fifteen jackets Schwarzenegger wore in The Terminator—even if Schwarzenegger himself was almost never there. They always asked, though. “It was incredibly monotonous for us, because there was a hierarchy like there is at any other job,” says actress Natalie Zea, who worked as a hostess at the Manhattan Planet Hollywood in 1994. “The servers were superior to us, because they’re the ones who got to interact on the occasion when somebody [famous] would come in. There was no real behind-the-scenes. It was just so rote.”

On a night when there wasn’t an opening or a screening, it was like any other midlevel chain restaurant where families in cutoffs clutching bags of sixteen-dollar T-shirts paid about fifteen dollars a person for pasta with a heavy sauce. The bartender mixed up big, bright, syrupy drinks, then put them on trays to be distributed to the smoking and nonsmoking sections. The same twenty songs played over and over. “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran seemed to always be on.

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Why this? Well, if you look in the right way – as Ravi (👋) did, you’ll see a strong resemblance to the origin story of a more recent phenomenon, where the promise of celebrities turning up in person and vouchsafing their wisdom attracted a lot of people; but then the celebrities went away, and so did the special people, until you reach the Yogi Berra paradox of “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too popular”. Except it’s not. (PH went bust, returned, rinse, repeat.)
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Why trying to clean up all the ocean plastic is pointless • Gizmodo

Molly Taft (for Gizmodo) speaks to Max Liboiron, associate professor at the University of Newfoundland and a scholar of plastic pollution – of which we’re putting 8bn kg into the ocean every year:

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Molly Taft, Earther We’re conditioned to think cleaning up the oceans is a net good, which is why projects that have these lofty goals of taking all the trash out of the sea seem to have such a cultural hold. What’s complicated about that premise?

Max Liboiron: One of the things that’s really important to understand is that cleaning up the oceans is fundamentally different than something like cleaning up litter on the street. That’s mostly because of scale problems. The stuff we’re really familiar with at the scale of being a human does not track into the ocean because the ocean is the biggest thing in the world.

You actually have a scale problem where you cannot clean up the ocean in any way at a rate that is commensurate with the amount of plastic going into it. Microplastics are some of the smallest things in the world. They’re smaller than a grain of rice, and they’re in one of the biggest things in the world from a numbers standpoint.

When we teach pollution science, which is different than litter science, what we teach people is that it’s called a stock-and-flow problem. The best metaphor is, OK, you walk into your bathroom and your bathtub is overflowing. Do you, a) turn off the tap, or b) get a mop? I mean, eventually you’ll do both, but you better turn off that tap before you start mopping up or you will never stop mopping up and you will never catch up to the water spilling out. That’s a great model for job security but a horrible model for dealing with pollution.

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Again and again, it feels as though we try to solve problems not by tackling the problem at its root, but by creating makework that enlarges the circuit around which the problem is handed. (See also: CO2 emissions.)
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UK regulator expected to block Meta’s Giphy deal • Financial Times

Kate Beioley and Javier Espinoza:

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Meta has aggressively fought the watchdog’s assessment and a block is likely to be controversial, potentially triggering an appeal. In a response to the CMA’s provisional findings Meta accused the watchdog of “engaging in extraterritorial over-reach” and “sending a chilling message to start-up entrepreneurs: do not build new companies because you will not be able to sell them”.

In August Meta said: “We disagree with the CMA’s preliminary findings, which we do not believe to be supported by the evidence. As we have demonstrated, this merger is in the best interest of people and businesses in the UK — and around the world — who use Giphy and our services. We will continue to work with the CMA to address the misconception that the deal harms competition.” 

According to submissions by Meta’s lawyers, the CMA’s findings contained “fundamental errors of law and fact”. The company also criticised the regulator’s assessment of Giphy’s potential future business ventures in display advertising. It was more likely, Meta said, that Giphy would have “continued in a diminished and underfunded state”.

Meta declined to comment on the CMA’s future move beyond its earlier remarks.

The clash grew more acrimonious in October when the CMA fined Meta £50.5m for a “major breach” of an order that the company remain separate from Giphy during its investigation. The CMA accused Meta of “consciously refusing to report” information about itself and Giphy, handing down by far the largest-ever fine for such a violation.

Regulators around the world have grown increasingly concerned about letting so-called “killer acquisitions” slip through their nets, after waving through Meta’s acquisition of smaller rivals Instagram and WhatsApp.

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If this happens, it would be the first acquisition by a big company to be blocked. Though Luther Lowe points out that Giphy put itself up for sale because Google downrated its results in search, preferring its own GIF search results. I know – how surprising that Google would do such an anticompetitive thing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Bajau people can hold their breath for exceptionally long times because of a genetic mutation. CC-licensed photo by Borneo Child Aid 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. Enthusiastic infection. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

WHO says too early to understand Omicron severity • Bloomberg via Yahoo

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The 13 omicron cases identified in the Netherlands on Sunday suggest the new variant already has a strong foothold in Europe, with more countries reporting cases. It will “inevitably” arrive in the US, Anthony Fauci said, and that Americans should get vaccines and boosters as prevention. Airline travel is beginning to recall the first days of the pandemic.

Moderna chief medical officer Paul Burton said he suspects omicron may elude current vaccines and, if so, a reformulated shot could be available early next year.

…The World Health Organization is urging caution after two South African health experts, including the doctor who first sounded the alarm about the omicron variant, indicated that symptoms linked to the coronavirus strain have been mild so far.

The initial reported infections were among university students, WHO said, adding that younger patients tend to have milder symptoms.

“Understanding the level of severity of the omicron variant will take days to several weeks,” WHO said in a statement, adding that “there is currently no information to suggest that symptoms associated with omicron are different from those from other variants.”

European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde said vaccination drives in poorer countries must be improved. “We won’t be protected until we are all vaccinated,” Lagarde told Italy’s Rai 3 in a live television interview. “If some companies can deliver packages everywhere, I’m sure we can do that with vaccines too.”

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Of course they decided not to call it “nu” – sounds too like “new” -, or the next option, “xi” because “it’s a common surname. So omicron it is. Two weeks to figure out how virulent it is and how aggressive.
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Israel and Iran broaden cyberwar to attack civilian targets • The New York Times

Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman:

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Millions of ordinary people in Iran and Israel recently found themselves caught in the crossfire of a cyberwar between their countries. In Tehran, a dentist drove around for hours in search of gasoline, waiting in long lines at four gas stations only to come away empty.

In Tel Aviv, a well-known broadcaster panicked as the intimate details of his sex life, and those of hundreds of thousands of others stolen from an LGBTQ dating site, were uploaded on social media.

For years, Israel and Iran have engaged in a covert war, by land, sea, air and computer, but the targets have usually been military or government related. Now, the cyberwar has widened to target civilians on a large scale.

In recent weeks, a cyberattack on Iran’s nationwide fuel distribution system paralyzed the country’s 4,300 gas stations, which took 12 days to have service fully restored.

That attack was attributed to Israel by two US defense officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments. It was followed days later by cyberattacks in Israel against a major medical facility and a popular LGBTQ dating site, attacks Israeli officials have attributed to Iran.

The escalation comes as American authorities have warned of Iranian attempts to hack the computer networks of hospitals and other critical infrastructure in the United States. As hopes fade for a diplomatic resurrection of the Iranian nuclear agreement, such attacks are only likely to proliferate.

Hacks have been seeping into civilian arenas for months. Iran’s national railroad was attacked in July, but that relatively unsophisticated hack may not have been Israeli. And Iran is accused of making a failed attack on Israel’s water system last year.

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The essence of cyberwar is that it’s almost certain to involve collateral damage to civilians. A Sky TV series called COBRA, featuring a beleaguered (but actually capable) Prime Minister, had a series-long storyline which was one cyberattack after another, which all looked close to feasible, amplified by social media unrest – which is what would really cause the problems.
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Improving digital public forums’ role in democracy • Imagining the Internet

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862 respondents answered the yes-no question [“Looking ahead to 2035, can digital spaces and people’s use of them be changed in ways that significantly serve the public good – yes or no?”]

61% said they either hope or expect that by 2035 digital spaces and people’s uses of them WILL change in ways that significantly serve the public good. However, because some wrote that this is merely their hope and others listed one or more extremely difficult hurdles to overcome before that outcome can be achieved, the numeric finding of 61 is not fully indicative of the challenge of accomplishing this.

39% said they expect that by 2035, digital spaces and people’s uses of them WILL NOT change in ways that significantly serve the public good.

It is important to note that a large share of those who chose “yes” – that online public spaces will improve significantly by 2035 – said it was their “hope” only and/or also wrote in their answers that the changes between now and then could go either way. They often listed one or more difficult hurdles to overcome before that outcome can be achieved. The simple quantitative results are not fully indicative of the complexities of the challenges. The important findings are found in the respondents’ rich, deep qualitative replies.The full 160-page report includes full details.

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To be read in parallel with the Pew Internet writeup of the same question. (You may find one or the other version more accessible, or hitting the buttons of interest better.) It’s quite a timescale – as long as social networks have been around – and yet one-third are sure of no improvement, and the others only “hope or expect”. (Thanks Seth F for the links.)
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The trouble with troubleshooting • 80/20 Endurance

Matt Fitzgerald:

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where nontraumatic sports injuries are concerned, the person is “better off without” a diagnosis most of the time. For example, in a 2021 study by Indian researchers, forty-four individuals with low-back pain were given MRI’s, after which half of them were given a factual description of the findings and half were told that the findings were normal regardless of the results. Six weeks later, according to the study’s authors, members of the first group had a “more negative perception of their spinal condition, increased catastrophization, decreased pain improvement, and poorer functional status.” That’s not exactly an endorsement of diagnosis.

At first blush, all of this business about athletic pain and overmedicalization might seem to have nothing to do with Bob and Sally, our two hypothetical runners [mentioned earlier in the full article] who had difficulty adjusting to a shift in their daily run time. [Bob laughed it off, Sally was concerned because her run monitoring device said she was having a “bad workout”.] In fact, though, it has everything to do with it. Increasingly, the devices that athletes use to monitor and regulate their training are doing the same thing doctors and diagnostic tests do to athletes. As device features and metrics multiply (Garmin’s new “body battery” takes the cake), so does the number of things that can go wrong. Worse, at the same time these devices raise (mostly false) alarms, they insidiously drain athletes of their autonomy, lulling them into placing more and more trust into the plastic oracles on their wrists and less and less into their own perceptions and judgments.

Someone should do an experiment where sports devices are coded to randomly produce an alert message reading, “You’re having a terrible workout.” I’m willing to bet that a majority of today’s tech-dependent athletes would take this message seriously, rattled by it even if they’re in the middle of a terrific workout when it pops up.

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The Apple Watch doesn’t do that, though I do wonder how hard it would be to ignore if it did. The interaction of our perception of how well we’re doing with the objective measure is subtle, and it probably doesn’t help at all to have qualitative analysis stuck to it.
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Rare mutation among Bajau people lets them stay underwater longer • Gizmodo

George Dvorsky:

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At first glance, the spleen doesn’t seem a likely organ to help us hold our breath. Its primary functions are to filter blood as part of the immune system, fight bacteria, and to recycle red blood cells. But it also plays an important role during acute oxygen shortage, i.e. when we hold our breath for an extended period of time. When breathing stops, our bodies trigger a series of physiological changes: our heart rate slows down, the blood vessels in our extremities constrict, and our spleen shrinks down in size. When the spleen contracts like this, it releases oxygenated red blood cells, which provides an extra supply of oxygen to the bloodstream. The bigger the spleen, the greater amounts of freshly oxygenated blood.

Figuring this was a clue to extraordinary breath-holding ability, lead researcher Melissa Ilardo brought a portable ultrasound machine to southeast Asia to measure the size of Bajau spleens. Which, as the researchers themselves admit, was a bit werid.

“I basically just showed up at the house of the chief of the village, this bizarre, foreign girl [referring to herself] with an ultrasound machine asking about spleens,” said Ilardo in a statement, adding that “They’re the most welcoming people I’ve ever met.”

Results of the ultrasounds showed that Bajau individuals do indeed have larger spleens, and they’re larger that those found in unrelated neighboring populations. At first, this observation was attributed to differences in physical conditioning or physiological responses—but spleen sizes among diving and non-diving Bajau individuals did not vary in size, which suggested something else was going on. Something a bit more genetic.

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A related topic, if you’re going down to the undersea woods today: the secret to holding your breath (much, much) longer. Did *you* know the spleen was involved in oxygen capacity? I always wondered why doctors seem happy to lop it out.
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Why carbon taxes really work • Tim Harford

The Undercover Economist approves of them:

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The price of everything we buy is tied to the cost of resources required to make and deliver it. If something requires acres of land, tonnes of raw materials, megawatt-hours of energy and days of skilled labour, you can bet that it won’t come cheap. The link between price and cost is fuzzy but real. Yet carbon emissions have not been reflected in that cost.

A carbon tax changes that by making the climate impact as real a cost as any other. It sends a signal along all those supply chains, nudging every decision towards the lower-carbon alternative. A shopper may decide that a carbon-taxed T-shirt is too costly, but meanwhile the textile factory is looking to save on electricity, while the electricity supplier is switching to solar. Every part of the value chain becomes greener.

Large changes might well be achievable with a surprisingly subtle carbon tax. The International Monetary Fund has suggested that a tax of $75/ton of CO2 might be required, but even with a £100/tonne tax — nearly twice as much — the day-to-day pain would be less than most people expect.

In the UK, carbon dioxide emissions are less than six tonnes per person per year, plus two or three tonnes more to reflect the carbon footprint of imported goods. A £100/tonne tax that covered those emissions would raise the cost of living by just over £2 a day, and cover more than 5% of UK tax revenue. That’s not nothing: the government would be wise to send everyone a monthly lump sum in compensation. The burden would fall unevenly: those who spent a lot, flew a lot, drove a lot or heated big, draughty houses would pay more. It is unlikely that you would notice much impact on the price of bananas.

Coffee provides an instructive example of how much of the change would be imperceptible. According to Mark Maslin and Carmen Nab of University College London, a kilogram of coffee beans delivered to the UK has a typical footprint of about 15 kilograms of CO2. If farmed and shipped more sustainably, the footprint is 3.5 kilograms. With a £100/tonne carbon tax, that’s either £1.50 or 35 pence. You can make dozens of coffees with a kilogram of beans, so coffee drinkers might not notice, but you can bet that behind the scenes farmers and shippers will be looking to push their costs away from £1.50 and towards 35 pence.

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The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger • Stephen Diehl

Diehl is annoyed (as he often is) by the empty promises of crypto:

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After twelve years of these technologies existing (roughly the same age as the iPhone) there is basically only one type of successful crypto business: exchanges which exist to trade more crypto. But the heart of this issue, and why there’s no other success stories, is because smart contracts tenuously look like a good idea until you actually try to build anything real that has to interact with the non-blockchain outside world. At which point they become too brittle, insecure, or strictly inferior to a centralized alternative.

In database terminology smart contracts are stored procedures that run one of the various incarnations of distributed databases these technologies are built on. In theory they act somewhat like self-automated vending machines but for more complex user interactions. In practice they act more like self-automated bug bounties which typically explode violently when certain exploits are issued against the coded logic, and at which point they spill all of the coins locked up in the contract.

These disasters happen about two or three times a week now because coding at that level of correctness required in a Javascript-like language with loose and ill-defined semantics is near impossible. When a contract does finally meet its end, the only recourse is begging or threats to return the stolen tokens. However it’s unclear that “stolen” is the right word because the contract was simply behaving exactly as instructed and therein lies the core reason why “code is law” is an absolutely rubbish idea.

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I was reminded of his point – that when people exploit these “smart contracts” to take millions, which they are then implored to give back, in a completely non-smart-contract human-to-human appeal, by a piece in the New Yorker about how Kurt Gödel said he’d found a recursive flaw in the US Constitution that left it open to becoming a constitutional dictatorship. And others explain how.
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Bitcoin exchanges face digital tax raid • Sunday Telegraph

James Titcomb:

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The UK tax office has informed online cryptocurrency exchanges that they are subject to the levy, which is designed to ensure tech firms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon pay more to the Exchequer.

HMRC said crypto assets “are not financial instruments” and do not qualify as commodities or money, meaning online exchanges that sell cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and ethereum are not able to claim an exemption for financial marketplaces.

The digital services tax, which came into force last year, places a 2% sales levy on online marketplaces, search engines and social media services that have a global revenue of over £500m and UK sales of over £25m.

It is expected to be phased out after a G20 tax deal earlier this year to punish avoidance, but remains in force until a replacement measure comes into effect.

Companies which may be hit by the levy include Coinbase, one of the world’s biggest exchanges. Its UK subsidiary reported sales of €21.2m (£18m) last year but the company recently reported that global revenues had quadrupled, meaning it is likely to pass the UK threshold in 2021.

CryptoUK, an industry body, is lobbying HMRC and The Treasury over the issue, saying it is unfair to treat cryptocurrencies differently to other financial assets. In the US, they have been treated as commodities.

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At the same time as this, crypto exchanges have to be licensed by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. So crypto both is and isn’t a financial instrument: it is for the purposes of consumer protection, and it isn’t for the purposes of raising tax.
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The post-truth pandemic • Overmatter

Natasha Loder is health policy editor at The Economist:

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Imagine, for a moment, that a massive asteroid is hurtling towards our planet. You would think that science, technology, and facts would form the backbone of the response. World leaders would be expected to come up with a strategy, informed by the world’s most brilliant minds, for how to deflect the asteroid. Or failing that, preserve as many lives as possible.

The last couple of years have taught us something. Should this hypothetical asteroid threaten us a number of far more depressing scenarios seem likely. Some leaders will deny the asteroid exists, or lean on non-mainstream ideas that suggest the rock is actually going to whizz right past us. Other politicians would point out that a large asteroid impact is not so bad, really. You know, not much worse than a bad meteor shower.  And some would use the crisis to their advantage, spreading division along the way. Belief in the asteroid could even become a sort of political litmus test.

Over the last few years, one of the questions I’ve been asked the most often is what it was like to be a health journalist covering a pandemic. One thing that stood out was the volume of misinformation that spread from the early days, and the extent to which the infodemic was driven by political leaders and states. So much so, I started to think about the outbreak as a “post-truth pandemic” about halfway through 2020.

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She lists a lot of the things that the leaders of the free (and not-so-free) world did to make it all go so badly wrong.

The asteroid idea, as it happens, is the premise of Don’t Look Up, which is Netflix’s Christmas Eve film. I’d say it’s exactly on point.

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It’s still November, so enough time to order Social Warming, my latest book, on the widespread effects of social networks.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Samsung’s iconic Galaxy Note – which forged the way for “phablets” – won’t be made any more, reports suggest. CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns 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. On the correct day this time. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How the pandemic pulled Nigerian university students into cybercrime • The Record

Olatunji Olaigbe:

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even now [Kayode’s] descent into cybercrime can sound rational given the nightmare of trying to stay afloat amid the pandemic in Nigeria. 

“I needed to do something. I needed to survive,” Kayode said. “I’m not justifying my decision, but there’s something in being at home, doing nothing, but paradoxically doing everything in your capacity to stay alive, yet you are kind of dying, that makes you care less about others.” 

Nigeria represents one of the largest economies in the world and the largest in Africa. Although oil and agriculture are still the country’s largest industries, its tech ecosystem is one of the world’s fastest growing.

But according to Trading Economics, the average Nigerian salary is 43,200 naira (about $105) a month, still far behind that of many other countries with strong tech sectors. Meanwhile, the country’s jobless rate is the second highest in the world—quadrupling in the last five years and surging to 33.3% from 27.1% amid the pandemic, Bloomberg reported in March.

Young Nigerians have been hit the hardest by the epidemic’s unemployment crisis—driving many to online crime and forcing cultural re-evaluation of its morality, according to Oludayo Tade.

“It creates this orientation that this society does not take care of us, so we have to take care of ourselves,” said Tade, who researches and teaches sociology and criminology at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. 

Kayode seems like an unlikely criminal at first glance. 

In high school, he says, he was an A student and served as his school’s social prefect, while also representing his school in academic competitions. And he scored well enough on the Nigerian equivalent of the SAT’s to land a spot at the University of Ilorin, one of the country’s most elite educational institutions—where I also attend.

But as Kayode was in the middle of first semester exams for his sophomore year in March 2020, the Academic Staff Union of University embarked on a two-week warning strike—citing unmet demands and disagreement with the federal government. Then the pandemic struck Nigeria, and the federal government imposed an indefinite nationwide lockdown. University students were encouraged to leave their dorms and go home until education resumed.

That wasn’t so easy for Kayode. 

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Doesn’t have to be cybercrime: plenty got work as essay writers, for richer but less capable people in other countries.
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A trust recession is looming over the American economy – The Atlantic

Jerry Useem:

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The economists Paul Zak and Stephen Knack found, in a study published in 1998, that a 15% bump in a nation’s belief that “most people can be trusted” adds a full percentage point to economic growth each year. That means that if, for the past 20 years, Americans had trusted one another like Ukrainians did, our annual GDP per capita would be $11,000 lower; if we had trusted like New Zealanders did, it’d be $16,000 higher. “If trust is sufficiently low,” they wrote, “economic growth is unachievable.”

…Add to the disruption and isolation of the pandemic a political climate that urges us to meditate on the distance—ethnic, generational, ideological, socioeconomic—separating us from others, and it’s not hard to see why many Americans feel disconnected.

What has suffered most are “weak ties”—relationships with acquaintances who fall somewhere between stranger and friend, which sociologists find are particularly valuable for the dissemination of knowledge. A closed inner circle tends to recycle knowledge it already has. New information is more likely to come from the serendipitous encounter with Alan, the guy with the fern in his office who reports to Phoebe and who remembers the last time someone suggested splitting the marketing division into three teams, and how that went.

Some evidence suggests that having more weak ties can shorten bouts of unemployment. In a famous 1973 survey, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter discovered that, among 54 people who had recently found a new job through someone they knew, 28% had heard about the new position from a weak tie, versus 17% from a strong one. When the weak ties fall away, our “radius of trust”—to borrow Fukuyama’s term—shrinks.

That’s a problem for individual employees, as much as they may appreciate the flexibility of working anywhere, anytime. And it’s a problem for business leaders, who are trying to weigh the preferences of those employees against the enduring existence of the place that employs them. They don’t want to end up like IBM. It saved $2bn making much of its workforce remote as early as the 1980s, only to reverse course in 2017, when it recognised that remote work was depressing collaboration. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently wondered whether companies were “burning” some of the face-to-face “social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. What’s the measure for that?”

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Poor regulation, not price cap, to blame for energy market mayhem • Financial Times

Helen Thomas:

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Bulb [which went bust earlier this week, leaving 1.7 million customers in the lurch] wasn’t a “tease and squeeze” merchant, attracting customers with low fixed rates before flipping them close to the price cap. It had one variable tariff. But it had grown very quickly and was perennially lossmaking, thinly-capitalised and in effect sold energy at cost. Its gross margin in the year to March 2019 was 1%.

Its position had looked precarious for some time. The going-concern statement in its March 2020 accounts implied it was reliant on a letter from parent company Simple Energy Limited (which only holds Bulb) guaranteeing support for another 12 months.

It had a £55m loan facility (again guaranteed by its parent). Compare that to Octopus Energy, which at the time had a similar number of customers, with its £340m of committed funding in its April 2020 accounts. While Octopus’s risk discussion of wholesale prices provides details on a “strict and sophisticated” hedging policy, the word “hedging” doesn’t even feature in Bulb’s similar disclosure.

The reality is Bulb probably didn’t have the balance sheet to follow the paint-by-numbers template provided by the regulator for protection consistent with the assumptions in the price cap. It wasn’t required to do so and it’s not clear how much it did hedge.

…The mistake [in regulation] was capping retail prices while allowing companies chasing growth at any cost to take huge amounts of commodity price risk that was in effect backstopped by the state. Recent moves in power prices would have probably meant some failures under most regimes, reckons Peter Atherton, a sector consultant. But the politics of energy mean ultimately “the government is the supplier of last resort — always has been, always will be”, he said.

A regulatory environment that priced in that risk to the taxpayer would have policed existing rules more vigorously. It would have set a much higher bar for new entrants, much earlier. And it would have set tougher requirements on hedging wholesale price risk.

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The energy market will look different – less choice, for sure – next year. Shows how important it is not just to regulate, but to do it well.
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Amid NSO scandal, Israel said to ban cyber tech sales to 65 countries • The Times of Israel

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The [Israel] Defense Ministry has dramatically scaled back the number of countries to which Israeli companies can sell cyber technologies amid global fallout over Israeli spyware firm NSO Group, according to a report Thursday.

The updated November list consists of 37 countries, down from 102, according to the Calcalist business news daily.

Countries with questionable human rights records, including Israel’s new allies Morocco and the UAE, have been removed, the report said.

Other dropped countries include Saudi Arabia and Mexico. The Saudis allegedly used NSO’s Pegasus spyware to monitor Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Mexico has also been said to use the surveillance technology on journalists and activists.

However, India — which was also accused of using NSO technology on journalists, opposition politicians, and activists — remains on the updated list.

The new rules are expected to deal a serious blow to Israel’s cyber technology industry, according to the report.

NSO Group has faced a torrent of international criticism over allegations it helps governments spy on dissidents and rights activists. NSO insists its product is meant only to assist countries in fighting crime and terrorism.

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How your product is “meant” to be used and how it’s actually used tend to be two different things. This is going to put NSO in a really tough spot. Imagine a fire sale, though: who would buy Pegasus? Who would oversee the bidding? Increasingly, Pegasus looks like one of the most valuable single pieces of software in the world. You have to hope they’ve got fantastic security, bot computing and physical.
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Galaxy Note 20 production to end, killing the series for good • 9to5Google

Ben Schoon:

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2021 marked a big year for the Galaxy Note series, but not in a good way. Rather, it was the beginning of the end as Samsung prioritized its foldables over the Galaxy Note line. Now, the death of the Note seems set in stone, as Samsung reportedly has no plans for a 2022 Galaxy Note, and is also planning to end production of the Galaxy Note 20. [There was no new Note released in 2021.]

ET News reports that Samsung has pretty much confirmed the end of the Galaxy Note series through two actions. Firstly, Samsung apparently has no plans for a Galaxy Note device in its 2022 roadmap. Likely, that means the only flagship-tier Galaxy smartphones coming next year will be the Galaxy S22 series and new foldables.

On top of that, Samsung will also apparently end production on its Galaxy Note 20 series entirely by the end of 2021. Until now, production on the Galaxy Note 20 has continued as the device has still been selling. In 2021, the series reportedly sold around 3.2 million devices, around a third the number of Note devices sold in 2020.

Of course, we know well at this point that the Galaxy S22 Ultra will act as a spiritual successor to the Galaxy Note series, with the device adopting a design closer to the Note 20 series as well as using the same built-in stylus. The Galaxy Fold series also inherits the S Pen, but still lacks a good place to store it.

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Iconic in its time, but the exploding batteries in autumn 2016 were very much the beginning of the end.
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Will glow-in-the-dark materials someday light our cities? • Knowable

Kurt Kleiner:

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These materials that glow strongly for hours open possibilities, such as “glow-in-the-dark” cities lighted by luminescent pavements and buildings. Since 19% of all global energy use is for lighting, and in Europe about 1.6% specifically for street lighting, the potential energy savings are large, write building engineer Anna Laura Pisello and colleagues in the 2021 Annual Review of Materials Research.

One problem with the approach is that most luminescent material won’t glow all the way through the night. Better materials could help solve that problem, says Pisello, of the University of Perugia, who studies energy-efficient building materials. In the meantime, existing materials could be combined with electric lighting that would come on long enough to recharge the road markings before switching off again.

Luminescent paint could also provide outdoor area lighting. Pisello’s lab developed such a glow-in-the-dark paint and in a 2019 report, simulated what would happen if they painted a public path near a railway station with it. By glowing throughout the night, the paint would reduce energy needed for lighting by about 27% in the immediate area, the scientists found.

If this conjures worries of entire cities glaring throughout the night and adding to harmful light pollution, Pisello says that is unlikely. Luminescent materials would likely only replace existing lighting, not add to it. The colour of the glowing materials could be chosen to avoid the blue frequencies that have been found especially harmful to wildlife.

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Tempted to say “no” reflexively to the headline, but the story is more persuasive.
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Tolkien estate blocks JRR Token crypto-currency • BBC News

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Lord of the Rings creator JRR Tolkien’s estate has successfully blocked a crypto-currency called JRR Token.

Lawyers representing the estate said the product, launched in August, infringed the author’s trademark, with websites selling and promoting the crypto-currency, jrrtoken.com and thetokenofpower.com, featuring rings, hobbit holes and a wizard like Gandalf.

The US-based developer paid the estate’s legal costs, which the lawyers said were “significant”.
The estate filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), one day after tokens for the crypto-currency ($JRR) went on sale aiming to “organise the people towards a common goal of making JRR Token ‘The One Token That Rules Them All'”.

This was very similar to the “one ring to rule them all” line from The Lord of The Rings book, the lawyers said.

And the domain name jrrtoken.com, registered in February 2021, was “specifically designed to mislead” people into believing it had a legitimate commercial connection with the author.

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As TV producer Willard Foxton Todd quipped: he’s a non-fungible Tolkien.
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Scientists call for travel ‘code red’ over Covid variant found in southern Africa • The Guardian

Hannah Devlin and Ian Sample:

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The variant, which was only identified on Tuesday, initially sparked concern because it carries an “extremely high number” of mutations that could allow it to evade immunity. The latest data, presented by South African scientists on Thursday, revealed the variant also appears to be more transmissible and is already present in provinces throughout the country.

Ewan Birney, the deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and a member of Spi-M, which advises the UK government, called for urgent “code red” – or “red list-type” – travel restrictions to be placed on southern Africa while the new variant’s transmissibility is investigated, saying it posed a risk of the pandemic regaining momentum.

He urged countries not to repeat the mistake of failing to act quickly. “What we’ve learnt from the other situations like this – some have turned out OK and some haven’t – is that whilst we’re [investigating] you have to be reasonably paranoid,” he said.

The new strain, B.1.1.529 [now dubbed “nu” by the WHO], was identified after a surge of cases in Gauteng, an urban area containing Pretoria and Johannesburg. Initially the cluster of cases, centred on a university, was assumed to be due to an increase in socialising.

However, this week the variant was identified as a potential, more ominous, cause of the increase. The first detected cases of the variant were collected in Botswana on 11 November and a case has also been found in Hong Kong – a 36-year-old man who tested positive while in quarantine after a trip to South Africa.

In the past 48 hours, South African scientists reviewed PCR test data from the Gauteng region and discovered the new variant appeared to be behind the increase in cases, having risen to account for around 90% of cases in a matter of weeks.

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When have travel restrictions ever prevented these variants from spreading, though? Endemic, pandemic, this virus spreads. The concern is if this is even more infectious than delta. The UK government put South Africa on the “red list” – quarantine required – on Thursday evening. With that in mind, the next question is…
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Has the UK reached herd immunity? • Unherd

Tom Chivers:

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here’s the note of caution. Herd immunity isn’t a fact about the virus: it’s an interaction between the virus and our behaviour. As an epidemiologist told me the last time I wrote about Covid case numbers, it’s much harder to predict the course of a pathogen when R is near 1. You can get unpredictable outbreaks in local patches, sub-populations with lower vaccination levels. Minor behaviour changes (more people socialising indoors as it gets colder? Christmas?) can push R up and alter things significantly. 

In response to that piece of mine, the forecasting site Metaculus put together some predictions for what was going to happen in the coming months — will we have further restrictions like Plan B or something more extreme; how high will the number of people in hospital get over winter, that sort of thing. 

Metaculus’s forecasts have a pretty good record in the pandemic so far. They think that Plan B-style restrictions are more likely than not before February 2022, and that there’s a good chance (≈25%) of more stringent ones, including a ban on household mixing at Christmas (≈20% chance). They also think that hospitalisations are likely to go up fairly significantly from their current level. (You can see their other relevant predictions here and here.)

So while we may be at or near herd immunity, we’re also in a knife-edge situation where changes in behaviour could change things quite a lot, and change the threshold for what counts as herd immunity.

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My most dangerous climb 🧗🏽‍♀️climbing an E9 with next to no trad experience • YouTube

Anna Hazelnutt:

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Once Upon a Time in the Southwest is a beautiful, 50 meter slab on the Devonshire coast in England. It’s a benchmark E9 (6c) trad climb known for its exposure, world-class techy slab movements, and of course, its flakey holds!

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The grade – E9 – essentially means “this is Olympics-style difficult, but also with a risk of serious injury if you get things wrong”. And she does get things wrong, because it’s only her second or third time where she isn’t just clipping to bolts drilled into the rock. She’s hand-placing the “gear” into cracks in the rock, from which it can be prone to fall out if you mishandle the rope. As she does.
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Christmas shopping? Let me recommend Social Warming, my latest book, about the creeping effects of social media on society, politics and journalism.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The US has put 27 Chinese companies on a blacklist for quantum computing technology, amid concerns that they could in future lead to military uses cracking encryption. CC-licensed photo by IBM Research 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. What have you done to my reactor? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Maradona’s stardom and a jar of cocaine trapped Natalia Denegri online • Rest of World

Lucía Cholakian Herrera and Leo Schwartz:

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The year is 1997, but the backing band looks trapped in the ’80s, all gas station sunglasses and button-downs. Although they play their instruments, the synthetic pop music sounds like a karaoke track. [Natalia] Denegri bounces around in a black halter top and skin-tight jeans, clutching a microphone, then reaches the chorus. “Who gave it to me?” she belts. “That’s what I want to know.”

The reference is not lost on the off-screen crowd, which erupts in exaggerated laughter, drowning out Denegri. “Attention in the studio!” implores the host, but the audience is too far gone.

Today, Denegri is a celebrated Argentinian actress and TV host, but this video is from a darker chapter of her life, when she was a young socialite trapped in the intoxicating orbit of football demigod Diego Maradona. The year before her ill-advised performance, Denegri was caught up in a scandal that gripped the nation, involving Maradona’s agent and a jar filled with cocaine. Her song, “Who Gave It To Me,” was a dirty double entendre referencing the episode, which is why the audience responded with such glee. She was 21 years old at the time. 

“As the years went by, I realized how I was used. I was a minor,” Natalia Denegri told Rest of World. “I had no idea what I was saying.”

She would rather everyone forget about that period of her life, when she became the spectacle of Argentina — sexualized, ridiculed, and denigrated in every corner of pop culture. She wants the video of her performance, and other links associated with her past, to be de-indexed from Google — removed from the search giant’s pages, so that they won’t so easily be found. 

The result is a high-profile legal case on the “right to be forgotten” — the first such case in Argentina, and one that embodies an ongoing debate between individual privacy and public interest, in a country where memory holds a particularly special significance.

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There’s a special poignancy about this topic in a country where people were made to vanish by the government for a long time. And, as the story makes clear, the judges have been making distinctions in their rulings around precisely that point.

But it still revolves around one question: if the content still exists on the original sites (as happens here and in Europe), what has really been removed? Only the ease of finding it. Not its existence.
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US blacklists Chinese quantum computing companies • Financial Times

Demetri Sevastopulo:

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The US has placed a dozen Chinese groups involved in quantum computing and other advanced technologies on an export blacklist, saying they pose a risk of gaining access to critical American technologies for the People’s Liberation Army.

The move, which makes it almost impossible for US companies to sell technologies to the listed companies, targeted a total of 27 entities, including 12 in China and two affiliated firms in Japan and Singapore. In addition to quantum computing, the list included companies in the semiconductor and aerospace industries.

Eight of the Chinese groups were specifically targeted to prevent them from accessing sensitive quantum-related technology, the US commerce department said, arguing they could help the PLA improve counter-stealth and counter-submarine applications and facilitate efforts to break US encryption.

The actions mark the latest effort by the Biden administration to make it more difficult for China to secure cutting-edge technologies with military applications. Last month, US intelligence officials warned American companies about Chinese efforts to access technology in areas including quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

“This is a sensible move and an important reminder of the scope and scale of China’s efforts to achieve technological breakthroughs that erode US national security,” said Martijn Rasser, a former CIA official who heads the technology and national security programme at the Center for a New American Security think-tank.

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The concern about quantum computing being that it could crack encryption in the blink of an eye. But it’s so far still completely impossible to say whether it’s near or far from doing that.
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The thousands of vulnerable people harmed by Facebook and Instagram are lost in Meta’s ‘average user’ data • The Conversation

Joseph Bak-Coleman is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington:

»

As a researcher who studies collective behavior, I see no conflict between the research (methodological quibbles aside), leaks and people’s intuition. Social media can have catastrophic effects, even if the average user only experiences minimal consequences.

To see how this works, consider a world in which Instagram has a rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer effect on the well-being of users. A majority, those already doing well to begin with, find Instagram provides social affirmation and helps them stay connected to friends. A minority, those who are struggling with depression and loneliness, see these posts and wind up feeling worse.

If you average them together in a study, you might not see much of a change over time. This could explain why findings from surveys and panels are able to claim minimal impact on average. More generally, small groups in a larger sample have a hard time changing the average.

Yet if we zoom in on the most at-risk people, many of them may have moved from occasionally sad to mildly depressed or from mildly depressed to dangerously so. This is precisely what Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen reported in her congressional testimony: Instagram creates a downward spiraling feedback loop among the most vulnerable teens.

The inability of this type of research to capture the smaller but still significant numbers of people at risk – the tail of the distribution – is made worse by the need to measure a range of human experiences in discrete increments. When people rate their well-being from a low point of one to a high point of five, “one” can mean anything from breaking up with a partner who they weren’t that into in the first place to urgently needing crisis intervention to stay alive. These nuances are buried in the context of population averages.

«

Subtle point, easily missed. Small average changes can mask big variations.
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Germany’s incoming government unveils plans to legalize cannabis and phase out coal • CNN

Sheena McKenzie, CNN:

»

(CNN)Three German political parties have sealed a deal for a new government, with left-leaning Olaf Scholz the proposed next chancellor following lengthy coalition negotiations and a historic election that sees Angela Merkel stepping down after 16 years at the helm.

The incoming government’s vision for Germany includes plans to legalize cannabis. It also aims to phase-out coal by 2030 and have at least 15 million electric cars on the road by the same year. Mandatory Covid-19 vaccines would also be considered, amid soaring cases in the country.

Under the agreement announced in Berlin on Wednesday, Scholz, of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), will head a three-party coalition with partners the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats. It follows a close September election and two months of negotiations to form a new government.

«

The stunning thing, though, is that they plan to phase out nuclear next year, and also aims to have 80% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 (and have stopped its coal use at the same time). Utterly crazy: why not keep the nuclear plants going? Then you could stop the coal plants a lot sooner.

You have to ask: what are they smoking?
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UK risks Christmas alcohol shortage due to lack of drivers • Reuters (via Yahoo)

James Davey:

»

Britain could face a shortage of alcohol this Christmas unless the government steps up its efforts to address a lack of heavy goods vehicle (HGV) drivers, the wine and spirits industry warned on Wednesday.

The prospect of limited alcohol lines follows panic buying at Britain’s fuel pumps, soaring heating prices and shortages of items ranging from consumer electronics to crisps and vegan sausage rolls.

The Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA) said 49 businesses including Moët Hennessy UK, Laurent-Perrier UK, Pernod Ricard UK, C&C Group and Matthew Clark, had put their names to a letter to transport minister Grant Shapps calling on him to take urgent action over HGV driver shortages and freight disruption.

“There is mounting concern amongst our membership that unless urgent action is taken, we will fall deeper into delivery chaos,” said WSTA CEO Miles Beale.

“We are already seeing major delays on wine and spirit delivery times which is pushing up costs and limiting the range of products available to UK consumers.”

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Supply chain slippage: now it’s serious.
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India’s fertility rate drops below 2.1, contraceptive prevalence up: NFHS • Hindustan Times

Rhythma Kaul and Anonna Dutt:

»

India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR), or the average number of children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime, has declined from 2.2 to 2 while the Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) has increased from 54% to 67%, according data from the National Family Health Survey-5. The union health ministry released data for Phase-2 of the survey on Wednesday; data from Phase-1 was released in December 2020.

A TFR of 2.1 is termed the replacement rate, and means there will be neither an increase, nor a decrease in population.

As per the fourth edition of the survey conducted between 2015 and 2016, the TFR was 2.2. The fifth survey was conducted between 2019 and 2021 in two phases and reflects gains made in population control.

VK Paul, member (health), NITI Aayog, said NFHS-5 shows momentum towards achieving sustainable development goals is getting further accelerated. “Data from the survey would help the government achieve Universal Health Coverage,” he added.

«

Indian population flatlines? You’d never have expected that. Put it together with China doing much the same and you have a strange, ageing world ahead.
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Meta delays encrypted messages on Facebook and Instagram to 2023 • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

The owner of Facebook and Instagram is delaying plans to encrypt users’ messages until 2023 amid warnings from child safety campaigners that its proposals would shield abusers from detection.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire has been under pressure to abandon its encryption plans, which the UK home secretary, Priti Patel, has described as “simply not acceptable”.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has said private messaging is the “frontline of child sexual abuse online” because it prevents law enforcement, and tech platforms, from seeing messages by ensuring that only the sender and recipient can view their content – a process known as end-to-end encryption.

The head of safety at Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, announced that the encryption process would take place in 2023. The company had previously said the change would happen in 2022 at the earliest.

“We’re taking our time to get this right and we don’t plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023,” Antigone Davis wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. “As a company that connects billions of people around the world and has built industry-leading technology, we’re determined to protect people’s private communications and keep people safe online.”

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There’s an interesting thread by David Thiel, ex-Facebook, to be read alongside it: he says Facebook was rushing ridiculously to try to implement this.
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Wear OS shoots up the market-share charts, now in striking distance of Apple • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Counterpoint Research has a new report detailing the smartwatch market, and Wear OS is a huge winner. Just three months ago, Google and Samsung teamed up to resurrect Wear OS, with the new Wear OS 3.0 debuting on the Galaxy Watch 4. Counterpoint’s latest data has the partnership down as a resounding success, with Wear OS market share rocketing from 4% in Q2 2021 to 17% in Q3 2021.

Google and Samsung’s team-up was a complete reboot of both companies’ smartwatch strategies. Google was floundering at the bottom of the sales charts, having seemingly lost interest in Wear OS for years. The last major OS release was Wear OS 2.0 in 2018, and that had been stagnating on the market for years.

The major Wear OS tech partners from the early days, like Samsung, LG, Sony, and Motorola, had left the platform, with only fashion brands like Fossil hanging around to make watches. Qualcomm was the main SoC provider, and while Apple was revolutionizing the power you can get from a smartwatch SoC, Qualcomm wasn’t really putting in a full effort and strangled the Wear OS market for years with sub-par chips.

«

Basically, the market is less split – Wear OS now has all of what was Samsung’s share. However, Counterpoint doesn’t include absolute figures (which would anyway be estimates) so one can’t tell whether the overall market is growing or static.
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Do recipe apps keep my data private? • The Washington Post

Tatum Hunter:

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Paper-and-ink cookbooks come with a few advantages compared to recipe apps: extra information about origins and ingredients, not having to incorporate your beeping phone into any good-for-the-soul cooking time, says cookbook author and critic Paula Forbes.

There’s also a third benefit: Analog cookbooks aren’t sending streams of information about you to third-party advertisers.

A new report from Mozilla Foundation, creator of the “Privacy Not Included” holiday shopping guide, found personal data streaming out of popular Android recipe apps, including precise location, detailed device information as well as scrolling and tapping behavior. Allrecipes Dinner Spinner, Recipes Home — Easy Recipes and Shopping List and Food Network Kitchen were the worst offenders in terms of the number of data requests from advertisers, according to the report.

It’s the latest example of the constant, behind-the-scenes monitoring that powers many of the apps we know and love. App-makers give your data to ad companies, which then combine that information with your activity on totally separate apps to target you with better ads.

…The most egregious tracking came from Recipes Home, according to Becca Ricks, the Mozilla researcher behind the report. She observed several different trackers, including Google and Facebook, collecting data from the app. Some advertisers collected her phone’s battery level, whether it was charging and whether headphones were plugged in, she said. One tracker repeatedly asked the app for data on how long people look at different ads.

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Sometimes live audio apps for rich people…are worse • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick follows up on Business Insider’s piece about Clubhouse’s gradual submergence, and says he never liked its premise, unlike Facebook or Twitter or TikTok:

»

These massive companies might now control the internet thanks to the network effect of their currently huge audiences, but those audiences were built by average users. The magic alchemy of populating a functioning social network was done outside of Silicon Valley. Though it’s being limited all the time, users still have some power over platforms. There is, at least in theory, a world were Facebook/Meta could cease to exist if enough people stop using their products.

Clubhouse, by the very fact both its initial user base and its subsequent hype was basically dreamt up by Silicon Valley insiders, was, in my opinion, a test of whether or not venture capitalists had enough influence to dream up a new — honestly, very bad — social network and force it upon the rest of the internet. And, though they got very close to making “fetch” happen, so to speak, they, thankfully, failed.

How can we determine Clubhouse has failed? Well, per The Verge’s Hot Pod newsletter, only 40,000 people tuned in to listen to Oprah earlier this month. Seems not great. Also, the best way to find out if your social network has failed is by looking at the successes of similar, but divergent apps. In this case, both Twitter Spaces and Discord have dominated the live audio space this year. And both have done it in ways that don’t feel tied to West Coast Peloton owners missing the intimacy of a conference call during quarantine. Twitter Spaces and Discord, also, most crucially, wait for it… had user bases built organically over many years!

It’s also weirdly fitting that the NFT and, now, DAO boom aren’t happening on Clubhouse, but Discord. It’s clearly a sign that Clubhouse — in its current form — is cooked, but, also, the entire blockchain mania right now is, in many ways, just the new Clubhouse gold rush.

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Does Windows on Arm have a future? • ZDNet

Mary Jo Foley:

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While Microsoft has continued to plod along the WoA [Windows on Arm] path for the past five years, it has little to show for its efforts. 

In 2016, Microsoft wanted to give Intel some incentive (probably on the price and performance fronts), so it signed up Qualcomm to help build the WoA platform. There have been several announcements and a handful of Windows Arm PCs since. But that’s about it. 

The Windows PCs out there with Arm processors don’t have compelling power/battery life stories, in spite of rather fantastical battery-life claims by some PC makers (including Microsoft). And Microsoft has struggled to get x64 app emulation to work on Arm PCs, limiting their appeal.

On the server front, things seem a bit more promising. Microsoft officials have publicly said the company has several server-side Arm partners (including Qualcomm) and is running Windows Server on Arm servers inside its own datacenters. Microsoft is reportedly working on its own Arm chip for servers.

To be clear: I haven’t heard any rumors about Microsoft throwing in the towel on Windows on Arm PCs. And this year, it got Office working on Windows 11 on Arm devices using its ARM64EC technology. 

I’m just not sure Arm’s promises are going to justify continued investments by Microsoft and its partners to make WoA PCs a real alternative to x64 PCs.

«

Surprising, at least to me, that Apple should be so much better than Microsoft at code translation: it has now created two very successful translators, both called Rosetta, in the past 15-odd years, once for the transition to Intel from PowerPC (a similar instruction set concept to Arm), and now to Arm from Intel. I’m guessing that Microsoft would have to include 32-bit x86 programs to have any hope, whereas Apple has just thrown them overboard.
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If you want to buy someone a Christmas book, I’d recommend Social Warming, my latest book. Unsurprisingly.

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Ever wondered why Apple’s cheaper accessories cost $19 – not more, not less? Turns out there’s a psychological reason. CC-licensed photo by nsuan-iphone on Flickr.

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

Apple sues Israeli spyware maker NSO Group • The New York Times

Nicole Perlroth:

»

Apple, for the first time, seeks to hold NSO accountable for what it says was the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. Apple also wants to permanently prevent NSO from using any Apple software, services or devices, a move that could render the company’s Pegasus spyware product worthless, given that its core business is to give government clients full access to a target’s iPhone or Android smartphone.

Apple is also asking for unspecified damages for the time and cost to deal with what the company argues is NSO’s abuse of its products. Apple said it would donate the proceeds from those damages to organizations that exposed spyware.
Since NSO’s founding in 2010, its executives have said they sell spyware to governments only for lawful interception, but a series of revelations by journalists and private researchers have shown the extent to which governments have deployed NSO’s Pegasus spyware against journalists, activists and dissidents.

Apple executives described the lawsuit as a warning shot to NSO and other spyware makers. “This is Apple saying: If you do this, if you weaponize our software against innocent users, researchers, dissidents, activists or journalists, Apple will give you no quarter,” Ivan Krstic, head of Apple security engineering and architecture, said in an interview on Monday.

“Thousands of lives were saved around the world thanks to NSO Group’s technologies used by its customers,” an NSO representative said in a statement Tuesday. “Pedophiles and terrorists can freely operate in technological safe-havens, and we provide governments the lawful tools to fight it.”

«

Related: Technology Review says the French were close to buying Pegasus (the French deny it); and Facebook was given leave to sue NSO too a few days ago, over its hacking into WhatsApp.
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Why $19 is Apple’s favourite price for accessories • WSJ

Dalvin Brown:

»

Analysts say $19 is also a sweet spot for well-to-do consumers willing to pay extra for basic tech products and services. “When you go below $20, those people don’t think twice about it, even if [the item] could be competitively priced at $1,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at venture-capital firm Loup Ventures.

The cost is also low enough to be an aspirational purchase for shoppers seeking products that make them feel special.

“Apple wants to make sure that their consumers constantly feel nice,” said Abir Syed, partner at e-commerce consulting firm UpCounting. Even if shoppers aren’t getting a good deal, he said, “they just feel fancy.”

But there’s a catch. Selling cables, adapters and polishing cloths far below $20 might put them in “cheap” territory. A lot of Apple’s success is based on its products’ positioning as an attainable luxury, something that costs a bit more but is justifiably worth it.

“At $19, you get the charm-pricing benefits [of a price ending in ‘9’], but it also sends the signal that this is a premium product,” Mr. Syed said.

Much of this pricing depends on where shoppers are doing their shopping. If you’re on Apple’s website or in an Apple store, you’re not bargain hunting the way you might be if you were shopping for a specific item on Amazon or at Walmart.

“A vast majority of people would say $20 is absurd for a dust cloth on Amazon,” Mr. Syed said. “At Apple, there’s a bit less of a comparison happening.”

In the case of Apple’s polishing cloth, selling it at $19 creates more demand than pricing it at $9, experts say. The $19 cloth became an internet meme shortly after Apple introduced it, which might help explain its hard-to-get status. And you likely won’t be paying less for it soon.

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Inside the rise and fall of Clubhouse, a poster child of pandemic hype • Business Insider

Kali Hays and Melia Russell:

»

In May 2020, when the pandemic raged, the comedian and TV writer Marlena Rodriguez got an invite to a new app called Clubhouse that offered the homebound online masses a way to spend some of their suddenly abundant time.

In the ensuing months, Rodriguez jousted in a chat room with the celebrity Ashton Kutcher, gained more than 13,000 followers, and started a party room on Fridays that frequently swelled to over 1,000 people. She wrote a play, “Once Upon a Clubhouse,” and hired actors to perform it on the app. “I was in love,” she said.

Today, “I question why I’m even still on Clubhouse,” Rodriguez said. Her Friday-night room has dwindled to about 30 people.

More than any other startup, Clubhouse epitomizes the venture-capital-backed euphoria that swept the tech industry since lockdowns shut millions of people inside and pushed them online for connection, entertainment, and information. Marc Andreessen has called the app “the Athenian agora come to life,” referring to the hub of democracy in ancient Greece. It has raised more than $100m from his firm and other top VCs, garnering a $4bn valuation.

But with vaccinations rising and more people returning to normal life, Clubhouse has been hit particularly hard. Daily downloads of the app have plunged more than 90% since a peak in June, while daily average users are down almost 80% since February, Apptopia data indicated.

Insider interviews with creators, advertisers, VCs, and others in the tech industry show a platform struggling to build an audience and keep it. Moneymaking opportunities are also slim, which makes the app a tough sell for creators and users as there are many other options online and off.

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Plus it’s been copied on other platforms, notably Twitter with its Spaces offering. Nice while it lasted, Clubhouse.
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Europe must ban Bitcoin mining to hit the 1.5C Paris climate goal, say Swedish regulators • Euronews

Tom Bateman:

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Erik Thedéen, director of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, and Björn Risinger, director of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, said cryptocurrency’s rising energy usage is threatening Sweden’s ability to meet its obligations under the Paris Climate Agreement.

Between April and August this year, the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining in the Nordic country rose “several hundred%,” and now consumes the equivalent electricity of 200,000 households, Thedéen and Risinger said.

In an open letter, the directors of Sweden’s top financial and environmental regulators called for an EU-wide ban on “proof of work” cryptocurrency mining, for Sweden to “halt the establishment” of new crypto mining operations and for companies that trade and invest in crypto assets to be prohibited from describing their business activities as environmentally sustainable.

…The growth of crypto mining brings with it an opportunity cost, Thedéen and Risinger said, as Sweden’s renewable energy is diverted away from industrial, transport and domestic uses, and into Bitcoin and other tokens.

“It is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single Bitcoin,” they said. “This is the equivalent of forty-four laps around the globe. 900 bitcoins are mined every day. This is not a reasonable use of our renewable energy”.

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This is going to become a recurrent refrain in the next few years, I think.
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The BABADEDA Crypter: an emerging crypter targeting the crypto, NFT, and DeFi communities • Morphisec Security

Hido Cohen and Arnold Osipov:

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As well as using cryptocurrency themselves to extract ransoms, cybercriminals are now also tailoring malware to exploit the booming market for NFTs and crypto games. In a discovery of critical importance to anyone familiar with this space, Morphisec Labs have encountered a new campaign of malware targeting cryptocurrency enthusiasts through Discord. 

Crucially, the crypter that this campaign deploys, which we have termed Babadeda (a Russian language placeholder used by the crypter itself which translates to “Grandma-Grandpa”), is able to bypass signature-based antivirus solutions. Although some variants of this crypter have been noted by other vendors, Morphisec is the first to fully disclose how it works.

For victims, this makes infections highly likely — and dangerous. We know that this malware installer has been used in a variety of recent campaigns to deliver information stealers, RATs, and even LockBit ransomware.

«

They have a detailed breakdown of how the malware gets onto your (well, someone else’s) machine. It seems that it’s an empty shell that you can pour something into. Noteworthy that it’s the crypto field that’s being targeted now: fewer law enforcement types around. Though transfers are easier to track.
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About 600 Google employees sign manifesto against widened vaccine mandate • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

The Biden administration has ordered US companies with 100 or more workers to ensure their employees are fully vaccinated or regularly tested for Covid-19 by Jan. 4. In response, Google has asked its more than 150,000 employees to upload their vaccination status to its internal systems by Dec. 3, whether they plan on coming into the office or not, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC. The company has also said that all employees who work directly or indirectly with government contracts must be vaccinated – even if they are working from home.

“Vaccines are key to our ability to enable a safe return to office for everyone and minimize the spread of Covid-19 in our communities,” wrote Chris Rackow, Google VP of security, in an email sent near the end of October.

Rackow stated the company was already implementing requirements, so the changes from Biden’s executive order were “minimal.” His email gave a deadline of Nov. 12 for employees to request exemptions for reasons such as religious beliefs or medical conditions, and said that exceptions would be granted on a case-by-case basis.

The manifesto within Google, which has been signed by at least 600 Google employees, asks company leaders to retract the vaccine mandate and create a new one that is “inclusive of all Googlers,” arguing leadership’s decision will have outsized influence in corporate America. It also calls on employees to “oppose the mandate as a matter of principle” and tells employees to not let the policy alter their decision if they’ve already chosen not to receive the Covid-19 shot.

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Let’s see, 600 of 150,000 is 0.4%. Unless those people are in absolutely crucial positions (say, called Brin or Page), Google could just say buh-bye. There’s no halfway house between a presidential mandate requiring 100% compliance and, well, anything else. No different, in its way, from care home workers facing the same deadline – but at far lower salaries.
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AirTag competitor Tile getting acquired by location sharing app Life360 • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Tile, known for its range of Bluetooth-based tracking accessories that compete with the AirTag, is being acquired by location tracking service Life360, Tile announced today.

Tile will continue to be operated as a standalone brand under Tile CEO CJ Prober, but Tile says that when the acquisition is completed, it will be able to leverage Life360’s 33 million smartphone users to grow Tile’s Finding network by 10x. Tile’s network is the equivalent of Apple’s Find My network, leveraging nearby devices to locate lost items.

Life360 has what it calls a “family safety platform” that allows family members to keep tabs on one another with tracking software on smartphones. It’s primarily used by parents to track their children and teenagers, and it has raised privacy concerns.

With the Tile acquisition, Life360 founder Chris Hulls says that Life360 will be able to provide an “all-encompassing solution” for locating people, pets, and things with cross-platform tracking and combined service for tracking items and people.

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Acquisition price $205m. Which strikes me as a lot of money: I’ve never noticed Tile having much of an impact anywhere, and even if you use a 10x multiple that suggests it was doing $20m in revenue per year. Can’t think there are that many people using the Premium version (£30 per year). Especially not when Apple’s AirTags don’t need a subscription and have a bigger network.
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Facebook knew its algorithms were biased against people of colour • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Nitasha Tiku and Craig Timberg:

»

Last year, researchers at Facebook showed executives an example of the kind of hate speech circulating on the social network: an actual post featuring an image of four female Democratic lawmakers known collectively as “The Squad.”

The poster, whose name was scrubbed out for privacy, referred to the women, two of whom are Muslim, as “swami rag heads.” A comment from another person used even more vulgar language, referring to the four women of color as “black c—s,” according to internal company documents exclusively obtained by The Washington Post.

The post represented the “worst of the worst” language on Facebook — the majority of it directed at minority groups, according to a two-year effort by a large team working across the company, the document said. The researchers urged executives to adopt an aggressive overhaul of its software system that would primarily remove only those hateful posts before any Facebook users could see them.

But Facebook’s leaders balked at the plan. According to two people familiar with the internal debate, top executives including Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan feared the new system would tilt the scales by protecting some vulnerable groups over others. A policy executive prepared a document for Kaplan that raised the potential for backlash from “conservative partners,” according to the document. The people spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.

The previously unreported debate is an example of how Facebook’s decisions in the name of being neutral and race-blind in fact come at the expense of minorities and particularly people of color. Far from protecting Black and other minority users, Facebook executives wound up instituting half-measures after the “worst of the worst” project that left minorities more likely to encounter derogatory and racist language on the site, the people said.

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Amazing how Kaplan’s name always pops up when right-wing interests are threatened, and subsequently they’re salved.
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If you want a deeper understanding of why we respond as we do to content on social networks, and what it’s doing to society, politics and journalism, read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Qualcomm has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Windows on ARM – expiring soon • XDA Developers

Rich Woods:

»

Last week, we reported that MediaTek is planning to build a chipset for Windows on ARM. As it turns out, the Windows on ARM chipset space could be even hotter than that, because there’s a reason that we’ve only seen Qualcomm SoCs in ARM PCs so far. Qualcomm actually has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Windows on ARM, and speaking with people familiar with it, we’ve learned that the deal is set to expire soon.

Other than the fact that Microsoft has publicly said that anyone who wants to can build a Windows on ARM chip, this really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Qualcomm didn’t just start building PC chips hoping that Microsoft would compile Windows to support it. No, these two companies worked together to make it happen. Because of that, Qualcomm gets to enjoy a bit of exclusivity.

One thing I wasn’t able to learn is when the deal will expire, only that it’s the thing holding back other chip vendors from competing in the space. It’s possible that Samsung might want to throw its hat into the ring with its Exynos processors too, especially given its recent partnership with AMD for graphics power. This is also presumably why Apple Silicon Macs aren’t officially supported for running Windows 11, so hopefully that will change as well.

…Between MediaTek’s Executive Summit and Qualcomm’s Investor Day, there’s been a very clear message that ARM SoC vendors absolutely believe that the ‘Wintel’ partnership is going to fade and that the transition to ARM isn’t just happening, it’s inevitable.

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‘Buy the Constitution’ aftermath: everyone very mad, confused, losing lots of money, fighting, crying, etc • Vice

Jordan Pearson and Jason Koebler:

»

The community of crypto investors who tried and failed to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution last week has descended into chaos as people are realizing today that roughly half of the donors will have the majority of their investment wiped out by cryptocurrency fees. Meanwhile, disagreements have broken out over the future of ConstitutionDAO, the original purpose of the more than $40m crowdfunding campaign, and what will happen to the $PEOPLE token that donors were given in exchange for their contributions.  

Over the weekend, the next steps of the project repeatedly changed. In the immediate aftermath of the Sotheby’s auction, in which ConstitutionDAO lost to hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin, the founders of the project asserted on its official Discord that, though they lost, “we still made history tonight.”  

“We have educated an entire cohort of people around the world—from museum curators and art directors to our grandmothers asking us what eth is when they read about us in the news —about the possibilities of web3,” an admin of the project posted on Thursday.

Many donors are indeed getting an education about Ethereum and web3, but it’s certainly not all positive as the community tries to quickly come up with a reason it should exist at all after failing in its initial goal.

«

The problem being that if they try to get a refund, it’ll essentially get eaten up by “gas fees” – the charge for doing the transfer. Which we always get told isn’t an issue for cryptocurrencies compared to those Evil Fiat Currencies. (Update: the Constitution DAO is going to close down, and everyone can get refunded. Or try to.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the UK, the seventh-biggest energy supplier has gone into administration, leaving just six standing – and millions in limbo. CC-licensed photo by MIKI Yoshihito on Flickr.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Not identified as a shark. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Multiple marine biologists are telling you it’s not a shark • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick, once more, for dammit he’s insightful:

»

What I think this whole episode does illustrate, however, is how, essentially, every mechanism on the internet is broken, possibly irreparably. Let’s summarize:

A content creator learns a fun fact about a shark. The content creator either googles the name of the shark and tweets out the first picture they see or they’re sent that photo from someone else. But it’s the wrong photo because an SEO farm run by random man from Wales has inserted the “misinformation” into Google’s search results. The content creator, though, has to mute the Twitter thread they’ve created because it’s gone too viral for anyone to actually follow.

It’s also still doing traffic, so the content creator, when they finally learn that the tweet is incorrect, doesn’t actually delete the tweet. Then dozens of verified experts attempt to debunk the incorrect tweet, except all they’ve done is trick Twitter’s trending algorithms to further promote the tweet because of the attention being driven to the post.

The current landscape of the internet is essentially a series of levers and automations because the largest companies responsible for how we use the web are operating at a scale that can no longer be properly moderated by human beings. Which means, increasingly, that if a glitch makes its way into the system — in this instance, a photo of a monkfish incorrectly labeled as a shark — there is no chance for that glitch to be removed. And, even more confoundingly, if human beings do try and intervene, it only makes the glitch worse. idk seems bad!

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Seems like the perfect way for this to end would be for the monkfish at issue to be officially reclassified as a shark.
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1997: The Long Boom: a history of the future, 1980–2020 • WIRED

Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, writing in July 1997:

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A BAD MEME—A contagious idea—began spreading through the United States in the 1980s: America is in decline, the world is going to hell, and our children’s lives will be worse than our own. The particulars are now familiar: Good jobs are disappearing, working people are falling into poverty, the underclass is swelling, crime is out of control. The post-Cold War world is fragmenting, and conflicts are erupting all over the planet. The environment is imploding—with global warming and ozone depletion, we’ll all either die of cancer or live in Waterworld. As for our kids, the collapsing educational system is producing either gun-toting gangsters or burger-flipping dopes who can’t read.

By the late 1990s, another meme began to gain ground. Borne of the surging stock market and an economy that won’t die down, this one is more positive: America is finally getting its economic act together, the world is not such a dangerous place after all, and our kids just might lead tolerable lives. Yet the good times will come only to a privileged few, no more than a fortunate fifth of our society. The vast majority in the United States and the world face a dire future of increasingly desperate poverty. And the environment? It’s a lost cause.

But there’s a new, very different meme, a radically optimistic meme: We are watching the beginnings of a global economic boom on a scale never experienced before. We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for—quite literally—billions of people on the planet. We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. And we’ll do it without blowing the lid off the environment.

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It’s wonderfully wild and overdone: “In 2020, humans arrive on Mars… the four astronauts touch down and beam their images back…” The printed article has Ten Scenario Spoilers. Pretty much all of which, unlike the scenarios in the article, have in fact happened.
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We’re making the Facebook Papers Public. Here’s why and how • Gizmodo

Dell Cameron, Andrew Couts, and Shoshana Wodinsky:

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The documents, captured by whistleblower Frances Haugen and first reported by the Wall Street Journal, were also handed to members of a Senate Commerce subcommittee chaired by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut who last month called Instagram “a breeding ground for eating disorders and self harm.” And it’s from here that Gizmodo and some 300 other mostly Western journalists derived their access.

We believe there’s a strong public need in making as many of the documents public as possible, as quickly as possible. To that end, we’ve partnered with a small group of independent monitors, who are joining us to establish guidelines for an accountable review of the documents prior to publication. The mission is to minimize any costs to individuals’ privacy or the furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest.

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[List of great and good omitted]

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While our group is itself largely American, our first decision was to require local experts when reviewing any document focused on another country. One of the committee’s chief responsibilities is to vet local experts to work alongside our reviewers.

The internet was a much smaller place when Facebook arrived in 2004. Back then, beyond hookups and house parties, the social network held little sway over events in the real world. Unrecognizable today from its origin as a dorm-room novelty, Facebook is now one of the richest and most influential companies on the planet and the most pervasive information platform ever created. A tentacular machine that has altered the face of politics and life itself on a global scale. At its best, Facebook is a tool that connects billions, narrowing the divide between disparate peoples and cultures in ways previously unimaginable. At its worst, it has served as history’s most efficient delivery system for toxic propaganda, empowering bigots and extremists to commit egregious crimes against humanity, quite literally being wielded as an instrument of war.

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Will this all have been squeezed dry by the news orgs by the time it reaches the general public? And the disinformation that will come out of making them public will be amazing to see.
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The role of Facebook and other social media in the disruption of elections, journalism and ordinary life is part of our modern landscape. Understand it better by reading Social Warming, my latest book, and find explanations – and more.

The UK government’s plan to reform data-protection laws are terrifying • openDemocracy

Alex Stobart:

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Personal data is personal. It’s about living human beings. But with its ‘reform’ proposals, the UK government aims to put citizens’ data up for sale on global markets. A commodity to be traded. Like pork bellies or copper or debt.

The ‘Data: A New Direction’ consultation, which ends this Friday (November 19), has introduced the biggest wholesale attack on the rights of UK citizens in decades.

In his ministerial foreward to the consultation paper, published in September, then culture secretary Oliver Dowden said reforms are needed because existing General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) inherited from Europe are “unnecessarily complex or vague”. He said the government wants to end the “persistent uncertainty” that has prevailed since their introduction. But it uses even greater vagueness, apparently deliberately: words like ‘responsible’ (which appears 52 times in the consultation) and ‘safeguards’ (95 times) every time it’s introducing an attack on citizen rights – which the consultation never bothers to define. And, if implemented, it will produce even more uncertainty, which will last much longer than just three years.

The government justifies its proposals on the grounds that it is tackling ‘consent fatigue’, encouraging research and promoting the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Consent fatigue stems from the relentless series of requests to a citizen to accept something, such as a privacy policy or cookies, with no real explicit sense or value, over and over again, to drive them into submission. Again, there are also users that show a tendency to simply accept the privacy policy without even reading it extensively, which is related to ‘consent fatigue’.

This focus ignores the vast majority of organisations in the UK that collect personal data for the purpose of providing a service, which is allowed for by GDPR if it is in performance of a contract, and where there is no evidence of a need for reform.

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This has been largely overlooked, because it’s described in such arcane and roundabout language. Dowden has since been fired, to be replaced by Nadine Dorries, who gives the impression she wouldn’t know data if it drove over her foot.
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Apple just provided the perfect example of why you can’t trust App Store review scores • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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You pissed off people by somewhat breaking your app, and they’re leaving angry reviews. How can you salvage your reputation? Apple just found one incredibly effective way — get listeners to submit better reviews by interrupting their podcast experience with an in-app prompt to submit a rating.

That’s how the Apple Podcasts app went from a publicly embarrassing 1.8-star score all the way to 4.6 stars in a little over a month without any actual fixes, as developer and App Store watchdog Kosta Eleftheriou points out. And it’s still going up: according to AppFigures data, the app has been getting thousands of ratings every day since November 9th, with the vast, overwhelming majority of them issuing a 5-star score.

The app has made it to 4.7 stars overall as of this writing and is firmly the No. 1 App Store search result for “podcast.” It looks far more desirable to a new user than it might have before. AppFigures estimates 6,292 five-star ratings were submitted on November 17th alone.

If you think there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, you might be right — it could definitely be that people who bother to submit reviews tend to be angry, and a lot of people who love Apple Podcasts and never bothered to look it up in the App Store (remember, it’s preinstalled!) are finally balancing things out.

But do those people actually love Apple Podcasts? Because if you really look at the reviews, it seems like some funny business is going on. There are new, positive reviews, but they aren’t reviews of the Apple Podcasts app at all — they’re reviews of podcasts themselves.

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The Apple Podcasts app is absolutely, utterly, incredibly terrible. Forgets whether you’ve started listening to a podcast. Doesn’t play podcasts in the order you expect. Doesn’t let you easily reorder what you’re going to listen to. I hate it, but feel it would be Slog Work to shift over to another one (Marco Arment’s Overcast is the obvious alternative).
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Ableton: inside the music software company everyone wants to buy • Billboard

Steve Knopper:

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Before Ableton Live, dance music pioneers like Richie Hawtin had to build up what Detroit electronic music festival promoter Jason Huvaere calls “a spaceship of gear,” from samplers to drum machines. After the software started to catch on, though, Huvaere recalls taking Hawtin to visit Skrillex, who blew his mind when he told him, “Yeah, I’m pretty much using Ableton.”

The software allowed DJs to use their laptops to load into Ableton Live samples, snippets of original music or effects, then manipulate them live while performing. They could speed up or slow down a track, or add buzzing effects or bass drops, all with a few clicks. This audio manipulation congealed into a new sound that Michaelangelo Matos described as “a crisp, computery flutter — the seemingly true voice of the tinny, bright machines making it,” in his 2015 history of electronic music, The Underground Is Massive. Matos says this latest generation of EDM stars, who improvise with Ableton Live, create “laptop music.”

By making it easier to manipulate music, Ableton Live also freed a new generation of DJs — Skrillex, deadmau5, Steve Aoki — from behind their decks to dance, jump and, in Aoki’s case, smash cakes into the faces of their fans. Skrillex emerged as the “f–king Herbie Hancock of Ableton,” as Diplo calls him, reimagining the potential of Ableton Live the way Jimi Hendrix reinvented the electric guitar. As with Auto-Tune, the impact of Ableton Live goes far beyond DJs and even electronic music.

“It created a completely new type of producer,” says Huvaere. “It gave access to a versatile tool that would do what people want without spending thousands and thousands of dollars and training.” In recent years, Ableton’s reach has grown beyond DJs and other electronic-music tinkerers to the entire community of artists and songwriters.

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Ableton has turned down huge paydays in order to remain an independent company. (Paywalled article. Sadly, the Javascript on my browser broke, leaving me able to read it.)
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Prestigious UK Global Talent fast-track scheme for scientists hasn’t received any applications since it launched • New Scientist

Jason Arunn Murugesu:

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Not a single scientist has applied to a UK government visa scheme for Nobel prize laureates and other award winners since its launch six months ago, New Scientist can reveal. The scheme has come under criticism from scientists and has been described as “a joke”.

In May, the government launched a fast-track visa route for award-winners in the fields of science, engineering, the humanities and medicine who want to work in the UK. This prestigious prize route makes it easier for some academics to apply for a Global Talent visa – it requires only one application, with no need to meet conditions such as a grant from the UK Research and Innovation funding body or a job offer at a UK organisation.

The number of prizes that qualify academics for this route currently stands at over 70, and includes the Turing Award, the L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science International Awards, and various gongs awarded by professional or membership bodies both in the UK and elsewhere.

“Winners of these awards have reached the pinnacle of their career and they have so much to offer the UK,” said home secretary Priti Patel when the prestigious prize scheme launched in May. “This is exactly what our new point-based immigration system was designed for – attracting the best and brightest based on the skills and talent they have, not where they’ve come from.”

But a freedom of information request by New Scientist has revealed that in the six months since the scheme was launched, no one working in science, engineering, the humanities or medicine has actually applied for a visa through this route.

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Something something sunlit uplands.
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Bulb Energy enters ‘special administration’ after collapse • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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The energy regulator drew up plans over the weekend to put the company into a process designed to protect Bulb’s 1.7 million household customers and ensure continuity of supply, according to industry sources.

Bulb told its staff that it would continue to operate “with no interruption of service or supply to members” and urged customers not to worry “as your energy supply is secure and all credit balances are protected”.

The company’s collapse has been long expected by industry rivals after it struggled to find new investment, or a willing buyer, before the UK’s looming winter energy crisis.

“It has been like watching a zombie movie – you know they’re walking dead but you couldn’t be sure when they’d stop moving,” one senior industry source said. “They’ve long been dicing with death but the recent events in the energy market have been a catalyst for what would have happened anyway.”

Bulb blamed the surge in energy market prices ignited by the global gas crisis for scuppering its plans to raise funds to fuel its ongoing growth, which included new businesses in France, Spain and Texas.

“When we started exploring fundraising options, we were delighted to receive lots of interest from investors to fund our business plans and future growth,” the company said in a blogpost on Monday. “However, the rising energy crisis in the UK and around the world has concerned investors who can’t go ahead while wholesale prices are so high.”

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What’s unusual here is that the energy regulator cannot persuade other (surviving) energy companies to take those customers on, because those companies would all lose money supplying them because of the price cap introduced by the regulator. Hence the “special administration” – aka a form of quiet nationalisation where the government pays the deficit.

Bulb is the biggest supplier to have gone bust out of the 21 (!!) to go out of business since the start of September. There are now only six left that are solvent.
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NFT makers are trying to build the next Disney • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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In the online auction market OpenSea, you can pay around $600 to buy a portrait of a robot in streetwear — and, if you’re lucky, a stake in a new media empire.

The robot is called a TARS, and it’s part of the Voguverse, an elaborate 37th-century mythos involving space arcologies, a nuclear war, and interstellar travel. The portrait is one of countless digital assets being sold as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. But by pairing its fictional universe with a blockchain-based ledger, the creators think they can tap into a new way to tell stories.

As NFTs explode in popularity, entrepreneurs are imagining an entire media industry that’s built around them. At its most ambitious, the vision is sometimes dubbed a “decentralized Disney”: a world of fictional crossovers like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its many spinoffs but where different characters and creative properties are owned by a panoply of fans, not a single company. Talent agencies, comics authors, and countless NFT enthusiasts are buying in.

What does owned mean? Many are still figuring that out.

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Many, it turns out, don’t understand the difference between having static ownership of an object, and having ownership of the copyrights and trademarks immanent in that object – the right to make derivative works, for example.

For an example of how loose their understanding is, they might want to consider their use of TARS, an acronym that more people would associate with a robot in the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar.
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How $6.6bn of billionaire Elon Musk’s fortune could overcome world hunger • World Economic Forum

Johnny Wood:

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Billionaire Elon Musk challenged the United Nations (UN) to show how $6bn of his fortune could be used to overcome world hunger, prompting the UN’s World Food Programme to produce a detailed plan.

Musk’s challenge was sparked by earlier comments from World Food Programme chief, David Beasley, who told CNN that 2% of Musk’s wealth could end world hunger.

In a tweet, the world’s richest man suggested he would sell stock in his electric car manufacturing company Tesla and donate the billion-dollar proceeds if the UN could demonstrate exactly how his money would be spent.

Responding to the tweet, Beasley urged billionaires like Musk to step up and support the fight against hunger, giving a breakdown of how $6.6bn could help avert catastrophe. The UN plan outlines how the money – a small percentage of Musk’s fortune estimated in the hundreds of billions – could support 42 million people threatened with famine in 43 of the world’s worst-hit countries for a year.

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The WFP article detailing how the $6.6bn would be allocated is from November 3, and this article is from November 19.

Do we expect to see a Twitter poll by Musk on this one too, or will he just sell stock and fund it? If he does fund it, I think we could count it as one of humanity’s greatest successes, and all sparked by social media.
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April 2005: Effects of Skin Pigmentation on Pulse Oximeter Accuracy at Low Saturation • American Society of Anesthesiologists

Bickler et al in April 2005:

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Results: At 60-70% Sao2, Spo2 (mean of three oximeters) overestimated Sao2 (bias +/- SD) by 3.56 +/- 2.45% (n = 29) in darkly pigmented subjects, compared with 0.37 +/- 3.20% (n = 58) in lightly pigmented subjects (P < 0.0001). The SD of bias was not greater with dark than light skin. The dark-light skin differences at 60-70% Sao2 were 2.35% (Nonin), 3.38% (Novametrix), and 4.30% (Nellcor). Skin pigment-related differences were significant with Nonin below 70% Sao2, with Novametrix below 90%, and with Nellcor at all ranges. Pigment-related bias increased approximately in proportion to desaturation.

Conclusions: The three tested pulse oximeters overestimated arterial oxygen saturation during hypoxia in dark-skinned individuals.

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Just pointing out that yesterday’s item about pulse oximeters overestimating blood oxygen levels in darker skins is not new; as Adrian M points out, this study (the first he could find on the topic) is 16 years old, and there are plenty of followups confirming the finding. Bickler, meanwhile, is still going strong, with a paper published earlier this year on Covid and low oxygen blood levels.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified