We know that pulse oximeters work pretty well for measuring blood oxygen levels when used on white skin. But what about other groups? CC-licensed photo by slgckgc 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. Blue site returns. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation • MIT Technology Review

Karen Hao:

»

Before Instant Articles, articles posted on Facebook would redirect to a browser, where they’d open up on the publisher’s own website. The ad provider, usually Google, would then cash in on any ad views or clicks. With the new scheme, articles would open up directly within the Facebook app, and Facebook would own the ad space. If a participating publisher had also opted into monetizing with Facebook’s advertising network, called Audience Network, Facebook could insert ads into the publisher’s stories and take a 30% cut of the revenue. 

Instant Articles quickly fell out of favor with its original cohort of big mainstream publishers. For them, the payouts weren’t high enough compared with other available forms of monetization. But that was not true for publishers in the Global South, which Facebook began accepting into the program in 2016. In 2018, the company reported paying out $1.5 billion to publishers and app developers (who can also participate in Audience Network). In 2019, that figure had reached multiple billions.

Early on, Facebook performed little quality control on the types of publishers joining the program. The platform’s design also didn’t sufficiently penalize users for posting identical content across Facebook pages—in fact, it rewarded the behavior. Posting the same article on multiple pages could as much as double the number of users who clicked on it and generated ad revenue.

Clickbait farms around the world seized on this flaw as a strategy—one they still use today.

Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of US dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary—paid to them directly by Facebook.

«

Did Facebook know about this? Yes, certainly from 2019, according to internal Facebook documents. A terrific piece which, again, points to the way that Facebook and Google don’t understand the disparities in income and attitude between the US and the global south.
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Since we’re on the topic of Facebook and Myanmar, I have a whole chapter on the topic in Social Warming, my latest book. It explains why social networks amplify outrage, and why we seem to like that. And much, much more.

Iranian hackers broke into newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises ahead of 2020 election • WSJ

Dustin Volz:

»

Iranian hackers last year infiltrated the computer systems of Lee Enterprises Inc., a major American media company that publishes dozens of daily newspapers across the U.S., as part of a broader effort to spread disinformation about the 2020 presidential election, according to people familiar with the matter.

On Thursday, the Justice Department said the alleged hackers broke in to the digital systems of an unnamed media company in fall 2020 and tested how to create false news content. People familiar with the matter on Friday identified the company as Lee Enterprises, a publicly traded company headquartered in Davenport, Iowa, and one of the largest newspaper chains in the U.S.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation warned the unnamed company about the intrusion, prosecutors said. The day after the November presidential election, the hackers tried to get back into the media company’s system but failed, prosecutors said. The federal charging document in the case doesn’t indicate the hackers successfully published fake information under the unnamed media company’s news brands.

«

Then again, after the 2020 election they didn’t have to worry – the Americans were generating all the misinformation and disinformation they could.
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‘Racist’ oxygen device may explain why Covid hit minorities so hard • The Sunday Times

Ben Spencer:

»

what explains the remaining 33% to 50% of extra Covid deaths seen among minorities? Some might be due to the vulnerability of certain racial groups to diabetes and cardiovascular disease, which in turn raises the risk of Covid. But experts believe that a “structural racism”, an “unintentional racial discrimination”, is also to blame.

The way the health system is set up — both in Britain’s NHS and across the global medical sector — is tilted against those who do not happen to be white.

This is most strikingly seen in the design of pulse oximeters — the small devices clipped to the end of a finger to measure oxygen levels in the blood. Used in every ward in every hospital in Britain, as well as in GP surgeries and private homes, they are fundamental to the monitoring and diagnosis of patients.

Yet despite their ubiquity, oximeters do not work as well for patients with dark skin. They measure how light is absorbed by the tissue of a finger. But dark skin absorbs more light than light skin, skewing the results.

Scientists have warned for years of this problem, and in some areas doctors take it into account to mentally adjust the results at the bedside. But doctors acknowledge that awareness of the issue is patchy at best, and with so much monitoring now automated, these adjustments are not always possible.

Last year researchers at the University of Michigan found 12% of black patients who were considered to have safe oxygen levels were in fact dangerously hypoxic.

Of course, doctors do not rely on oximetry alone and can compensate for the problems. They use temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate and symptoms to form a picture of a patient’s health. But at the height of the pandemic, when hospitals were under strain and access to ventilators was limited, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that black and Asian people were denied lifesaving treatment because the device clipped to the end of their finger was designed for someone of a different race.

«

Again proving that technology is not good nor bad, but neither is it neutral.
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Steve Wozniak’s startup Privateer plans to launch hundreds of satellites to study space debris • Space

Mike Wall:

»

Orbital debris is already tracked by a number of organizations, including the US military and private companies such as LeoLabs. Privateer wants to contribute to these efforts and help ramp them up, eventually creating the “Google Maps of space,” as Fielding told TechCrunch last month.

To make this happen, Privateer, which is still in “stealth mode” at the moment, plans to build and analyze a huge debris dataset that incorporates information from a variety of sources.

“We want to basically be a company that’s focused on decision intelligence by aggregating massive quantities of disparate and heterogeneous information, because there’s something to be gained in the numbers,” said Jah, a space debris expert who’s also an associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Privateer will purchase some of this information, crowdsource some of it and gather still more using its own satellites, Jah said. The first of those satellites is on track to launch this coming February, he added.

This information will lead to much more than a census of space junk, if all goes according to plan. The company intends also to characterize debris objects, nailing down their size, shape and spin rate, among other features.

“The catalogs of objects out there all treat things like they’re spheres,” Jah said. “We’re going to take it beyond the sphere, to what the thing more realistically looks like and is.”

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I feel that launching satellites in order to investigate satellite debris that can wreck satellites has an innate flaw, as concepts go.
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Norway is running out of gas-guzzling cars to tax • WIRED

Morgan Meaker:

»

In Norway, the most progressive electric vehicle policies in the world started with a pop group, an environmentalist, and a small red Fiat Panda. It was 1988 when activist Frederic Hauge, along with fellow green campaigners from the band A-ha, traveled to the Swiss city of Bern, where they found the red Fiat. A previous owner had converted the car to run off a lead battery, and the group planned to use the vehicle to persuade the Norwegian government to encourage electric vehicle uptake.

The Fiat became the centerpiece of a nine-year campaign in which Hauge and members of A-ha drove the car on Norway’s toll roads without paying. The fines racked up, and when they remained unpaid, the vehicle would be impounded and sold at auction, where Hauge would buy it back and repeat the cycle of toll dodging. A-ha’s celebrity members added glitz to the crusade against toll fees for EVs and Hauge—who has led an environmental group called Bellona since 1986—courted press attention to demand incentives for electric cars. “By being a positive vigilante, he made the media and also the politicians aware of the electric car,” says Øyvind Solberg Thorsen, director of Norway’s Road Traffic Information Council, which publishes statistics about the country’s roads and vehicles.

Eventually, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the incentives the group campaigned for started to materialize, handing EVs a superior status on Norway’s roads. Rules were introduced that exempted EVs from all toll charges and parking fees and allowed them to skip traffic by using bus lanes. More meaningfully, purchases of new EVs were exempted from hefty taxes—including VAT and purchase tax—meaning a new Volkswagen e-Golf cost €790 ($893) less than a VW Golf with a combustion engine.

The problem was that people responded to the policy so well that it eradicated an important source of income for the government, says Anette Berve, spokesperson for the Norwegian Automobile Federation, a group representing car owners. “So this is a clash of two different goals.”

«

So now various car taxes are being reintroduced on EVs. Death and taxes: those two most certain things. (“And nurses,” as an Australian journalist I knew liked to say.)
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A look at the intimate details Amazon knows about us • Reuters News Foundation

Chris Kirkham and Jeffrey Dastin:

»

As a Virginia lawmaker, Ibraheem Samirah has studied internet privacy issues and debated how to regulate tech firms’ collection of personal data. Still, he was stunned to learn the full details of the information Amazon.com Inc has collected on him.

The e-commerce giant had more than 1,000 contacts from his phone. It had records of exactly which part of the Quran that Samirah, who was raised as a Muslim, had listened to on Dec. 17 of last year. The company knew every search he had made on its platform, including one for books on “progressive community organizing” and other sensitive health-related inquiries he thought were private.

“Are they selling products, or are they spying on everyday people?” asked Samirah, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates.

Samirah was among the few Virginia legislators who opposed an industry-friendly, Amazon-drafted state privacy bill that passed earlier this year. At Reuters’ request, Samirah asked Amazon to disclose the data it collected on him as a consumer.

The company gathers a vast array of information on its U.S. customers, and it started making that data available to all upon request early last year, after trying and failing to defeat a 2018 California measure requiring such disclosures. (U.S. Amazon customers can obtain their data by filling out a form on Amazon.com.)

«

(This is the UK equivalent for the data request. It’s under Account – Browse help topics (lower part of the page) – Privacy – Request Your Personal Information).

You wouldn’t be surprised that Amazon knows a lot about you, of course.It’s the extent. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin outbid a group of crypto investors for copy of US Constitution • WSJ

Kelly Crow:

»

Chicago hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin said he won a $43.2m first-edition copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby’s auction on Thursday—and now he intends to lend it to a free Arkansas art museum.

The 53-year old founder and chief executive of Citadel caused a stir Thursday when he outbid a large group of cryptocurrency investors who had crowdfunded more than $40m earlier in the week in a frenzied attempt to win the document, the last surviving first edition in private hands.

The group, organized as ConstitutionDAO, pooled funds from more than 17,000 people over a 72-hour period, with the median donation hovering around $206. ConstitutionDAO said it sought to take the Constitution copy and make it accessible to the public.

“The US Constitution is a sacred document that enshrines the rights of every American and all those who aspire to be,” Mr. Griffin said in a statement issued by Sotheby’s. “That is why I intend to ensure that this copy of our Constitution will be available for all Americans and visitors to view and appreciate.”

«

So it’s going to be accessible to the public, and Sotheby’s doesn’t have to quibble with crypto junk.
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Twitter rolls back AMP support, no longer sends users to AMP pages • Search Engine Land

Henry Powderly:

»

If you are noticing less traffic to your website’s AMP pages coming from Twitter, turns out there is a reason for that: Twitter has subtly updated its AMP guidelines page on its Developer site to say support for AMP will be phased out by the fourth quarter.

How that might affect you. Previously, if a mobile user clicked on a link to your site, Twitter would redirect them to the AMP version of that page if an AMP version was available. Now, that won’t happen and users will just load the native mobile/responsive version of your content.

We’ve heard anecdotally that publishers have been seeing AMP traffic fall, especially since Google started putting non-AMP pages in its Top Stories section. But it was David Esteve, audience development specialist and product manager at Marfeel, and technical SEO consultant Christian Oliveira who spotted the update in Twitter’s documentation.

Looking at our own data, we’ve seen sharp Twitter referral declines since August. But, traffic completely bottomed out in November suggesting the rollout is complete.

«

SEL is turning off its own AMP pages because it’s no longer a requirement to appear in Google’s “Top Stories” carousel.

Can’t see AMP lasting that much longer on this basis. Announced October 2015, began appearing in mobile results February 2016. It’s just about survived five years, but the revelation that it was a key piece of manipulation for header bidding on ads makes it look doomed.
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How Twitter got research right • The Verge

Casey Newton talked to Twitter’s research team about their work, which included this:

»

Responsible AI is hard in part because no one understands fully understands decisions made by algorithms. Ranking algorithms in social feeds are probabilistic — they show you things based on how likely you are to like, share, or comment on them. But there’s no one algorithm making that decision — it’s typically a mesh of multiple (sometimes dozens) of different models, each making guesses that are then weighted differently according to ever-shifting factors.

That’s a major reason why it’s so difficult to confidently build AI systems that are “responsible” — there is simply a lot of guesswork involved. [Lead for machine learning ethics and responsibility at Twitter, Rumman] Chowdhury pointed out the difference here between working on responsible AI and cybersecurity. In security, she said, it’s usually possible to unwind why the system is vulnerable, so long as you can discover where the attacker entered it. But in responsible AI, finding a problem often doesn’t tell you much about what created it.

That’s the case with the company’s research on amplifying right-wing voices, for example. Twitter is confident that the phenomenon is real but can only theorize as to the reasons behind it. It may be something in the algorithm. But it might also be a user behavior — maybe right-wing politicians tend to tweet in a way to elicit more comments, for example, which then causes their tweets to be weighted more heavily by Twitter’s systems.

“There’s this law of unintended consequences to large systems,” said Williams, who previously worked at Google and Facebook. “It could be so many different things. How we’ve weighted algorithmic recommendation may be a part of it. But it wasn’t intended to be a consequence of political affiliation. So there’s so much research to be done.

«

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When the traffic firehose is pointed at you • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick dug into “Thinkarete”, which was one of the most-shared publishers on Facebook in Q3:

»

So let’s put it all together.

The “Thinkarete” online brand appears to have been created by a food blogger from Utah. Between 2013-2014, there was a flurry of activity around the web — a website publishing original recipes, the launch of the Thinkarete Lifestyle Facebook page, and bylines on other blogs. The Thinkarete Facebook page, however, slowly became more and more important, as the other parts of the Thinkarete brand atrophied. The Thinkarete Facebook even went through a period where it was posting freebooted BuzzFeed Tasty videos, likely to capitalize on the Facebook video boom. The Allfood and the Lynda’s Kitchen domains were both registered in 2014. And, in 2016, the operation incorporated.

Navigating the Thinkarete Facebook page is impossible now because of the spam from Lyndas Kitchen. In fact, CrowdTangle couldn’t even generate a decent report because of the amount of links being shared to the page. But, after scrolling through Thinkarete’s videos section and the Allfood Instagram page, what seems clear is that the blogger running these pages was experimenting — food videos, Pinterest-optimized recipes, E-commerce links, vaguely conservative memes. We even found what are likely family photos and videos buried deep in Thinkarete’s socials, which, we obviously aren’t linking to here, but they seem to have been forgotten about amid all the optimizing. The entire Thinkarete brand seemed to be this woman’s online side project, which had largely morphed over time into a drop-shipping scheme. Then, last summer, the Facebook firehose was pointed directly at the page.

This is an objectively terrifying idea. To pass no judgment on the blogger who was playing around with these tools — you know, get that passive income — but imagine if you woke up one day, posted something to your Facebook page, and suddenly had more viewers than the Super Bowl. Because that’s what appears to have happened here. Facebook flipped a switch, favoring comments and reactions over shares, and suddenly a food blogger from Utah became the largest publisher in the country, if not the world.

«

Utterly random. That’s the world we now live in: there’s no sense to it because it’s all shaped by algorithms that have no idea what they’re actually dealing with.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Brent Bravo oil rig is decommissioned now, but as a functional rig its ramshackle nature led to two avoidable deaths. CC-licensed photo by Rab Lawrence on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Overdue. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Social media creating virus of lies, says Nobel winner Maria Ressa • The Guardian

Rebecca Ratcliffe:

»

Social media platforms are biased against facts and creating “a virus of lies” that threatens all democracies, the Nobel peace prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa has said.

Ressa, one of the Philippines’ most prominent journalists, said social media platforms were “manipulating our minds insidiously, creating alternate realities, making it impossible for us to think slow”.

Focusing simply on moderating social media content was a distraction, she said, and it was the design of platforms, and the algorithms they used to promote content, that were in need of an overhaul.

Speaking at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Sydney Dialogue, Ressa accused social media companies of misusing arguments around freedom of speech. “It’s a freedom of reach issue, not a freedom of speech issue,” she said.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong with our information ecosystem. Because the platforms that deliver the facts are actually biased against the facts,” she added, pointing to Facebook as the world’s largest delivery platform for news.

«

Naturally I reference Ressa, and the experience of Rappler (her magazine in the Philippines) in Social Warming. The irony, of course, is that Rappler began on Facebook. And that the Philippines was probably the first place where Facebook was used to sway an election through all sorts of manipulation, bots and misinformation. When Ressa talks, it’s worth listening.
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Divorce does funny things • The Paris Review

Tabitha Lasley wrote a book, Sea State, about the men who work on offshore oil rigs, and this is a little extract:

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He smiled, displaying large, rounded teeth. Many of the men I’d met looked worn out by the physicality of their work, but this man emitted an air of wholesome good health. He must have been in his late forties, at least, to have worked on Piper Alpha, but in the dim light of the lobby, he appeared almost ageless.

“We’ve had a lot of deaths on the Brents over the years. We had the Chinook disaster forty-five people who’d left the Brent Delta. There were two guys killed down the leg of the Brent Bravo. During the last downturn.”

The man explained that oil companies were expected to deliver nominations—specific quantities of oil and gas—to the grid. Failure to do so incurred penalties. But there is a constant tension between production and compliance. Platforms become fatigued over time. Battered by the elements, their structures need continued maintenance. Routine maintenance often puts operations on hold, and during downturns, companies will deploy quick fixes. In 1999, it was alleged that Shell had a protocol known as TFA: “Touch Fuck All.” Permits apparently came with TFA scrawled across them, meaning workers should leave equipment alone, rather than risk a shutdown. Shell commissioned an internal audit, which corroborated the allegations and recommended immediate intervention. But the auditor was transferred, and the report did not surface again until 2006, shortly before a fatal accident inquiry into the Brent Bravo deaths.

«

Do read the rest of the piece, and then discover the sheriff’s report into the two deaths in Brent Bravo. (You can probably begin reading that at item 12, “Events of 11 September 2003”.
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US regulator raises concerns over Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

»

Nvidia disclosed the pushback from American regulators as it announced its latest quarterly earnings to Wall Street late on Wednesday. It said that the Federal Trade Commission had “expressed concerns” about the Arm transaction, and that it was in discussions with the agency about “remedies to address those concerns”.

The US chipmaker did not reveal what had prompted the opposition, or what concessions it had offered. The deal, which was announced 14 months ago, has attracted opposition from some big American tech companies that worry Nvidia will limit their access to Arm’s chip designs, giving it an unfair advantage in big chip markets such as data centres and cars.

Nvidia has already made an offer to UK and EU regulators to guarantee not to cut Arm’s customers off, or to change the list of Arm products they have access to, according to one person familiar with its position. But the offer was not sufficient to prevent London and Brussels from moving ahead with extended investigations, and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has said it does not believe any “behavioural” remedies like this can be effective.

Nvidia could face further headaches in China, where some local chipmakers are reported to have complained to regulators about the deal. The company said on Wednesday that a formal antitrust process had not even started there yet, though it said the deal had been “under review” by Chinese authorities.

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At least this is the first time that we’ve had some idea of what the regulators object to.
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The shareholder fight that forced Apple’s hand on repair rights • The Verge

Maddie Stone:

»

But Apple didn’t change its policy [on user repairs] out of the goodness of its heart. The announcement follows months of growing pressure from repair activists and regulators — and its timing seems deliberate, considering a shareholder resolution environmental advocates filed with the company in September asking Apple to re-evaluate its stance on independent repair. Wednesday is a key deadline in the fight over the resolution, with advocates poised to bring the issue to the Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve.

Apple spokesperson Nick Leahy told The Verge that the program “has been in development for well over a year,” describing it as “the next step in increasing customer access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and manuals.” Leahy declined to say whether the timing of the announcement was influenced by shareholder pressure.

Activist shareholders believe that it was. “The timing is definitely no coincidence,” says Annalisa Tarizzo, an advocate with Green Century, the mutual fund company that filed the right-to-repair resolution with Apple in September. As a result of today’s announcement, Green Century is withdrawing its resolution, which asked Apple to “reverse its anti repair practices” and evaluate the benefits of making parts and tools more available to consumers.

That’s exactly what Apple seems to be doing with its new Self Service Repair program.

«

Given how large companies operate, the idea that Apple rushed to do this when the resolution was brought forward is unlikely. Two months isn’t enough to get anything like this done. But it could have accelerated the announcement; Apple would have chosen to get ahead of the resolution, even while it tries to figure out the precise details of what it will do.
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Facebook isn’t telling you how popular right-wing content is on the platform • The Markup

Corin Faife:

»

Data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project shows that during the period from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2021, outlets like The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, and BuzzFeed’s viral content arm were among the top-viewed domains in our sample. 

Citizen Browser is a national panel of paid Facebook users who automatically share their news feed data with The Markup.

To analyze the websites whose content performs the best on Facebook, we counted the total number of times that links from any domain appeared in our panelists’ news feeds—a metric known as “impressions”—over a three-month period (the same time covered by Facebook’s Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report). Facebook, by contrast, chose a different metric, calculating the “most-viewed” domains by tallying only the number of users who saw links, regardless of whether each user saw a link once or hundreds of times.

By our calculation, the top performing domains were those that surfaced in users’ feeds over and over—including some highly partisan, polarizing sites that effectively bombarded some Facebook users with content.

These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.

“They are very good at dancing with data,” Haugen told British lawmakers during a European tour.

«

Facebook’s response, in part: “The focus of the Widely Viewed Content Report is to show the content that is seen by the most people on Facebook, not the content that is posted most frequently.”

The question then is which is the better measure: if someone sees the same link three or four times, is that three or four impressions, or just one? And which has more effect?
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Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster • Rest of World

Marwa Fatafta:

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Arab activists and journalists, many of whom use Facebook to document human rights abuses and war crimes, are routinely censored and booted off the platform — most commonly under the pretext of terrorism. 

This is especially pronounced in times of political crisis and violence. Let’s not forget Facebook’s mass censorship of Palestinian voices during the height of Israeli violence and brutality in the months of May and June 2021. Most notably, Facebook deleted content reporting on Israeli forces violently storming into Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, throwing stun grenades and tear gas at worshippers, because company staff mistook “Al-Aqsa” for a terrorist organization. 

Such arbitrary mistakes are disturbingly common. Across the region, Facebook’s algorithms incorrectly deleted Arabic content 77% of the time. In one instance, Facebook’s Oversight Board overturned the erroneous removal of a post shared by an Egyptian user on the violence in Israel and Palestine from a verified Al Jazeera page. Not only was the content wrongfully removed for allegedly violating the platform’s Dangerous Individuals and Organisations (DIO) Community Standard, but the user was also disproportionately punished with a read-only account restriction for three days, disabling his ability to livestream content, and prohibiting him from using advertising products on the platform for 30 days. 

Digital rights advocates have demanded transparency on these designations. The Oversight Board also recommended Facebook to publish the list, but Facebook refused, citing safety concerns. The Intercept recently revealed the full list, and again, to no one’s surprise, “the DIO policy and blacklist … place far looser prohibitions on commentary about predominately white anti-government militias than on groups and individuals listed as terrorists, who are predominately Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Muslim.”

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Long gone are the days when Zuckerberg eagerly believed that getting Israelis and Palestinians onto Facebook would mean they could resolve their differences.
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Hate speech in Myanmar continues to thrive on Facebook • Associated Press

Sam McNeil and Victoria Milko:

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Years after coming under scrutiny for contributing to ethnic and religious violence in Myanmar, Facebook still has problems detecting and moderating hate speech and misinformation on its platform in the Southeast Asian nation, internal documents viewed by The Associated Press show.

Three years ago, the company commissioned a report that found Facebook was used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in the country. It pledged to do better and developed several tools and policies to deal with hate speech.

But the breaches have persisted — and even been exploited by hostile actors — since the Feb. 1 military takeover this year that resulted in gruesome human rights abuses across the country.

Scrolling through Facebook today, it’s not hard to find posts threatening murder and rape in Myanmar.

One 2 1/2 minute video posted on Oct. 24 of a supporter of the military calling for violence against opposition groups has garnered over 56,000 views.

“So starting from now, we are the god of death for all (of them),” the man says in Burmese while looking into the camera. “Come tomorrow and let’s see if you are real men or gays.”

«

These are part of what I think we’ll call the Haugen Documents, to which the AP has access. But really, Facebook: you’ve seen how it goes in Myanmar. You’ve been publicly shamed over it. Does nothing work?
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Votes for children! Why we should lower the voting age to six • The Guardian

Professor David Runciman:

»

Indeed, I believe there is a strong case for lowering the voting age to six, effectively extending the franchise to any child in full-time education. When I have made this case, as I have done in recent years in a variety of different forums, I am always struck by the reaction I get. It is incredulity. What possible reason could there be to do something so seemingly reckless and foolhardy? Most audiences recognise that our democracy is growing fractious, frustrated and frustrating. Our political divisions are wide and our institutions seem ill-equipped to handle them. But nothing surely could justify allowing children to join in. Wouldn’t it simply make everything worse?

It would not. In fact, it might make things better. But to understand why, we first need to understand the nature of the problems our democracy faces, and in particular, the generational divide that has become an increasingly important factor in politics over recent decades.

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I’ve heard David (who I know) make this argument a few times. In case you think he’s some random guy on the internet, he’s also professor of politics at Cambridge University. And his point about demographics is key to this argument. After all, if some people are too young to vote, isn’t that also an argument that some people are too old to vote? Scoff at the headline all you like, but read the piece and see if you can refute his argument.
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Ford steps into the chips business • WSJ

Mike Colias:

»

The semiconductor shortage has scuttled output of millions of planned vehicles industrywide this year. Some car executives have said they are taking steps to get a better handle on their chip supplies, a critical piece of the supply chain into which they have had little visibility.

The parts crisis is also driving deeper cooperation between the semiconductor and auto industries with executives from both sectors establishing closer ties to address challenges and working together to introduce new products.

Ford’s move would go a step further by eventually bringing some chip development in-house. The Dearborn, Mich.-based auto maker said designing its own chips could improve some vehicle features—such as automated-driving capabilities or battery systems for electric vehicles—and potentially help Ford sidestep future shortages.

“We feel like we can really boost our product performance and our tech independence at the same time,” said Chuck Gray, Ford’s vice president of vehicle embedded software and controls.

Part of the agreement with GlobalFoundries is intended to enhance near-term chip supplies for Ford, which has been hit especially hard by the supply crunch relative to many other auto makers. The joint-development work is aimed at producing higher-end chips that would go into vehicles several years out, Mr. Gray said.

Semiconductors are used to electronically control many functions in cars, from engine calibration to steering and air-bag deployment. Those computer chips have been scarce this year as auto makers compete for supply with producers of other consumer goods, including electronics and appliances.

«

GlobalFoundries was founded in 2009 as a spinoff from AMD, but only went public this October. Of note: it’s the only semiconductor maker with operations in Europe and the US and Singapore. It’s also a “Trusted Foundry” for the US government. All down to Ford to design some good chips, then. (The link should make the article free to read, at least if you click through from the Overspill website; can’t promise what Mailchimp will do to it.)
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Hackers backed by Iran are targeting US critical infrastructure, US warns • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

In May, the attackers targeted an unnamed US municipality, where they likely created an account with the username “elie” to further burrow into the compromised network. A month later, they hacked a US-based hospital specializing in health care for children. The latter attack likely involved Iranian-linked servers at 91.214.124[.]143, 162.55.137[.]20, and 154.16.192[.]70.

Last month, the APT [advanced persistent threat] actors exploited Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities that gave them initial access to systems in advance of follow-on operations. Australian authorities said they also observed the group leveraging the Exchange flaw.

The hackers may have created new user accounts on the domain controllers, servers, workstations, and active directories of networks they compromised. Some of the accounts appear to mimic existing accounts, so the usernames are often different from targeted organization to targeted organization. The advisory said network security personnel should search for unrecognized accounts with special attention on usernames such as Support, Help, elie, and WADGUtilityAccount.

The advisory comes a day after Microsoft reported that an Iranian-aligned group it calls Phosphorous is increasingly using ransomware to generate revenue or disrupt adversaries. The group employs “aggressive brute force attacks” on targets, Microsoft added.

Early this year, Microsoft said, Phosphorus scanned millions of Internet IP addresses in search of FortiOS systems that had yet to install the security fixes for CVE-2018-13379. The flaw allowed the hackers to harvest clear-text credentials used to remotely access the servers. Phosphorus ended up collecting credentials from more than 900 Fortinet servers in the US, Europe, and Israel.

«

So we’re now at the stage where aggressive state hacking is background noise.
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Clubhouse launches bug bounty program with $3,000 on offer for critical vulnerabilities • The Daily Swig

Adam Bannister:

»

Clubhouse, the audio-based chatroom application, has rolled out a public bug bounty program on HackerOne.

Financial rewards for unearthing critical flaws are pegged at $3,000, while ‘high’ severity bugs will command bounties of $1,500. Bug hunters could get $500 and $100, respectively, for valid ‘medium’ and ‘low’ severity bugs.

In a blog post published to coincide with the program’s launch, Clubhouse said: “While many bug bounty programs promise high rewards for catastrophic-level discoveries, our approach keeps the scope broad so we can address as many bugs as possible. To that end, if you can help us fix bugs that could cause harm to our community, you’ll be eligible to earn a bounty.”

«

“Usage is dropping. What can we do to increase engagement?”

“How about encouraging hackers to spend more time using the platform?”

In its way, it is cheaper than a marketing drive. I’d love to know how Clubhouse’s financials are looking, because Google Trends suggests it’s fallen off people’s radar. Except, that is, in those hotbeds of social media familiar to everyone – Somalia and Mongolia.
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The chase for fusion energy • Nature

Philip Ball:

»

There are now more than 30 private fusion firms globally, according to an October survey by the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) in Washington DC, which represents companies in the sector; the 18 firms that have declared their funding say they have attracted more than US$2.4bn in total, almost entirely from private investments (see ‘Fusion funding’). Key to these efforts are advances in materials research and computing that are enabling technologies other than the standard designs that national and international agencies have pursued for so long.

The latest venture at Culham — the hub of UK fusion research for decades — is a demonstration plant for General Fusion (GF), a company based in Burnaby, Canada. It is scheduled to start operating in 2025, and the company aims to have reactors for sale in the early 2030s. It “will be the first power-plant-relevant large-scale demonstration”, says GF’s chief executive Chris Mowry — unless, that is, its competitors deliver sooner.

Designed by British architect Amanda Levete, GF’s prototype plant illustrates the way fusion research has shifted from gargantuan state- or internationally funded enterprises to sleek, image-conscious affairs driven by private companies, often with state support. (GF will receive some UK government funding; it has not disclosed how much.)

In this respect, advocates of fusion technology say it has many parallels with the space industry. That, too, was once confined to government agencies but is now benefiting from the drive and imagination of nimble (albeit often state-assisted) private enterprise. This is “the SpaceX moment for fusion”, says Mowry, referring to Elon Musk’s space-flight company in Hawthorne, California.

“The mood has changed,” says Thomas Klinger, a fusion specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany. “We can smell that we’re getting close.” Investors sense the real prospect of returns on their money: Google and the New York City-based investment bank Goldman Sachs, for instance, are among those funding the fusion company TAE Technologies, based in Foothill Ranch, California, which has raised around $880m so far. “Companies are starting to build things at the level of what governments can build,” says Bob Mumgaard, chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

«

Two points. First: JET, also in Culham, had perhaps $800m of funding (half to build it) during its lifetime. ITER, its successor, could cost between €20bn and €60bn. That’s multi-government funding, but it tends to be slow, and less urgently goal-driven than venture capital. Which is the second point: if VC money succeeds in giving us fusion, will it be too cheap to meter, or too expensive for any but the richest to use?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: well OK you want to know why this is late. I did prepare all the links earlier on Thursday because I was, mirabile dictu, playing for the local squash team at an away match that involved a 150-mile round trip, and fully intended to then assemble and schedule the post when I got back, but somehow at 11.30pm didn’t have the presence of mind to do so. So this is late. Apologies. (I got thoroughly squashed, but the team won, thanks for asking.)

The nation of Singapore seems to be sliding towards becoming a surveillance state run by its ruling party. CC-licensed photo by maja kuzmanovic on Flickr.

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

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

Beginning next year, Apple will send you parts and tools to fix your iPhone and Mac at home • TechCrunch

Brian Heater:

»

Here’s a pleasant — and frankly unexpected — update from Apple. The company just announced Self Service Repair, a new program designed to let users perform common repairs on devices at home. Through the program, users with damaged devices will be sent “Apple genuine” tools and components — same as the ones they use at the Genius Bar.

The company will also be offering up online repair manuals (text, not video), accessible through the new Apple Self Service Repair Online Store. The system is similar to the one the company rolled out for Independent Repair Providers (of which there are currently 2,800 in the U.S. plus 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers), beginning with the iPhone 12 and 13, focused on display, battery and camera fixes. A similar service for M1 Macs will be launching “soon” after.

…Performing these tasks at home won’t void the device’s warranty, though you might if you manage to further damage the product in the process of repairing it — so hew closely to those manuals.

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That’s quite the warning, isn’t it. A very big step by Apple, though it seems more likely this will enable a cottage industry of repairers (who previously existed but were stymied by Apple’s designs of the past few years) than everyone DIYing their cracked screens. But maybe it will create a whole new generation of Haynes manuals. Though iFixit is sort of like that already.
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Scientists say we need to look into solar geoengineering now—before it’s too late • Singularity Hub

Edd Gent:

»

One major plank of geoengineering is the idea of removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere, either through reforestation or carbon capture technology that will scrub emissions from industrial exhausts or directly from the air. There are limits to nature-based CO2 removal, though, and so-called “negative emissions technology” is a long way from maturity.

The other option is solar geoengineering, which involves deflecting sunlight away from the Earth by boosting the reflectivity of the atmosphere or the planet’s surface. Leading proposals involve injecting tiny particles into the stratosphere, making clouds whiter by spraying sea water into the atmosphere, or thinning out high cirrus clouds that trap heat.

In theory, this could reduce global warming fairly cheaply and quickly, but interfering with the Earth’s climate system carries unpredictable and potentially enormous risks. This has led to widespread opposition to even basic research into the idea. Earlier this year, a test of the approach by Sweden’s space agency was cancelled following concerted opposition.

But this lack of research means policymakers are flying blind when weighing the pros and cons of the approach, researchers write in a series of articles in the latest issue of Science. They outline why research into the approach is necessary and how social science in particular can help us better understand the potential trade-offs.

In an editorial, Edward A. Parson from the University of California, Los Angeles, notes that critics often point to the fact that solar geoengineering is a short-term solution to a long-term problem that is likely to be imperfect and whose effects could be uneven and unjust.

«

This really is one from the Department Of Bad Ideas. Don’t know what it will do, can’t reverse it, but hey, why not?
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YouTube co-founder predicts ‘decline’ of the platform following removal of dislikes • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

[Jawed] Karim has been getting his own message out in an unusual way: by editing the description to the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, a banal clip titled “Me at the zoo” which stars the 25-year-old Karim himself. Karim originally edited the description of the video a few days ago to read: “When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube [face palm emoji].” But this morning he changed this description once again to give a more detailed condemnation:

“The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform,” writes Karim. “Why? Because not all user-generated content is good. It can’t be. In fact, most of it is not good. And that’s OK. […] The process works, and there’s a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines. Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre?”

It’s not the first time Karim has used the “Me at the zoo” video as an informal billboard for his opinions on the platform. In 2013, when YouTube announced it would use Google Plus to power comments — a move which many saw as a way for the search giant to force increased engagement for its doomed social network — Karim changed the video’s description to read: “why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment on a video?”

«

Predicting the decline of YouTube is a brave move. Predicting it over the removal of visible dislikes, even braver.
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No links about the blue site today! But YouTube certainly counts as a social network. How do they affect us? What do social networks do to democracy and journalism? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Notes on newsletters • Benedict Evans

He’s thinking about email, and Substack, and discovery:

»

How many lists can we all sign up to, after all? And who owns the reader?

The most striking thing for me, though, is that the history professor making $1m from her Substack (and note that ‘her Substack’ is their brand, not hers) reminds me almost exactly of the developer who put a Tetris clone on the iPhone app store in 2008 and made a fortune. Good luck trying that now. In every new, empty channel, the first people to offer something good can get rich. Once the channel fills up, the dynamics change. This happened to SEO, SEM, Facebook, Instagram, podcasts, D2C, Youtube, Tiktok and now newsletters. This is the cycle of life on the internet – any tool that makes it easy for everyone to create and reach an audience also means you’re competing with all the other everyones.

So, what does any content platform do when it has 100m users and 1m creators? The leader boards break, and search probably breaks too. Now what? Apple’s app store was paralysed by that for years. Yahoo’s directory was killed by search. FB built algorithms. Now see Substack. How does discovery work at scale? That isn’t just a high-quality problem – ‘what happens when there is more stuff on your platform than anyone can look at?’ is an essential, existential question. It can define the whole of what your product really means. What happens when email fills up – where does Substack’s own reader fit in?

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Singapore’s tech-utopia dream is turning into a surveillance state nightmare • Rest of World

Peter Guest:

»

It’s a place where pilot projects hint at a future — just over the horizon — where the intractable problems of today are automated out of existence. Where vertical farms and “NEWater” made from treated sewage cut the island’s reliance on neighbouring Malaysia for food and water. Where robots care for the elderly and drones service freighters. Where warehouses and construction sites are staffed by machines, obviating the need for the migrant workers who make Singapore function, but make Singaporeans uncomfortable. Technology keeps them safe, fed and independent; secure in a scary world, but connected to it through telecoms and air travel.

That safety requires constant vigilance. The city must be watched. The smart cameras that are being trialled in Changi [jail] are just a part of a nationwide thrust towards treating surveillance as part of everyday life. Ninety-thousand police cameras watch the streets. By the end of the decade, there will be 200,000. Sensors, including facial recognition cameras and crowd analytics systems, are being positioned across the city. The technology alone isn’t unique — it’s used in many countries. But Singapore’s ruling party sees dangers everywhere, and seems increasingly willing to peer individually and en masse into people’s lives. 

“What [technology] will do for people is make our lives a hell of a lot easier, more convenient, more easily able to plug into the good life,” Monamie Bhadra Haines, an assistant professor at the Technical University of Denmark, who studies the intersection between technology and society. “But … the surveillance is what is here, now.”

«

Very fine piece pointing out how easily this stuff slides from “for your own good” (surveilling prisoners in case they harm themselves) to “for our own good” (surveilling everyone in case they harm the ruling party).
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Amazon to stop accepting UK-issued Visa credit cards • The Guardian

Hilary Osborne:

»

James Andrews, from the comparison website money.co.uk, said the decision would come as a blow to the millions of UK shoppers who had Visa credit cards, including customers of Barclaycard and HSBC.

“With American Express also rejected by many UK retailers, that means people looking for rewards on their spending or trying to split the cost of shopping with a 0% purchase card on Amazon will be effectively forced to choose a Mastercard,” he said.

“Hopefully, Visa and Amazon work out their differences before the ban comes into force on 19 January but in the meantime it would be wise to check your cards now.”

Card fees have long been an issue of contention between providers and retailers, and this month Visa and Mastercard increased their quoted fees for “card-not-present” (CNP) payments on credit cards to merchants in the EU after the removal of caps post-Brexit.

The British Retail Consortium said companies faced an estimated £150m increase in the cost of accepting cross-border card payments, with British retailers shouldering an extra £36.5m in fees, equivalent to £100,000 every day.

The Federation of Small Businesses said its members had experienced soaring fees in recent years.

Its national chairman, Mike Cherry, said: “Small businesses are almost always charged more for card terminals than big corporates – so when online giants start throwing down the gauntlet, you know the situation is becoming critical.”

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It’s not immediately obvious, but Amazon transactions are very CNP – you’re not even required to give your CVV (the three-digit number on the back). That means a lot of risk for Amazon. But it’s the interchange fees it’s annoyed about. If you want a truly financial wonkish take, Tom Noyes has it for you: the Amazon-Visa row isn’t just a UK thing, and it’s been going on for ages.
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Taiwan proposes maximum seven-year prison term for deepfake porn images • Taiwan News

Matthew Strong:

»

Producers and distributors of deepfake footage replacing the faces of pornographic actors with those of other people could receive a prison sentence of up to seven years, according to a proposal unveiled by the Ministry of Justice.

The authorities promised a crackdown after a web influencer faced charges for allegedly using the faces of celebrities in porn videos. He reportedly made NT$10m (US$359,000) in profits from the illegal venture.

The proposed legislation still foresaw different levels of prison sentencing depending on the nature of the crime, CNA reported. The seven-year maximum sentence would be reserved for the production and distribution of deepfake images with a profit motive, the Ministry of Justice said. It added that five years would be the maximum term if no payment was involved.

If a couple shot an intimate video and one of the partners distributed it without the other’s consent, the maximum prison sentence would be two years.

«

First mention here of deepfake porn: December 2017. I guess four years isn’t slow in legislative terms.
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Pulp Fiction’s Quentin Tarantino sued by Miramax over NFT project • CBR (Comic Book Resources)

Keegan Prosse:

»

Miramax filed a lawsuit against Quentin Tarantino following the Pulp Fiction director’s recent announcement he plans to sell NFTs based on the 1994 cult film.

“Tarantino’s conduct has forced Miramax to bring this lawsuit against a valued collaborator in order to enforce, preserve, and protect its contractual and intellectual property rights relating to one of Miramax’s most iconic and valuable film properties,” the company wrote in its lawsuit, according to THR. “Left unchecked, Tarantino’s conduct could mislead others into believing Miramax is involved in his venture.”

The production company further alleged that Tarantino’s plan to release Pulp Fiction NFTs “could also mislead others into believing they have the rights to pursue similar deals or offerings” and explained that “Miramax holds the rights needed to develop, market, and sell NFTs relating to its deep film library.”

While Tarantino’s attorney responded by arguing the director was acting within his “Reserved Rights,” Miramax accused Tarantino of intentionally disregarding the agreement he signed and attempting to devalue the NFT rights to Pulp Fiction moving forward.

…Tarantino announced in early November that he planned to auction off a number of uncut scenes and original scripts from Pulp Fiction as NFTs. Among the collectibles are seven uncut scenes, original handwritten scripts and exclusive audio commentary from Tarantino. The director said at that time the NFTs would be built by the blockchain ecosystem known as the Secret Network and would be auctioned off on the marketplace OpenSea. As with all NFTs, each offering would come with a unique certificate of ownership.

«

I like how the headline clarifies that it’s Pulp Fiction’s Quentin Tarantino, to distinguish him from all the other Quentin Tarantinos out there. However now that the lawyers for the film studios are involved in NFTs, things can only get worse.
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Peak phosphorus is worse than climate change • Climate Conscious

Dustin T. Cox:

»

Phosphorus is a nutrient that is key to life, but the world has a finite supply, and that supply is running perilously short. Some studies estimate that global phosphorus reserves will run out within 50–100 years. And, as early as 2030, world phosphorus production will likely reach its peak. When that happens, food prices will steadily climb in conjunction with rising fertilizer costs. When the supply runs out, crops will fail and the food web will collapse. Phosphorus depletion is, therefore, an extinction level emergency more pressing than even global warming.

Seven nations control 90% of the world’s phosphorus supply. Morocco alone controls 75%, while the US, China, and a handful of other nations each have considerable reserves. The price of phosphorus has increased dramatically in the last 60 years, rising from $80 per ton in 1961 to over $700 per ton in 2015. Given the uneven distribution of phosphorus throughout the world, wealthy nations will likely starve last, though political strife and wars for food could imperil even the most insulated countries. PRIO (Peace Research Institute Olso) rates hunger as one of the most “reliable predictors of civil war.” If that is true, then even relatively stable nations, like the US, can expect their citizens to one day fight for their food.

… all 94 million acres of American corn crops are fertilized with phosphorus. Furthermore, each crop is reared through “insurance based farming” — the practice of “heaping on” phosphorus at a rate nine times greater than what we consume in food. The left over phosphorus, rather than finding its way to innovative phosphorus capture systems in American sewage processing facilities, remains in the soil, washes to the sea, and pollutes rivers, lakes, and streams.

«

From the abstract of the linked article (from 2009):

»

modern agriculture is dependent on phosphorus derived from phosphate rock, which is a non-renewable resource and current global reserves may be depleted in 50–100 years. While phosphorus demand is projected to increase, the expected global peak in phosphorus production is predicted to occur around 2030.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The government of Greenland is suspending oil exploration because it would contribute to climate change. CC-licensed photo by NASA on The Commons 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. Still not in orbit. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

ConstitutionDAO: a $20m stupid Ethereum trick • Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

David Gerard:

»

“DAO” stands for Decentralised Autonomous Organization. You get a pile of cryptocurrency, and holders with the right tokens to vote decide what to do with the crypto.

DAOs have a less than illustrious history of crashing and burning in fraud and hacks — it turns out that “code is law” is not very smart. So ConstitutionDAO is doing things more simply and elegantly — they’ve set up a multi-signature address with thirteen signers, where all the ETH gets deposited. It’s just a crowdfunding. The “DAO” bit’s connection to the money is more of an idea, you understand.

The completely and utterly centralised control of the project in all practical terms has led to some disappointment amongst those who bought the “DAO” pitch — but hey, it’s not like they can do anything about it.

The ConstitutionDAO founders say they’re setting up a Delaware LLC to front for this unincorporated bunch o’ guys who just got sent $5m of ETH. Everything is a gentleman’s agreement so far, worth only the paper it’s not written on. If ConstitutionDAO doesn’t win the auction, the funds will be returned via Juicebox, the platform they’re collecting the money on.

If ConstitutionDAO does win, what happens then? From the FAQ:

»

Will the core team receive any of the raised funds for themselves or get compensated in any way from this?

The core team has not received or pre-minted any tokens. Following the purchase of the Constitution, we intend to submit a proposal to be voted on by the community. While this is unusual, we believe that it establishes a precedence of mutual trust between the core team and the backers of the ConstitutionDAO.

«

Notice how this doesn’t answer the question.

On the ConstitutionDAO Discord chat, Will Papper, one of the multisig signers, says

»

Delaware LLC. Minimal operating agreement for now while we finalize details. The LLC allows us to bid on the Sotheby’s auction. Sotheby’s does not allow DAOs themselves to bid. “ConstitutionDAO LLC” but it’s still being set up. Need to consult more with securities lawyers we work with on this (since fractionalized ownership could be a security).

«

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There’s a lot of misreporting around this. Essentially the LLC gets the money. Whether it gives it back or does anything trustworthy is up to them.
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Satellites discover huge amounts of undeclared methane emissions • Space

Tereza Pultarova:

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Huge amounts of uncounted emissions of highly warming greenhouse gas methane are being released by “super-emitters” all over the world, satellite observations reveal. 

Scientists have only recently worked out how to detect methane emissions from space, but what they have seen since has taken them by surprise. The greenhouse gas, which is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, is leaking from gas pipelines, oil wells, fossil fuel processing plants and landfills all over the world. It is frequently released through negligence and improper operations; the emissions, in many cases, are not accounted for in mandatory greenhouse gas inventories. 

“We see quite a lot of those super-emitters,” Ilse Aben, senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) told Space.com. “These are large emissions, and we see a lot of them on the global scale — much more than we had expected.”

Aben heads a team of experts working with data from an instrument called Tropomi (for TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument) that flies on the European Sentinel 5P satellite, which is part of the Earth-observing constellation Copernicus.

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So, after the recent report that emissions have been lower than we thought for a few years, we’re now discovering that emissions (and especially methane) have probably been higher than we thought. Which would explain the rapid warming. Right?
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Russia acknowledges anti-satellite test, but says it’s no big deal • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

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it remains difficult to fully explain the country’s decision to destroy a satellite and create a cloud of debris that could very well threaten the International Space Station, as independent observations suggest.

Various theories have emerged to explain Russia’s actions, but as of Monday evening senior US officials were still scrambling to comprehend Russian motivations. Certainly, the selection of this satellite, in this orbit, was not made by chance. However, the decision to hit the Tselina-D satellite, also known as Cosmos 1408, may have been taken by Russia’s defense ministers without consulting the civil space operators of the space station.

One dark theory is that Russian President Vladimir Putin has now concluded that Russia’s space industry has fallen hopelessly behind the United States and China, and the gap will only further widen in future years. Because of this strategic and economic disadvantage, Putin has calculated that the best option for Russia is to deny certain orbits to these competitors. With Monday’s test, then, he sent his counterparts a message that he still retains some control in space—what you can destroy, Putin believes, you can control.

In the near term it seems likely that the US government, in concert with other spacefaring partners, will offer some sort of response. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have called the test unacceptable and said Russia must be held accountable for its actions. In the long term, this only heightens existing concerns about debris and the sustainability of high-trafficked orbits near Earth.

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Inside Reality Labs Research: meet the team that’s working to bring touch to the digital world • Facebook Research

Andrew Bosworth, in charge of Meta’s metaverse effort:

»

Imagine working on a virtual 3D puzzle with a friend’s ultra-realistic 3D avatar. As you pick up a virtual puzzle piece from the table, your fingers automatically stop moving as you feel it within your grasp. You feel the sharpness of the cardboard’s edges and the smoothness of its surface as you hold it up for closer inspection, followed by a satisfying snap as you fit it into place.

Now imagine sitting down to work at a café and having a virtual screen and keyboard appear in front of you. The virtual keyboard conforms to the size of your hands and the space you have available, and it’s easily personalized to suit your preferences. You can feel the click of each keystroke, as well as the edges of the virtual keys on your fingertips, making it as easy as typing on a perfectly-sized physical keyboard.

How would these experiences enhance your connection to the virtual world? What would they do for your ability to be productive or perform any action in the metaverse?

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Here’s something I wrote in October 2002:

»

The cube felt rubbery, although it didn’t strictly exist. As I moved the pencil-like mouse in my hand, a cursor moved too in the virtual room where the cube sat. A little manoeuvring and the cursor was beneath the cube. Move the pencil (called a “phantom”) upwards, and suddenly there was the sensation of weight, and the cube moved upwards on the screen. With a little practice, I could flip it upwards and catch it. The surface seemed to give, like rubber; the weight felt like a small ball, perhaps a golf ball.

A few minutes later another cursor appeared, and moved to the opposite side of the cube. Then we both pushed at the same time, and the cube rose. It was the first transmission of “touch” over the internet, demonstrated simultaneously in London and Massachusetts yesterday. The other cursor belonged to Jung Kim, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Touch Lab” in Boston.

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Yes, that’s 19 years.
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The AGI hype train is running out of steam • The Next Web

Thomas Macaulay:

»

The AGI hype train has hit some heavy traffic.

While futurists and fundraisers used to make bullish predictions about artificial general intelligence, they’ve become quieter lately. Peter Thiel — the tech billionaire and rumored vampire — says Silicon Valley big brains have lost enthusiasm for AGI.

“Elon’s not talking about it anymore and Larry [Page] is off to Fiji and doesn’t seem to be working on it quite as hard,” Thiel said at a recent event.

Thiel described Musk as “a weathervane for the zeitgeist,” who’s stopped talking about AGI because interest has declined.

Scientists are also increasingly skeptical. A recent study paper posited that AGI is “in principle impossible,” while other researchers have mocked the term’s proponents.

“I have yet to come across work on AGI that I can take seriously,” tweeted Abeba Birhane, a cognitive scientist based at University College Dublin.

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If like me you missed the “Larry Page is off to Fiji” bit, he’s hanging out a few miiles off Viti Levu.
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Qualcomm says it will have chips to take on Apple silicon in nine months • iMore

Stephen Warwick:

»

Qualcomm says that it is going to release new chips next year that can keep up with M-series Apple chips like M1 Pro and M1 Max, and the M1 featured in devices like the MacBook Air with M1 and 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1.

Chief Technology Officer Dr. James Thompson spoke at Qualcomm’s 2021 investor event, where he revealed the plan.

Qualcomm supplies Apple with some hardware, providing modems for devices like the iPhone 13 and its other best iPhones.

Thompson said Qualcomm would release new “arm-compatible” SoC’s designed by Nuvia, which it bought for $1.4bn in 2021. The company boasts former Apple engineers who worked on Apple silicon, and in July Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon said he thought Qualcomm could have the best chip on the market by next year. According to Thompson today, the new chips will be unveiled in about nine months, and be ready for devices in 2023.

«

Ah, so what Thompson is really saying is that in 2023 Qualcomm will have chips that “can keep up” with chips Apple released in 2020 (since the M1 Pro/Max chips are just more-CPU-core-more-GPU-core versions of the M1). And of course Qualcomm has never produced a chip that can power a smartwatch as well as Apple’s. But maybe adding Nuvia will change that.
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Greenland suspends oil exploration because of climate change • Associated Press

»

The left-leaning government of Greenland has decided to suspend all oil exploration off the world’s largest island, calling it is “a natural step” because the Arctic government “takes the climate crisis seriously.”

No oil has been found yet around Greenland, but officials there had seen potentially vast reserves as a way to help Greenlanders realize their long-held dream of independence from Denmark by cutting the annual subsidy of 3.4bn kroner ($540m) the Danish territory receives.

Global warming means that retreating ice could uncover potential oil and mineral resources which, if successfully tapped, could dramatically change the fortunes of the semiautonomous territory of 57,000 people.

“The future does not lie in oil. The future belongs to renewable energy, and in that respect we have much more to gain,” the Greenland government said in a statement. The government said it “wants to take co-responsibility for combating the global climate crisis.”

The decision was made June 24 but made public Thursday.

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Baby steps, but steps nonetheless.
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What it’s like living in the coldest town on Earth • WIRED

Jenna Garrett:

»

It gets down to well below zero in Oymyakon, Russia, long known as the coldest inhabited place on Earth. If that kind of climate is hard to wrap your brain around, such a temperature is so cold that people here regularly consume frozen meat, keep their cars running 24/7 and must warm the ground with a bonfire for several days before burying their dead.

It’s hard to know why anyone would want to live in such a place, and harder still to imagine why anyone would want to visit. But photographer Amos Chapple just couldn’t resist.

“I shoot travel photos aimed at the news sections of papers and need a headline to hang a story on,” the New Zealander said. “‘The coldest place on Earth’ is pretty irresistible.”

He traveled more than 10,000 miles to reach this village of 500 residents tucked away in a remote corner of Siberia. It’s so nasty that planes can’t land during the winter, and it takes two days to arrive by car from Yakutsk, the nearest major city (it’s 576 miles away). Chapple spent several weeks shooting in Oymyakon and Yakutsk during the long, dark month of January in 2013 and 2014. His remarkable photos capture the cold, bleak landscape and the hardy residents who brave unimaginable conditions.

Oymyakon sits at a 63.4608° N, 142.7858° E latitude, just a few hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. It’s dark – completely, utterly dark – for up to 21 hours a day during the winter, and the temperature averages -58. That’s balmy compared to one February in 1933, when Oymyakon earned its title as the coldest place on Earth when the mercury plunged to -90.

Here arctic chill is simply a fact of life, something to be endured. People develop a variety of tricks to survive. Most people use outhouses, because indoor plumbing tends to freeze. Cars are kept in heated garages or, if left outside, left running all the time. Crops don’t grow in the frozen ground, so people have a largely carnivorous diet—reindeer meat, raw flesh shaved from frozen fish, and ice cubes of horse blood with macaroni are a few local delicacies.

Chapple found it difficult to speak with the people he encountered, as many people were rushing as fast as possible from one oasis of warmth to another. Those willing to chat warned him about the rampant alcoholism, particularly during the holiday months.

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Remains a complete puzzle why you would live there. Or even take a job there. Other places exist, after all.
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The ‘psychology of regret’ helps explain why vaccine mandates work • The Washington Post

Adam Galinsky is a professor of ethics:

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To combat vaccine hesitancy, we need to grasp its psychological roots. Alongside skepticism of institutions and experts, exposure to misinformation, and other often-cited reasons for resisting vaccines sits a clear emotional explanation: Many people are afraid that they’ll make a bad decision. They’re influenced by the psychology of anticipated regret. Understanding this reaction can help us get more shots into arms, removing one of the final obstacles to controlling the virus.

It’s widely understood that when humans make decisions, they engage in a cost-benefit analysis. But psychologists have shown that people also conduct a less-rational calculation involving the regret they might experience. When deciding which of two roads to go down, they not only consider the statistical probabilities but also implicitly imagine their reactions to worst-case scenarios. In these analyses, potential bad outcomes weigh heavier on the mind than equally likely positive possibilities.

When do people anticipate feeling the most regret? When outcomes will derive from actions they take (as opposed to the consequences of declining to act), research shows. Psychologists — notably Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making — have demonstrated these tendencies in a series of experiments. For example, Kahneman found that people anticipate feeling more regret if they were to lose money by switching to a new stock vs. taking a loss on their current stock. And this regret is maximally intensified when we freely choose to take action — we are not ordered or coerced — and when it involves new or experimental activities. For example, Kahneman found that people anticipate more regret when imagining an accident that occurs while driving home along a new route compared with driving on one’s normal route. Anticipated regret is why people often prefer to stand still rather than move forward.

Anticipated regret sheds light on why vaccine-hesitant people seem more comfortable taking their chances with the virus rather than getting the shot, a decision that is not rational given the relative likelihood of experiencing severe effects of covid-19 vs. severe vaccine side effects.

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Awaiting with interest how many (or few) care home staff will choose not to be vaccinated, and hence fired, following the passage of their mandatory vaccination deadline in the UK. Early estimates suggested thousands would.
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Vizio’s profit on ads, subscriptions, and data is double the money it makes selling TVs • The Verge

Richard Lawler:

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It’s been less than a year since Vizio became a publicly traded company, and one consequence of that is we know more about its business than ever before. The TV maker released its latest earnings report on Tuesday and revealed that over the last three months, its Platform Plus segment that includes advertising and viewer data had a gross profit of $57.3m. That’s more than twice the amount of profit it made selling devices like TVs, which was $25.6m, despite those device sales pulling in considerably more revenue.

When Vizio filed to go public, it described the difference between the two divisions. While Devices is easy to understand — 4K TVs, soundbars, etc. — Platform Plus is a little more complicated. It counts money made from selling ad placements on its TV homescreens, deals for the buttons on remotes, ads that run on streaming channels, its cut from subscriptions, and viewer data that it tracks and sells as part of the InScape program.

The company says shipments of its TVs fell to 1.4m in 2021 compared to 2.1m in 2020, a drop of 36%. CEO William Wang told investors on the call that he sees “pretty healthy inventory” going into the holiday season, so anyone planning to pick up a value-priced TV or soundbar should have some decent options available.

That spike in Platform Plus revenue, which shot up 136% compared to last year, did a lot to help Vizio make up the difference as profits from TVs dipped compared to last year.

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Smart TVs in the sense that getting people to install them is a smart move.
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No examples of social networks putting people at loggerheads (thank goodness). But even so, why not buy my book Social Warming, to understand what they’re doing.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Air pollution in Delhi is pushing the top of the scale. Is burning more coal really going to help? CC-licensed photo by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier 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. Standard orbit. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Russia blows up a satellite, creating a dangerous debris cloud in space • The Verge

Loren Grush:

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This morning, Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a ground-based missile, creating thousands of pieces of debris that have spread out into Earth orbit, according to the US State Department. The US has identified more than 1,500 trackable pieces of debris from the event, and many thousands of smaller ones that cannot be traced, Ned Price, a spokesperson for the State Department, said during a briefing.

The news comes amid reports from Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, independently verified by The Verge via NASA’s live feed, that the astronauts living on board the International Space Station had to shelter in place this morning due to a cloud of space debris that seems to be passing by the station every 90 minutes, the time it takes for the ISS to orbit the Earth. NASA has yet to confirm if the debris field passing the ISS is the same one created by the Russian anti-satellite, or ASAT, test, and the agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, the State Department indicated that the debris field is a danger to the space station. “This test will significantly increase the risk to astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station, as well as to other human spaceflight activities,” Price told reporters. “Russia’s dangerous and irresponsible behavior jeopardizes the long term sustainability of our space and clearly demonstrates that Russia’s claims of opposing the weaponization of space are disingenuous and hypocritical.”

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Yes, it’s the plot of Gravity, but now as real life. (Also the backstory, partly, of Wall-E.) Astonishingly stupid of Russia: the standard method is to make the satellite’s orbit decay so that it burns up.
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India’s pollution board says prepare for emergency steps as Delhi’s smog worsens • Reuters

Neha Arora and Mayank Bhardwaj:

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India’s federal pollution control board on Friday ordered states and local bodies to be in “complete readiness” for emergency measures to tackle New Delhi’s worsening smog conditions due to a drop in temperature and wind speeds.

A thick haze of toxic smog hung over the Indian capital, exacerbated by a spike in the burning of crop waste in surrounding farmlands.

It reduced visibility and the Air Quality Index (AQI) hit 470 on a scale of 500, according to the federal pollution control board. This level of pollution means the air will affect healthy people and seriously impact those with existing diseases.

According to the pollution board’s “Graded Response Action Plan”, air quality remaining “severe” for 48 hours must prompt states and local bodies to impose emergency measures that include shutting down schools, imposing ‘odd-even’ restrictions on private cars based on their number plates, and stopping all construction.

In a circular late on Friday, the board said the government and private offices should reduce the use of private transport by 30% and advised the city’s residents to limit outdoor exposure.

“Meteorological conditions will be highly unfavourable for dispersion of pollutants till November 18, 2021 in view of low winds with calm conditions during the night,” the board said.

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According to a report on the radio, children born in Delhi are in effect 20-a-day smokers. The air quality is shocking. And yet India moved to retain coal burning at COP26.
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Lenders brace for more problems at NSO after US blacklisting • Financial Times

“FT Reporters”:

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Law firms Stroock & Stroock & Lavan and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher are independently working with creditor groups who are scouring credit agreements to see what recourse they may have against NSO, which faces severe restrictions on business with US companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

The US said it sanctioned the company for selling its military-grade spyware, Pegasus, to foreign governments that used these tools to carry out “transnational repression” of journalists, activists and embassy workers.

In response, lenders say they have tried to sell the loan on to other investors but have struggled to find willing buyers even at a discounted price. Most recently, quotes were around 70 cents on the dollar for the company’s $350m term loan maturing in 2025, according to a person familiar with the matter. Bloomberg News earlier reported the trading price of the loan.

At the same time, the creditor groups have been careful not to antagonise NSO’s management.

Shalev Hulio, the co-founder of the company, stepped down as CEO just before the commerce department designation, but still enjoys the support of the Israeli government, which will probably lobby the White House to reverse or soften the blacklist, people familiar with the matter said.

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I bet you would be careful not to antagonise NSO’s management. They’d probably drop Pegasus on your phone in an eyeblink and your personal life would be all over the internet within hours.
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Has Google dropped the Pixel Fold? • Display Supply Chain Consultants

Ross Young:

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DSCC has confirmed with its supply chain sources that Google has decided not to bring the Pixel Fold to market. Not in 2021 and reportedly not in the first half of 2022. Our sources indicated that Google believed the product wouldn’t be as competitive as it needed to be. They likely figured that competing against Samsung in the US and Europe in a small niche market facing higher costs than their primary competitor, would stack the odds against this project. I point out regional differences as in China, where Samsung is not as strong, we do expect to see many competing products with similar form factors from Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Huawei and Honor.

In terms of hardware, the Pixel Fold was expected to be the same size as the Galaxy Z Fold 3 with LTPO and variable refresh up to 120Hz. Unlike the Z Fold 3, it was not expected to have color on encapsulation nor an under panel camera. In addition, there were rumors that the cameras were not going to be state-of-the-art. According to 9to5google.com, the Pixel Fold cameras were expected to be a step down from the recently released Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro.

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I like how the headline is unsure but the story is certain. Take your pick of Fold certainty. I didn’t think it sounded like a smart idea, given how tiny the market is, how terrible Microsoft’s effort has been, and how small Google’s smartphone efforts (drops in a bucket) are.
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How will Facebook keep its metaverse safe for users? • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

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The man leading Facebook’s push into the metaverse has told employees he wants its virtual worlds to have “almost Disney levels of safety”, but also acknowledged that moderating how users speak and behave “at any meaningful scale is practically impossible”.

Andrew Bosworth, who has been steering a $10 billion-a-year budget to build “the metaverse”, warned that virtual reality can often be a “toxic environment” especially for women and minorities, in an internal memo from March seen by the Financial Times.

He added that this would be an “existential threat” to Facebook’s ambitious plans if it turned off “mainstream customers from the medium entirely”.

The memo sets out the enormous challenge facing Facebook, which has a history of failing to stop harmful content from reaching its users, as it tries to create an immersive digital realm where people will log on as 3D avatars to socialise, game, shop and work.

Bosworth, who will take over as Facebook’s chief technology officer next year, sketched out ways in which the company can try to tackle the issue, but experts warned that monitoring billions of interactions in real time will require significant effort and may not even be possible. Reality Labs, the division headed by Bosworth, currently has no head of safety role.

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I’m presently more persuaded by the view of Ben Thompson (of Stratechery) that the “metaverse”, or more likely metaverses, will principally be corporate, certainly in their first incarnations – like the first commercial PCs. They’ll be relatively bulky, and clunky, and bring benefits for narrow applications, rather than being all-purpose. (Thompson discusses this at length with John Gruber on the latest episode of Gruber’s Talk Show.)

Given that, the need for moderation essentially doesn’t exist, because you’ll have the heavy breath of HR on your neck, with everything you do and say recorded and replayable.
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Speaking of Facebook, you could consider:
• 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?

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

The devious fossil fuel propaganda we all use • Mashable

Mark Kaufman:

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Another heralded environmental advertising campaign, launched three decades later in 2000, also won a laudatory advertising award, a “Gold Effie.” The campaign impressed upon the American public that a different type of pollution, heat-trapping carbon pollution, is also your problem, not the problem of companies drilling deep into the Earth for, and then selling, carbonaceous fuels refined from ancient, decomposed creatures. British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals.

It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life — going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling — is largely responsible for heating the globe. A decade and a half later, “carbon footprint” is everywhere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a carbon calculator. The New York Times has a guide on “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint.” Mashable published a story in 2019 entitled “How to shrink your carbon footprint when you travel.” Outdoorsy brands love the term.

“This is one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever,” said Benjamin Franta, who researches law and history of science as a J.D.-Ph.D. student at Stanford Law School.

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The best manipulation is the sort you’re not even aware you’re agreeing with.
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‘I sniffed out good news like a bloodhound’: how I broke my doomscrolling habit • The Guardian

Pandora Sykes:

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George Resch loves two things in this world: “Making people think a little bit more positively, and making them laugh.” A former fence salesman from Long Island, New York, Resch is now the creator of the wildly popular (2.5 million followers) positive news outlet Tank’s Good News, set up in September 2017 after he saw a picture of an old woman being rescued from her living room in Texas during the floods caused by Hurricane Harvey. Inspired by the image’s portrayal of “triumph in the tragedy” – she was on the back of a jet ski doing a double thumbs up – Resch, 41, began posting similar images: a young woman food shopping for an elderly couple too scared to get out of their car during peak pandemic in Oregon, or the homecoming queen who gave her crown to a recently bereaved classmate. Resch believes the appeal of his posts is simple: “It’s a hit of dopamine when you’re scrolling through doom and gloom.” Every day, he is inundated with messages from people saying he has saved their life.

…Speaking to friends, I realise that many of them are looking for, if not an escape, then a breather. They have secret joy rituals. Emily begins her day with videos of orcas, finding calm in their expansive inky blackness. Rosie watches videos of nuns on TikTok. Mary, a lawyer, and Andrew, a yoga instructor, have set up a side project called Hello Stranger, where they leave stamped blank postcards with Mary’s address written on them, around London, with a small note at the top asking people to share some happy news. To date, they have left 500 postcards and received 300 back. For those of us who feel anxious when anything is left unresolved, simple acts of routine, or completion, can be a vital salve. A woman goes shopping. An orca crashes its tail. A room of nuns hole-punch a sheet of unleavened bread with military efficiency, to create perfectly rounded communion wafers, over and over again.

The term “doomscrolling” was coined in a tweet in 2018, but popularised by business journalist Karen Ho in spring 2020, after she noticed how many people were hunched over their screens consuming excessive amounts of negative news, with faces like Munch’s Scream. Ho started by simply asking her followers every night on Twitter: “‘Hey, are you doomscrolling?’ and people were like, ‘Ohhhh, that’s what I’m doing!’” In response, she issued simple, daily self-care reminders – take a break from the screen, stop slouching, stretch your legs, grab a glass of water – and in autumn of last year, created @doomscroll_bot on Twitter to send regular reminders.

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Ex-security chief: we have privatised our cyber security. The winners are the hackers • Prospect Magazine

Ciaran Martin founded and led the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre:

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When the Queen opened the new National Cyber Security Centre in 2017, a senior government minister confided to me, at the margins of the festivities, their concern that the launch of this new department in GCHQ to fight digital threats represented “the nationalisation of cyber security.” But the opposite problem is emerging: we are privatising national security risk.

The US fuel crisis is a case in point. When Colonial Pipeline was hit, it wasn’t the pipeline controls that were hacked but the company’s corporate systems. It was the company, not the hackers, who shut down the pipeline, apparently because it could not run its services profitably because of the damage done to its business processes.

This was a decision that the company was perfectly entitled to take. But while it did not consult the US government beforehand, it fell to the US government to deal with the fallout. Washington had to suspend safety regulations concerning the transport of fuel by road and issue guidance to citizens to prevent panic buying and the storing of fuel in unsafe containers. It then sent the FBI after the hackers. Yet it had no involvement in any of the decisions that made such actions necessary; those were taken by the firm’s executives.

Colonial, it should be said, broke no rules. And that’s the point. Insufficient protection of its pipeline—a critical national asset—caused social disruption that clearly met the threshold of a national security threat. But there is nothing—yet—in the regulations governing this critical sector that requires firms to do better (and Republicans in Washington are starting to push back against suggestions for tighter controls). The unspoken message behind the Colonial case is that businesses can choose how to respond, whatever the consequences, and the government will pick up the tab.

The real lesson of 2021 is that digital vulnerabilities in a range of private and public organisations can be exploited to cause significant disruption and, potentially, serious social harm. That lesson will not be lost on authoritarian states that have better cyber capabilities than a few greedy Russian thugs. This year has revealed, among other things, that you can cause energy chaos in parts of America and a healthcare crisis in an EU member state with a few lines of malicious code of medium sophistication.

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Emails reveal new details of Trump White House interference in CDC Covid planning • POLITICO

Erin Banco:

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The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has conducted interviews over the last several months about how former President Donald Trump and his closest confidantes, including former White House adviser Scott Atlas and son-in-law Jared Kushner, tried to steer the course of the federal response, sidestepping the interagency process.

On Friday, the committee released emails and transcripts with former senior CDC officials about the White House’s attempts to sideline the agency at critical moments at the beginning of the U.S. outbreak.
The emails and transcripts detail how in the early days of 2020 Trump and his allies in the White House blocked media briefings and interviews with CDC officials, attempted to alter public safety guidance normally cleared by the agency and instructed agency officials to destroy evidence that might be construed as political interference.

The documents further underscore how Trump appointees tried to undermine the work of scientists and career staff at the CDC to control the administration’s messaging on the spread of the virus and the dangers of transmission and infection.

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This is worth noting because of the breadth and depth of the interference revealed. Deborah Birx was frequently denigrated for allowing herself to be pushed around by Trump and his team. She clearly knew that was happening – yet judged it would be worse for everyone if she left than if she stayed. That in itself tells you that the things she foresaw happening without her were really, really terrible.

America still hasn’t come to terms with the extent to which Trump and his team ran a mafia operation.
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US 3G service is set to end in 2022, rendering useless old cellphones, life alerts and early model Kindles • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski:

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The wireless networks that underpin an assortment of devices, including life-alert alarms, older cellphones and tablets, are about to shut down, an action that consumer advocates say will leave some of society’s most vulnerable people without critical communications tools.

When they were rolled out nearly two decades ago, 3G wireless networks served as the bedrock of an explosion in cellphones and connected devices. Many devices have moved to 4G networks and newer phones are now moving onto 5G.

But a motley assortment still relies on the more rudimentary 3G service — ranging from location sensors that track school buses to connected breathalyzers police use to monitor convicted drunk drivers — and consumer advocates are urging the Federal Communications Commission to slow the change, which is set to start in February.

Older and low-income Americans are more likely to be affected by the shift, these advocates say. If they don’t upgrade in time, their phones and life-alert devices won’t be able to call 911 or other emergency services, government regulators warn.

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Amazing to think that 3G is 20-year-old infrastructure now. (In the US, it’s nearly old enough to drink.) The first 4G phones began appearing in 2010, but as the article points out, it’s the relatively low-bandwidth products that still count as ongoing infrastructure which really need 3G. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A close examination of James Bond’s travel behaviour suggests he’s really not careful enough about hygiene. That could be life-shortening. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Not being phased down. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hoax email blast abused poor coding in FBI website • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed today that its fbi.gov domain name and Internet address were used to blast out thousands of fake emails about a cybercrime investigation. According to an interview with the person who claimed responsibility for the hoax, the spam messages were sent by abusing insecure code in an FBI online portal designed to share information with state and local law enforcement authorities.

Late in the evening on Nov. 12 ET, tens of thousands of emails began flooding out from the FBI address eims@ic.fbi.gov, warning about fake cyberattacks. Around that time, KrebsOnSecurity received a message from the same email address.

“Hi its pompompurin,” read the missive. “Check headers of this email it’s actually coming from FBI server. I am contacting you today because we located a botnet being hosted on your forehead, please take immediate action thanks.”

A review of the email’s message headers indicated it had indeed been sent by the FBI, and from the agency’s own Internet address. The domain in the “from:” portion of the email I received — eims@ic.fbi.gov — corresponds to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division (CJIS).

…In response to a request for comment, the FBI confirmed the unauthorized messages, but declined to offer further information.

…“I could’ve 1000% used this to send more legit looking emails, trick companies into handing over data etc.,” Pompompurin said. “And this would’ve never been found by anyone who would responsibly disclose, due to the notice the feds have on their website.”

Pompompurin says the illicit access to the FBI’s email system began with an exploration of its Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP), which the bureau describes as “a gateway providing law enforcement agencies, intelligence groups, and criminal justice entities access to beneficial resources.”

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Question now is whether the FBI will go after him for demonstrating that the site was terribly flawed, with a one-time password provided in the HTML of the page and a form you could edit – an utterly amateurish error.
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Cabbage, lost and found • Rory’s Always On Newsletter

Rory Cellan-Jones got a message on Friday that Cabbage, his family’s beloved (and ageing, like us all) rescue collie had gone missing with five other dogs when the dogwalker’s van they were in was stolen:

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By now it was late afternoon and my wife Diane and I were feeling pretty gloomy, desperately worried about what was happening to Cabbage in the hands of malevolent strangers. If they were dog thieves rather than just opportunists grabbing a relatively modern van they would quickly realise that a 15 year old crossbreed was worth nothing to them – and what would they do then?

Then there was at last something which seemed to offer hope. The press office at Ford UK called me to explain that they needed to be put in touch with Brett. They explained that his Transit Van, like all. recent Fords, had a feature which allowed owners to track their vehicles via a smartphone app.

It turned out that Brett had once had this app but had forgotten his password. But he got a new one and quickly found that he was being given a location for the van – or at least where it had been at 1020 in the morning.

It was in Park Royal, one of London’s few industrial areas and pretty close to where the van had been stolen. Just as I was about to talk to Radio 4’s PM and then go on the ITV London regional news programme I got a text from India telling me they were heading to the place pinpointed by the app and were just ten minutes away.

“Be careful”, I texted back. I realised I could be on air just as they found the dogs – or came face to face with whoever had stolen the van.

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Together with his tweets and the use of the app, this was a Very Modern Dog Recovery. (I suspect Cabbage just found the day perplexing: not a proper walk, but among dog friends, but not in quite the usual place. It’s the humans who had an absolutely appalling time.)
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Ukraine wants to be the crypto capital of the world • The New York Times

David Segal and Ivan Nechepurenko:

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A buccaneering 37-year-old educated in a British private school, Michael Chobanian is fluent both in English and the folkways of Ukraine, which he regards as a largely lawless frontier and which he likes to traverse in his black Ferrari 612. He is the founder of Kuna, one of Eastern Europe’s first cryptocurrency exchanges. To him, his native country is a terrific place to run a business, as long as you have the nerve to navigate a system rife with corruption.

Chief among the upsides, he explains in his office overlooking the Dnieper River, is the sort of freedom not seen in developed nations for hundreds of years.

Like, you can get away with murder.

“In this country, you can kill a person and you will not go to jail, if you have enough money and you’re connected,” he said, sipping tea on a plush leather sofa. “If you are not connected, it will cost you more.”

The anything-goes ethos has dogged Ukraine for years, and now the government is hoping to bury it, with an assist from cryptocurrency. In early September, the Parliament here passed a law legalizing and regulating Bitcoin, step one in an ambitious campaign to both mainstream the nation’s thriving trade in crypto and to rebrand the entire country.

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How will legalising crypto bury its reputation for anything-goes? In passing: Ukraine is described in the article as the second-poorest nation in Europe. World Atlas puts it at the lowest in 2019. So does World Population Review using 2020 figures.
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The US is making its biggest investment in broadband internet ever • Popular Science

Shira Feder:

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The government has allocated $42.4bn towards a Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, which is just what it sounds like, says [director of infrastrcture policy at the Center for American Progress, Kevin] DeGood. In areas without internet service, or with spotty, intermittent service, there will be an auction in which private companies can bid on how much money they would need in order to build out real broadband internet access. 

The Pew Research Center consistently finds that affordability is a huge barrier to broadband adoption in the United States. A program called the Affordable Connectivity Fund seeks to address this, allocating $14.2bn to provide a $30 monthly subsidy to bring down the cost of monthly internet access charges for households that are at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. [That is, households whose income is less than double the poverty line level.] This program is a continuation of the $3.2bn Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, or EBBP, started during the pandemic to help low-income Americans get online.

Two billion dollars will go towards making sure indigenous communities have access to the internet, and $2.75 billion will go towards “digital equity plans,” like computer labs for your local library.

…One of the provisions in the bill is to give the government more authority to demand better data from these private network providers. Unlike road maps, where experts can look at a map and see where there is or isn’t a road, with the internet, experts can examine a map and see that fiber optic cable has been laid down, but not know who is accessing that cable.

Our estimate is “based on guesses as to whether or not people are being served based on fiber maps and other wireline technology,” says DeGood. Just because a line might pass by someone’s property doesn’t mean they automatically have internet access.

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One thing I bet it isn’t going to fix is the monopolistic practices that leave no effective rivalry for services in any given location.
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China CPI and PPI: the world’s second largest economy has a big inflation problem • CNN

Laura He:

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Last week, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued a notice directing local governments to encourage families to stock up on food and other daily essentials as bad weather, energy shortages and Covid-19 restrictions threatened to disrupt supplies. The sudden warning sparked panic buying among the public and frenzied online speculation.

Authorities attributed the rise in consumer inflation to surging costs for vegetables and gas.

Vegetable prices jumped 16% in October, mainly due to heavy rainfall and rising transportation costs, according to a statement from Dong Lijuan, a senior statistician for the NBS. Extreme weather has hurt crops, and authorities have acknowledged that the cost of transiting across regions could rise because of strict measures intended to contain outbreaks of Covid-19.

Gasoline and diesel prices rose more than 30%, Dong said. An ongoing energy crunch was also the major contributor to the rise in producer price inflation, as the cost of coal mining and processing has risen.

The world’s second largest economy is already growing at the slowest pace in a year as the energy woes, shipping disruptions and a deepening property crisis take their toll.

Rising inflation in the country is also triggering global concerns. The soaring producer inflation is “fueling upward pressure on global inflation,” considering China’s role as the world’s factory and its importance to the global supply chain, according to Ken Cheung, chief Asian foreign exchange strategist for Mizuho Bank.

«

Wonder if rising energy prices favours renewables, which have essentially no ongoing costs apart from maintenance – there’s no fuel required for solar panels or wind turbines or wave systems. But the delay from demand to installation is inevitably long (though it’s a lot quicker to install a solar farm or a wind turbine – now up to 15MW for a single tower! – than a CCGT plant.)
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International travel has reopened: here’s why you shouldn’t go right now • Frequent Business Traveler

Jonathan Spira:

»

The reopening of international borders has given rise to family reunions and the activation of long-dormant travel plans to Europe but such trips come with a fairly large caveat: “Avoid travel” recommendations from Austria to the former Yugoslavia are now in place.

“Because of the current situation,” the CDC writes on its travel-advisory website, “even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading Covid-19 variants.”

The situation that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is referring to is both dire and real: Europe is in the early stages of another major surge.

This raises the question as to whether the situation is as bad as the numbers from the World Health Organization suggest or is the CDC being a bit alarmist.

As outlined below, the numbers show that the  situation is, in fact “dire,” as noted by Landeshauptmann Thomas Stelzer of Oberösterreich, or Upper Austria.

Unlike the surge in March, when vaccination programs were still getting underway in some countries, there is no singular explanation this time around.  Countries in Central and Eastern Europe, many which were behind the Iron Curtain, a low vaccination rate is the likely cause.  Indeed, Bulgaria, Russia, and Slovenia have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the developed world.

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It’s coming to something when Frequent Business Travel(l)er is telling you not to travel.
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No time to die: an in-depth analysis of James Bond’s exposure to infectious agents • ScienceDirect

Graumans, Stone and Bousema (in the Netherlands and UK):

»

Global travelers, whether tourists or secret agents, are exposed to a smörgåsbord of infectious agents. We hypothesized that agents pre-occupied with espionage and counterterrorism may, at their peril, fail to correctly prioritize travel medicine. To examine our hypothesis, we examined adherence to international travel advice during the 86 international journeys that James Bond was observed to undertake in feature films spanning 1962–2021.

Scrutinizing these missions involved ∼3113 min of evening hours per author that could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues. We uncovered above-average sexual activity, often without sufficient time for an exchange of sexual history, with a remarkably high mortality among Bond’s sexual partners (27.1; 95% confidence interval 16.4–40.3). Given how inopportune a bout of diarrhea would be in the midst of world-saving action, it is striking that Bond is seen washing his hands on only two occasions, despite numerous exposures to foodborne pathogens. We hypothesize that his foolhardy courage, sometimes purposefully eliciting life-threatening situations, might even be a consequence of Toxoplasmosis.

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“Do you expect me to talk?”

“No, Mr Bond, I expect you to wash your hands!”

Also worth pointing out that he’s exposed to lots of other pathogens (well, poisons) via enemies, including digitalis in Casino Royale and something undisclosed in You Only Live Twice (which kills his bedmate instead). And surely it would be Blofeld who’d be at risk of toxoplasmosis? (Thanks G for the link.)
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A good newsletter exit strategy is hard to find • Vanity Fair

Delia Cai:

»

or anyone looking to get out of the game without an Atlantic–sized landing pad—or who hasn’t quite budgeted for the possibility of issuing subscription refunds—the cost of quitting might well be prohibitive. Casey Lewis, who writes the youth culture newsletter “After School,” told me she once looked into putting her paid newsletter on hold during a bout of freelance busyness and calculated the potential amount she’d refund. “You’re talking about $5,000 to $7,000, and you’re talking about writers who are living paycheck to paycheck,” she told me. “I ended up talking myself off that cliff.”

…In my view—both meta and biased as it will be for a former Substack poster child who never actually dabbled in matters of paid subscription herself—the cleanest newsletter exit by far is the one executed by Nick Quah, who sold his podcast trade newsletter “Hot Pod” to The Verge this summer and joined the Vox Mediaverse himself as Vulture’s podcast critic. (Disclosure: Warzel, Quah, and I were part of the Sidechannel newsletter Discord together.) Quah got the best of both worlds: the big full-time media job and the ability to see his newsletter brand live on—without any of the messy business of having to issue prorated refunds, as Warzel did, because The Verge simply took the “Hot Pod” subscription over (they did not have an existing paid product to merge it with).

When I called Quah up to ask how, exactly, he figured out how to get off the newsletter ride, Quah laughed and told me, “it’s harder to stay on.” Early this year, he’d been writing “Hot Pod” for almost seven years and felt incredibly burned out.

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Speaking as a journalist who was each day having to write rather more than just a daily newsletter (The Overspill’s Start Up predecessor Boot Up, at The Guardian, was one of just multiple things I was writing each day), I do understand how one can get burnt out by the relentless demand for moarcontentcontentcontent. There’s an inevitable cyclicality to this: people move away from “jobs” to be independent, then move back. It helps having an organisation behind you – as Charlie Warzel’s move away from the New York Times to Substack and now on board The Atlantic, mentioned in this piece, shows.
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Fifty per cent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia. Here’s why • Rest of World

Vittoria Elliott and Bopha Phorn:

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In 2018, the team at Facebook had a puzzle on their hands. Cambodian users accounted for nearly 50% of all global traffic for Messenger’s voice function, but no one at the company knew why, according to documents released by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

One employee suggested running a survey, according to internal documents viewed by Rest of World. Did it have to do with low literacy levels? they wondered. In 2020, a Facebook study attempted to ask users in countries with high audio use, but was only able to find a single Cambodian respondent, the same documents showed. The mystery, it seemed, stayed unsolved.

The answer, surprisingly, has less to do with Facebook, and more to do with the complexity of the Khmer language, and the way users adapt for a technology that was never designed with them in mind.

In Cambodia, everyone from tuk-tuk drivers to Prime Minister Hun Sen prefers to send voice notes instead of messages. Facebook’s study revealed that it wasn’t just Cambodians who favor voice messages — though nowhere else was it more popular. In the study, which included 30 users from the Dominican Republic, Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast, and that single Cambodian, 87% of respondents said that they used voice tools to send notes in a different language from the one set on their apps. This was true on WhatsApp — the most popular platform among the survey respondents — along with Messenger and Telegram. 

One of the most common reasons? Typing was just too hard.

In Cambodia’s case, there has never been an easy way to type in Khmer. While Khmer Unicode was standardized fairly early, between 2006 and 2008, the keyboard itself lagged behind. The developers of the first Khmer computer keyboard had to accommodate the language’s 74 characters, the most of any script in the world.

«

This is also common in India, where illiteracy rates have long meant that people used Google (and YouTube) voice search rather than typing. It’s an idea that frequently astonishes people in San Francisco.
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Want to understand more about Facebook (and other social networks’) role in developing countries? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Apple silicon roadmap reveals plans for Mac Pro, MacBook Air • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

»

Apple has already finalised the second generation of Mac processors, and the third generation is expected to be made with a new 3-nanometer process, according to a report in The Information citing people with direct knowledge of the plans.

The report says that the second-generation chips will use an “upgraded version” of the 5-nanometer process used for the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max found in recent Apple Silicon Macs. But unlike those first-generation chips, some of the second-generation chips will have two dies instead of one, allowing for more processor cores.

A second-generation chip with just one die will be included in the long-rumored, redesigned MacBook Air as well as in iPads. That chip is code-named Staten. On the other hand, the MacBook Pro will feature more powerful second-generation chips code-named Rhodes. The second-generation chips have already been finalized and are ready to enter trial production, according to The Information’s sources.

But the sources also say we haven’t seen the end of the first generation. The next Mac Pro’s processor would be part of the generation that began with the M1. Code-named Jade, it will be based on the high-end MacBook Pro’s M1 Max, but it will have two dies instead of one.

«

It’s hardly unexpected that Apple has finalised the design; the surprise would be if it hadn’t.

The revised Mac Pro will be a beast, though it’s still an open question whether it will allow external GPUs.

Separately, we used to await updates to Macs based on Intel’s, and before that IBM/PowerPC’s (quite public) chip cycles. For the first time in more than 30 years we have zero visibility, apart from these reports, about where we are in Apple’s chip update cycle.
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Apple’s new Digital Legacy feature lets you choose who gets your iCloud data • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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Apple is solving a complicated problem with its latest iOS update: right of survivorship. Until now, when a loved one or family member dies, there was no easy way to access their iCloud account and absolutely no way of unlocking their phone without knowing their passcode. According to the iCloud terms of service, the deceased person’s data goes with them even with a death certificate.

With the new Digital Legacy program, first announced at WWDC earlier this year and arriving in iOS 15.2, you can designate up to five people as Legacy Contacts. These individuals can then access your data and personal information stored in iCloud when you die, such as photos, documents, and even purchases.

To activate Digital Legacy, Apple still requires proof of death and an access key. Still, it’s a much more simplified process than before, which could require a court order confirming a right to inheritance, and even then, there was no guarantee you would get access to the data.

This has been a complicated situation for Apple, which has long touted its core principles of protecting users’ privacy. Grieving parents and spouses railing against the company for not giving them access to their spouses’ photos isn’t a good look. But neither is doling out people’s data willy-nilly.

Both Google and Facebook have systems in place for designating account access to other people, and it’s good to see Apple catching up here.

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The next problem they’ll have to grapple with (right?) is what happens if the person who died was the administrator of the Family account which gave everyone their Apple Music, Apple TV+, shared iCloud storage, etc? Can that be transferred?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if Facebook is really more like a zillion channels, almost all of which have nothing on? CC-licensed photo by Kevin Dooley on Flickr.

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

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

Algorithmic tracking is ‘damaging mental health’ of UK workers • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

An “accountability for algorithms act’” would ensure that companies evaluate the effect of performance-driven regimes such as queue monitoring in supermarkets or deliveries-per-hour guidelines for delivery drivers, said the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on the future of work.

“Pervasive monitoring and target-setting technologies, in particular, are associated with pronounced negative impacts on mental and physical wellbeing as workers experience the extreme pressure of constant, real-time micro-management and automated assessment,” said the APPG members in their report, the New Frontier: Artificial Intelligence at Work.

The report recommends bringing in a new algorithms act, which it says would establish “a clear direction to ensure AI puts people first”. It warns that “use of algorithmic surveillance, management and monitoring technologies that undertake new advisory functions, as well as traditional ones, has significantly increased during the pandemic”.

Under the act workers would be given the right to be involved in the design and use of algorithm-driven systems, where computers make and execute decisions about fundamental aspects of someone’s work – including in some cases allocation of shifts and pay, or whether they get a job in the first place.

The report also recommended that corporations and public sector employers fill out algorithmic impact assessments, aimed at ironing out any problems caused by the systems, and expanding the new umbrella body for digital regulation, the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum, to introduce certification and guidance for use of AI and algorithms at work.

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Helen Lewis also did an excellent radio programme (free to listen) about this in February 2019. The topic of people essentially being ruled by an algorithm is quite weird.
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As the UK nears elimination of cervical cancer, the US isn’t close • STAT

Angus Chen:

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[Peter] Sasieni and his colleagues [at King’s College London] compared women in the UK who were offered the vaccine in school as teens and preteens against slightly older women who were not offered the shot, all under the age of 30.

The team found that women who were offered the vaccine at ages 12 to 13 had an 87% lower risk of cervical cancer than those who were not offered the vaccine at the same age. Their risk of an abnormal Pap smear, a screening test that detects signs of potential cervical cancer, was lower by 97%. That means, Sasieni said, cervical cancer “becomes a very rare cancer, instead of what was one of the most common cancers in young women.”

Based on their findings, Sasieni extrapolated that the vaccination will drive cervical cancer cases down to 50 per year among women under 30 in the U.K. from more than 400 per year before HPV vaccination.

In the US, the HPV vaccine has not had such success. Instead, it’s had to slog through a quagmire of social and economic objections since the day it was approved. Some pointed out that the shot was just plain expensive, making it hard for states to justify school vaccine mandates, but the greatest opposition to the vaccine has come because it became entwined with the subject of teen sex. Some advocacy groups opposed mandating HPV vaccines since HPV can be transmitted sexually, arguing instead that public health efforts be focused on keeping kids from having sex.

“I think the biggest mistake was the way this vaccine was introduced into this country,” Kempe said. “There was a lot of discussion about sexual activity. The focus was on sexual activity and getting it into early adolescents before sexual activity. That was a big mistake. Parents got concerned that this meant their child was sexually active or it would trigger sexual activity.”

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Good old America – it would be free for children, but pricey ($360) for older women. And of course it got tied up in sex.
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How SARS-CoV-2 in white-tailed deer could alter the course of the pandemic • NPR

Michaeleen Doucleff:

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veterinarians at Pennsylvania State University have found active SARS-CoV-2 infections in at least 30% of deer tested across Iowa during 2020. Their study, published online last week, suggests that white-tailed deer could become what’s known as a reservoir for SARS-CoV-2. That is, the animals could carry the virus indefinitely and spread it back to humans periodically.

If that’s the case, it would essentially dash any hopes of eliminating or eradicating the virus in the U.S. — and therefore in the world — says veterinary virologist Suresh Kuchipudi at Penn State, who co-led the study.

“If the virus has opportunities to find an alternate host besides humans, which we would call a reservoir, that will create a safe haven where the virus can continue to circulate even if the entire human population becomes immune,” he says. “And so it becomes more and more complicated to manage or even eradicate the virus.”

In the study, Kuchipudi and his colleagues looked for the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the lymph nodes of nearly 300 white-tailed deer, including more than 100 wild deer. “So these deer were either roadkill or free-living deer that hunters had killed [to eat],” says veterinary microbiologist Vivek Kapur at Penn State, who also co-led the study.

What they found left Kapur and Kuchipudi dumbfounded. “It was actually quite stunning to us,” Kapur says. “We were very surprised to see such a high number of positive samples.”

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See also: mink. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Facebook’s vast wasteland: infinite channels and nothing on • Galaxy Brain

Charlie Warzel, newly installed at The Atlantic which is hosting his newsletter:

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Some of the top links [on Facebook] make sense to me (a recipes website, vaccines.gov, one link with 35.8 million views that Facebook won’t show, because “This link was removed by Facebook for violating Community Standards”). But most of the links just lead to spammy, clickbait-y content.

Many of the pages seem to simply repost screen-grabbed photos of recycled memes (a tactic that’s very popular among local-radio-station Facebook pages). The most popular pages include celebrity-gossip sites (People), various cooking blogs, mom-focused content, the Australian branch of the popular viral dude-content site LADbible, and, of course, the Falun Gong–backed newspaper The Epoch Times, which doubled down on publishing right-wing misinformation during the Trump era. The most popular individual posts are almost all text cards with prompt questions like “Who can honestly say they never had a DUI? I’ll wait.” (94.3 million views) and “Name something that a lot of people like, but you can’t stand?” (82.4 million views).

Clicking through these pages can feel like flipping through the channels during a programming dead zone. Some posts are truly vapid, recycled, or low budget, like the 2 a.m. channel scroll. Other posts approximate the feel of listless daytime channel surfing: lots of time killers and “on in the background” content sandwiched between melodrama.

Importantly, lots of this content is not offensive in any way. There’s some worrying misinformation and propaganda in Facebook’s list; there are also some legitimately helpful resource pages, too. But the bulk seems to be this quickly published, clickbait-y grist for the viral Facebook mills. It’s not quite spam, because people engage with it, but it is created and published much like spam by content merchants who throw as much shit at the wall as possible to see what sticks.

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The question we’ve stopped asking about teenagers and social media • The New Yorker

Cal Newport:

»

For a particularly dispiriting case study of how long it sometimes takes to establish definitive causation between behaviors and negative outcomes, consider the effort involved in connecting smoking to lung cancer. The first major study showing a statistical correlation between cigarettes and cancer, authored by Herbert Lombard and Carl Doering of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Harvard School of Public Health, was published in 1928.

I recently came across an article in the archives of The Atlantic from 1956—nearly thirty years later—in which the author was still trying to convince skeptics who were unhappy with the types of confounding factors that are unavoidable in scientific studies. “If it has not been proved that tobacco is guilty of causing cancer of the lung,” the article pleads, “it has certainly been shown to have been on the scene of the crime.”

So where does this leave us? If the science is not yet ready to give us a definitive answer about the impact of social media on teen-agers, then Amy Orben is right when she notes that, in her role as a scientist, she can’t tell you what to do with your kids. But this isn’t an issue that we need to fully defer to science. Unlike with the hard-to-detect development of lung-cancer cells, when it comes to the well-being of teen-agers, we can, as parents or educators, often clearly observe what seems to make a difference.

Even more directly, we can ask the teen-agers themselves. As Adam Alter noted, it doesn’t take much time chatting about social media with these groups before alarms begin to ring. In other words, you don’t need a specification-curve analysis to uncover the potential negative impacts of Instagram—just ask any teen-age girl.

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It’s not just Facebook; all the social networks manipulate us. Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find out more.

Did Google’s victory in £3bn landmark Supreme Court case backfire? • Daily Mail (via MSN)

Mark Duell:

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Google’s argument over third party cookies which it used to win its Supreme Court case contradicts another ongoing case on its ‘Privacy Sandbox’, it was alleged today.

An alliance of tech businesses, advertisers and publishers known as ‘Movement for an Open Web’ has claimed that Google said in the first case that third party cookies were no threat to privacy – but, in the second case, it says they are.

It comes after the UK’s highest court yesterday blocked a £3bn lawsuit against the US tech firm over claims it secretly tracked millions of iPhone users’ web activity. 

If the case had been successful, more than four million Britons would have received damages of up to £750 each for alleged breaches of the Data Protection Act. But the Supreme Court ruled former Which? director Richard Lloyd had failed to prove that ‘material damage or distress’ had been caused to individuals as a result. 

Now, Movement for an Open Web. also known as MOW, has claimed yesterday’s outcome at the Supreme Court was ‘not quite the triumph Google might claim’. It said the court held that a mere collection of data is not an invasion of privacy – so the mass claim could not proceed, in a finding that might look to benefit Google.

However, in reaching its decision, the UK’s highest court found Mr Lloyd had failed to prove an infringement of privacy law arising from the mere collection of data. And a MOW spokesman said today: ‘Put simply – it wasn’t clear that the setting of third-party cookies by Google involved any invasion of privacy contrary to law.’

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This is the text of the Supreme Court decision, which – if I read it right – boils down to two problems: the Data Protection Act doesn’t offer damages for the correct use of data (and the argument with Google was over how it got the data, not what it did afterwards); and it wasn’t feasible to estimate the damages suffered by users because they varied so widely, meaning a class-action lawsuit (or UK equivalent) couldn’t succeed.
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The republic of the metaverse • The Pull Request

Antonio García Martínez:

»

If you’re wondering why someone like Zuckerberg with such immense resources (including an estate on paradisiacal Kauaʻi) wants to blot out reality with a VR headset, then you need to understand the techie mindset. As one notable VC un-ironically told me in private: anything worth doing, can be done better via a screen. His (very successful) investment portfolio and lifestyle both reflect that view; while he himself still convenes in-person dinners, those ‘IRL’ events are now a luxury add-on (and reflection of) digital life rather than vice versa. He and others like him invest vast sums in people they’ve never physically met. The resulting companies have workforces who spend all day looking at each other via endless Zoom calls, but who never or rarely meet (I know, I’ve worked in them). The techies prefer intermediating reality and people via pixels and algorithms, and they’ve created the conditions such that the world meets them on their terms.

Not that we were very hard to convince.

While I find myself a bit skeptical of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse plan—virtual reality has been the perpetual technology of the future for longer than I can remember, and Facebook has gone a long time without a homespun product hit—the little ‘m’ metaverse is already here and firmly in place.

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He also wrote an interesting thread on the topic, which in some ways is better.
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Researchers wait 12 months to report vulnerability with 9.8 out of 10 severity rating • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

About 10,000 enterprise servers running Palo Alto Networks’ GlobalProtect VPN are vulnerable to a just-patched buffer overflow bug with a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10.

Security firm Randori said on Wednesday that it discovered the vulnerability 12 months ago and for most of the time since has been privately using it in its red team products, which help customers test their network defenses against real-world threats. The norm among security professionals is for researchers to privately report high-severity vulnerabilities to vendors as soon as possible rather than hoarding them in secret.

CVE-2021-3064, as the vulnerability is tracked, is a buffer overflow flaw that occurs when parsing user-supplied input in a fixed-length location on the stack. A proof-of-concept exploit Randori researchers developed demonstrates the considerable damage that can result.

“Our team was able to gain a shell on the affected target, access sensitive configuration data, extract credentials, and more,” researchers from Randori wrote on Wednesday. “Once an attacker has control over the firewall, they will have visibility into the internal network and can proceed to move laterally.”

Over the past few years, hackers have actively exploited vulnerabilities in a raft of enterprise firewalls and VPNs from the likes of Citrix, Microsoft, and Fortinet, government agencies warned earlier this year. Similar enterprise products, including those from Pulse Secure and Sonic Wall, have also come under attack. Now, Palo Alto Networks’ GlobalProtect may be poised to join the list.

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The Twitter response to Randori was that it had done a Very Bad Thing not alerting everyone to this, and using the zero-day in its red team (permitted attack on clients) exercises. The CEO’s point was: zero-days exist, and so you need to be able to protect your organisation against them. So how well did these organisations they were red-teaming against cope? Put like that, it’s a bit more justifiable – realistic even.
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Thanks for the bitcoin! How does it work? • The New Yorker

Ben McGrath:

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Anthony Di Iorio, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, is a Toronto native, and, as it happens, is in the midst of a transition toward philanthropic endeavors that extend to combatting misinformation and other problems engendered by faulty business models. “We need media that is trustworthy,” he said. “Ninety-nine% of the stuff I’m reading? Grain of salt.” He dispatched some associates to help set the Phoenix up with a so-called cold wallet and later joined Bidini and his top editors for a Google Hangouts session to “whiteboard” strategies for growth, using a model that he calls his “perfect formula.”

They made at first for an awkward party, the cryptocurrency guru and the ink-stained journalists. Di Iorio sat in a futuristic white swivel chair with a couple of talismans hanging from chains around his neck, one of them given to him by the organizers of Burning Man and the other by a Costa Rican shaman. (“It stands for protection,” he said.) Between bites of salad, he spoke of scalability, disruption, utilization, stakeholders, and the importance of “empowering people to be in control of their digital lives.” Bidini, who likes to joke about his unfamiliarity with smartphone features, sat on a couch with his wife, Janet Morassutti (the managing editor and a co-founder of the paper), and their snoozing rescue dog, Sandy. He interrupted Di Iorio at one point to ask, “Can you just define what a stakeholder is?” He reverted to a music analogy to articulate his concerns about selling out. “I always use R.E.M. as an example. How do they go from ‘Murmur’ to ‘Losing My Religion,’ and they continue to be R.E.M.? They navigated it so beautifully.”

The Phoenix staff may have been short on data, but they were long on hunches—about, for instance, the efficacy of hot-pink lawn signs (“I Read the West End Phoenix”) in disseminating the word, compared with ads they were placing on the boards of local ice rinks, say, and with social media, where engagement was measurable but potentially in conflict with their ethos.

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A lovely little story of worlds colliding.
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Google caught hackers using a Mac zero-day against Hong Kong users • Vice

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

Google researchers caught hackers targeting users in Hong Kong exploiting what were at the time unknown vulnerabilities in Apple’s Mac operating system. According to the researchers, the attacks have the hallmarks of government-backed hackers. 

On Thursday, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), the company’s elite team of hacker hunters, published a report detailing the hacking campaign. The researchers didn’t go as far as pointing the finger at a specific hacking group or country, but they said it was “a well resourced group, likely state backed.” 

“We do not have enough technical evidence to provide attribution and we do not speculate about attribution,” the head of TAG Shane Huntley told Motherboard in an email. “However, the nature of the activity and targeting is consistent with a government backed actor.”

Erye Hernandez, the Google researcher who found the hacking campaign and authored the report, wrote that TAG discovered the campaign in late August of this year. The hackers had set up a watering hole attack, meaning they hid malware within the legitimate websites of “a media outlet and a prominent pro-democracy labor and political group” in Hong Kong. Users who visited those websites would get hacked with an unknown vulnerability—in other words, a zero-day—and another exploit that took advantage of a previously patched vulnerability for MacOS that was used to install a backdoor on their computers, according to Hernandez. 

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There was also an iOS exploit, but they couldn’t recover it. Not hard to guess which government would be behind this.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might think that Assassin’s Creed is just another video game, but Ubisoft took a lot of trouble to create historically accurate locations. Why? CC-licensed photo by cea + on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not part of a COP26 communique. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook allows stolen content to flourish, its researchers warned • WSJ

Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz:

»

Facebook has allowed plagiarized and recycled content to flourish on its platform despite having policies against it, the tech giant’s researchers warned in internal memos.

About 40% of the traffic to Facebook pages at one point in 2018 went to pages that stole or repurposed most of their content, according to a research report that year by Facebook senior data scientist Jeff Allen, one of a dozen internal communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Pages are used by businesses and organizations to disseminate content on Facebook, while individual users put content on what Facebook calls “profiles.”

The researchers also wrote Facebook has been slow to crack down on copyright infringement for fear of opening itself to legal liability.

“What’s the easiest (lowest effort) way to make a big Facebook Page?” Mr. Allen wrote in an internal slide presentation the following year. “Step 1: Find an existing, engaged community on [Facebook]. Step 2: Scrape/Aggregate content popular in that community. Step 3: Repost most popular content on your Page.”

Mr. Allen, who left Facebook in late 2019, wrote that Facebook pages seeking big followings simply had to ask one question of the content they were considering recirculating: “Has it gone viral in the past?”

Posting unoriginal content continues to be a formula for success on Facebook, according to data the company has released this year on the platform’s most popular posts.

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There was a thread to this effect on Twitter a few months ago, though I don’t think it was from Allen. This is a big problem, though. Facebook used to worry (maybe still does; maybe always does) that people weren’t interacting enough with the site – not posting enough updates, not Liking enough stuff, not commenting enough. Viewed through that lens, why would it be worried if people recycle content? That’s going to be Fine, Great, Keep Doing That.
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Instagram tests ‘Take a Break’ reminders on an opt-in basis • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today the company has begun testing a new feature this week called “Take a Break,” which will allow users to remind themselves to take a break from using the app after either 10, 20 or 30 minutes, depending on their preferences. As an opt-in feature, however, the reminders may have a limited impact, as users would have to be motivated to set up the new control for themselves.

The company had previously said it was looking into “Take a Break” reminders. Mosseri, for instance, mentioned the coming addition when commenting on Instagram’s plans to pause its plans to build a version of its service for younger users, Instagram for Kids. He referenced Instagram’s plans to build in “nudges” and “reminders,” like “Take a Break,” as an example of how Instagram was addressing issues related to its product’s impact on users’ mental health.

Meta’s (previously, Facebook’s) Global Head of Security Antigone Davis also referenced Instagram’s  “Take a Break” reminders when the company was grilled in a Senate hearing over teen mental health back in September. He said the idea with the feature was to encourage users to stop looking at the app after they had been browsing for too long, and cited it as one of the many ways the company was working to improve the experiences of young people using its platform.

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Another interesting move from a social network. (Instagram previously instituted a “You’re all caught up” element when you’d seen all the new posts. But, leopards qua spots, it then instituted a “suggested follows” feature into which you were automatically opted.
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YouTube is making dislike counts private for everyone • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

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YouTube has announced that it’ll be hiding public dislike counts on videos across its site, starting today. The company says the change is to keep smaller creators from being targeted by dislike attacks or harassment, and to promote “respectful interactions between viewers and creators.” The dislike button will still be there, but it’ll be for private feedback, rather than public shaming.

This move isn’t out of the blue. In March, YouTube announced that it was experimenting with hiding the public dislike numbers, and individual creators have long had the ability to hide ratings on their videos. But the fact that the dislike counts will be disappearing for everyone (gradually, according to YouTube) is a big deal — viewers are used to being able to see the like-to-dislike ratio as soon as they click on a video and may use that number to decide whether to continue watching. Now, that will no longer be an option, but it could close off a vector for harassment.

YouTube says that when it tested hiding dislike numbers, people were less likely to use the button to attack the creator — commenting “I just came here to dislike” was seemingly less satisfying when you don’t actually get to see the number go up.

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Fascinating move, taking the heat out of social networks (which YouTube is, effectively, in a way that Reddit isn’t: YouTube recommends both content and users to follow).
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Where would we be without social networks? Possibly somewhere better. To understand what they’re doing to us, read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

It’s time for some game theory • Lapham’s Quarterly

Caroline Wazer:

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Does Assassin’s Creed actually have an impact on how young people understand history? One illuminating attempt to answer this question appeared in the journal Theory and Research in Social Education in 2019. Lisa Gilbert, a lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis, conducted qualitative interviews in which she asked fourteen teenage boys who had played at least one Assassin’s Creed game to explain how, if at all, the series had influenced their understanding of history.

Most of the boys Gilbert interviewed reported having a low or moderate preexisting interest in history. Many said that they didn’t think the game had measurably influenced their social studies grades or even taught them historical information, which they largely equated with the rote memorisation of dates and names. They also seemed to understand quite well that AC is a work of fiction, not fact. Gilbert describes one hesitating when asked to categorise ACIII characters as “historical” or “fictional”—the game’s George Washington, he made sure she knew he understood, was both at once.

What the boys did nearly unanimously report to Gilbert is that Assassin’s Creed had made them feel more emotionally connected to the past. “It’s not like you’re learning about history” from playing the games, one explained. “You’re experiencing it.” As another put it, “Assassin’s Creed reminds us that history is more than just words on a page. History is human experience.” An interviewee named Henry told Gilbert about the powerful emotional reaction he experienced after playing through ACIII’s portrayal of the Boston Massacre and realising, for the first time, how frightened participants in the actual event would have been: “That was a terror not like anything I had ever read. But I felt that.”

…According to Maxime Durand, the lead historian on the games, Ubisoft considered adding the Discovery Tour mode [which removes the game characters, leaving just the location] for almost a decade before they finally did so. With Origins’ re-creation of first-century-bc Egypt “we had this fantastic setting,” Durand told the Guardian of the decision to release the mode in 2018, but “we also have the legitimacy to do it now, after all these games showing that we treat history with respect.”

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A very deep dive that suggests games can subliminally make a difference here too.
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Visualised: cars created by tech giants

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Using genuine patents filed by Apple Inc., we’ve created a vision of the anticipated Apple Car and how it might look on launch. Click below to explore the car inside and out, with details on the real-life patents that went into the concept.

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I yelped with laughter at this. It’s the ugliest thing you could imagine; worth looking at just for the feeling of “this is how you wouldn’t do it”. There’s also an “interior” view. If this were in any way true, nobody at Tesla would lose a moment’s sleep. However, Apple has recently hired a Tesla engineer, so there might be something to think about.
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EU wins €2.4bn Google Shopping case • Financial Times

Javier Espinova:

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Google has lost its appeal against a €2.42bn EU competition fine over its Shopping service, in a ruling that is likely to re-energise antitrust investigators looking at how Big Tech promotes its own businesses.

The General Court of Luxembourg ruled on Wednesday that Google favours “its own comparison shopping service over competing services” in its search results, rather than delivering the “better result”.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust chief, accused Google in 2017, after a seven-year investigation, of abusing its market power to give an “illegal advantage” to another arm of its business. Some price comparison websites have gone bust since Google engaged in this behaviour.

Shivaun Raff, co-founder of Foundem, a now defunct shopping comparison website that was an original plaintiff in the EU’s investigation, said: “While we welcome today’s judgment, it does not undo the considerable consumer and anti-competitive harm caused by more than a decade of Google’s insidious search manipulation practices.”

Google said the judgment on Wednesday related to a “very specific set of facts” and that it made changes in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s decision.

The ruling is likely to be appealed. But it marks the first time that a European court has ruled against Google on an antitrust case.

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As Raff points out, this case is ancient. She and her partner at Foundem filed their complaint in 2010 – and that was over behaviour by Google in 2009, favouring its own shopping search results and downgrading other shopping sites. The “solution” isn’t a solution; it makes them pay for positions they used to get for free in organic links.

That doesn’t however mean that the pattern of behaviour is gone. As we’ve seen in the stories about the real reason for AMP, and the “header bidding” cheating, Google – well, some parts of Google, because it’s not one monolithic mass – doesn’t think there should be any room for rivals, and will use its position to solidify that.
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iPhone apps can tell many things about you through the accelerometer • Mysk

Tommy Mysk:

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Accelerometer measurements are collected all the time while you are holding your phone. iOS makes the measurements accessible to the app that is active in the foreground. The app may choose to ignore the measurements or read them. There’re no boundaries for what an app can do with the measurements, but here are some spooky scenarios:

Motion and Activities
Accelerometer data reflects how you hold your phone and how you move. An app can tell if you are using it while lying, sitting, walking, or cycling. The app can also count your steps. Although access to the pedometer on the iPhone is protected by a system permission, there are many sophisticated algorithms that process accelerometer data to achieve exactly that.

It is worth mentioning that the iPhone is also equipped with a barometer, a sensor that measures air pressure and altitude. The barometer is also part of the Core Motion Framework and no permission is required to access it. As a result, any app can figure out your altitude and measure air pressure in your environment. Thus, any app can tell if you are riding on a bus, train, or plane while using it.

Heart Rate
The accelerometer can detect the slight movements of your hand and body while holding the phone. Researchers can use this data to estimate your heart rate. Thus, an app can potentially know your heart rate while you are using it.

Breathing Rate
Similarly to heart rate, researchers can use accelerometer data to estimate your breathing rate, and even diagnose certain diseases.

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And lots more. Plus apps don’t need permission to access the accelerometer/barometer combo.
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‘Politics-as-sports’: why it matters • Breaking the News

James Fallows is editor of The Atlantic, but also wrote a book called “Breaking the News” 25 years ago. Now he’s pointing to the way that US papers’ love of the horse-race of politics, not the distance covered, undermines understanding:

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A major Democratic-backed bill passed with bipartisan support, and the nation’s leading newspaper framed it as a scramble backward for “Democrats.”

The roughly 40 paragraphs of the story that followed, from the front page to a long inside jump, were strictly about the politics, deal-making, factional maneuvers, and polling implications of the bill. The story’s only glancing mention of its contents was as follows:

“Passage of the infrastructure legislation would be a much-needed and long-delayed victory for Mr. Biden—and a welcome break for Democrats, who could spend next week’s Veterans Day break traveling to their districts to show off the roads, bridges, tunnels, transit lines and airports due for a huge infusion of federal support.”

That is: roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and so forth were significant mainly as near-term talking points. This would be the appropriate framing if you were a pollster or a Congressional staffer. Less so for anyone else.

A few hours later, the Times’s revised online version of the story had added some mentions of the bill’s contents. Which means, interestingly: under the previous night’s intense deadline pressure to make the print edition, the aspect the paper chose to stress was the how of party politics. When it had time later on, it got around to the what.

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The problem is less bad in the UK, partly because the political process is a lot less impotent. The US has so many checks and balances it can’t do anything effective.

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Updating The Verge’s “on background” policy • The Verge

Nilay Patel is editor in chief of The Verge:

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big tech companies in particular have hired a dizzying array of communications staff who routinely push the boundaries of acceptable sourcing in an effort to deflect accountability, pass the burden of truth to the media, and generally control the narratives around the companies they work for while being annoying as hell to deal with.

The main way this happens is that big companies take advantage of a particular agreement in the media called “background.” Being “on background” means that they tell things to reporters, but those reporters agree to not specifically attribute that information to a person by name. Oftentimes, companies will make things significantly worse and also insist that background information be paraphrased, further obscuring both specific details and the source of those details.

There are many reasons a reporter might agree to learning information on background, but importantly, being on background is supposed to be an agreement.

But the trend with big tech companies now is to increasingly treat background as a default or even a condition of reporting. That means reporters are now routinely asked to report things without being able to attribute them appropriately, and readers aren’t being presented with clear sources of information.

This all certainly feeds into the overall distrust of the media, which has dire consequences in our current information landscape, but in practice, it is also hilariously stupid.

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I’ve experienced this a lot, and it swept in from American tech companies. I didn’t come across it until some time in the mid-2000s, I think. A spokesperson will say they’re telling you something “on background”, which means journalists have to write things as though they magically know (bland, corporate) inside information. It’s a terrible system, and it’s good that The Verge is acting. Others will surely follow.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: 1) I’ll link to the US-China announcement from COP26 in tomorrow’s edition, when there has been time for some analysis of what it actually contains.
2) Retracted articles still stay online; they just get a big watermark all over them. So you can still read the now-zapped “Air dust pollution and online music teaching effect based on heterogeneous wireless network”. (Thanks Michael Stoner.)

The phone charger maker Anker has seen sales jump since Apple and Samsung stopped including chargers in the box with new phones. What are people doing with the old ones? CC-licensed photo by Nenad Stojkovic on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not guest edited. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hostage-style bitcoin scam videos are spreading across Instagram • Vice

Joseph Cox:

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Hackers are forcing Instagram users to film hostage-style videos instructing their followers to participate in fraudulent get-rich-quick Bitcoin schemes as part of a new kind of scam that’s spreading across the Facebook-owned app.

The news follows Motherboard reporting last week on how a scammer forced one victim to film a video with the promise of getting their money back after sending the fraudster Bitcoin. After filming the video, however, the scammer broke into the victim’s Instagram account and sent the video to their friends and posted it from their profile to try and scam others. After we published the story, more Instagram users got in touch with Motherboard saying they’ve been hacked and forced to shoot similar videos, indicating the issue appears to be more widespread on the social network with victims describing personal, professional, reputational, and financial damage. Multiple victims also complained about the troublesome Instagram account recovery process and the lack of direct communication from the company.

“Hey you guys, I just got back from a long day of work, but Ashly just helped me invest $1,000 and got me back $8,500,” Emma Zoller, who was forced to make one of the clips, says to the camera during her video. “What an amazing way to end the day, and I feel so blessed and appreciative for this process. It’s guaranteed. I suggest doing it.”

But Ashly is a fraudster. The scam started when Zoller saw her best friend post about making money from Bitcoin in an Instagram Story, according to a chronology of the events written and shared by Zoller’s mother with Motherboard. Zoller clicked a link the friend’s account sent her, and a hacker took over her account. The link appears to spoof a legitimate Instagram page.

Initially, the hacker demanded that Zoller send them a nude video to regain access to the account.

“I am bawling my eyes out. I can’t take a nude video,” Zoller wrote to the Ashly account. “I am going to kill myself, please you stole everything from me. Please give me my Instagram back please.”

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Turn on two-factor authentication, and get your family and friends to as well. Wonder if Instagram will actually figure this out and stop the videos spreading.
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Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published • Nature

Holly Else:

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Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers.

Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal. The retractions come after the publishers each issued expressions of concern earlier this year, covering hundreds of articles.

Science-integrity experts expect that more investigations will come in the months ahead as other titles realize that they have been duped.

“It is very worrying,” says Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, who has worked to uncover nonsense science papers in special issues. He adds that it is shocking to see such papers in journals from ‘flagship’ publishers and that “it is not only predatory journals that publish bullshit”.

A Springer Nature spokesperson said that an investigation had revealed “deliberate attempts to subvert the trust-based editorial process and manipulate the publication record”. They added that they did not yet know who was responsible (Nature is editorially independent of its publisher).

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They seem to relate to “Environment and low carbon transportation” in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, for Springer (I’m now gagging to read “Air dust pollution and online music teaching effect based on heterogeneous wireless network” but it’s retracted).

Puzzle is what the people who do this are up to. Seems to be so they can raise the profile of low-impact researchers.
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Why charging phones is such a complex business, with Anker CEO • The Verge

Nilay Patel puts questions to Steven Yang, the charger company’s CEO:

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Q: Apple and Samsung do not have chargers in the box anymore. We should talk about the international regulatory pressure to reduce e-waste, but I am curious from the nuts and bolts level: if companies are not including chargers in the box, does that result in more charger sales for Anker?

Yes — a lot more, because this is a new category. Previously, a lot of users didn’t buy a charger by itself. Per our survey, about 50% of those users still just go back to using their old chargers, because they have saved some over the years. But more and more people are starting to shop for individual chargers. Of course, a large fraction of them will go to the device brand — for example, they will go buy an Apple or Samsung charger. Still, that gives us a chance as a third-party charger brand to reach those users. It is a chance to inform them about the superiority of our charger: the small size, the high power durability, and the interoperability to charge all their devices from all the brands.

Q: This brings us back to the e-waste question: the idea was that, since consumers probably have a charger already from a previous phone, manufacturers can take the charger out of the box, reducing e-waste. But you are saying consumers are responding to these mandates by buying a lot more chargers. Do you think that the box mandates have resulted in a meaningful effect on e-waste?

First of all, when chargers aren’t in the box, that’s already a lot of savings. Let’s say that for a hundred people, we saved a hundred chargers already. Per our survey, around 50% of people will reuse their old chargers so they won’t buy any more, but there is still a fraction of users whose old chargers are slow-charging chargers.

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Who are these people who don’t reuse their old chargers? I don’t understand them. At all.
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A quarter of new Volvos are now plug-in hybrids or battery EVs • Ars Technica

Jonathan Gitlin:

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Volvo sold a total of 581,464 cars [worldwide] between January and October of this year, despite supply chain problems that have affected production. Of those cars, 148,068 [25.4%] were either plug-in hybrid or battery electric, with the vast majority (129,803) being plug-in hybrid versions of the 60 series and 90 series vehicles.

With only two battery-electric Volvos on sale (the XC40 Recharge and C40 Recharge), it’s not surprising that BEVs made up a smaller percentage at just 3.1%, or 18,261 cars in total.

Here in the US, the automaker sold 104,066 vehicles, of which 12,906 were plug-in hybrids and another 5,225 were fully electric.

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So about 17% were hybrid or electric in the US. Tesla’s total world sales for the same three quarters was 627,481. It’s bigger than all of Volvo, and selling only battery electrics. Volvo’s market cap: $59.52bn. Tesla’s market cap: $1 trillion.

The market cap is the market’s estimate of the total future profits of a company before it goes phut. For Volvo, the market seems to think (based on its $5bn profit for this year) that it has another ten years to go.
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Google gives the Nest Hub another year to convince you sleep tracking’s worth paying for • Android Police

Will Sattelberg:

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More than six months after release, Google has returned to give the Nest Hub a boost for sleep tracking — along with some more details on when the feature might cost money to use.

Sleep staging is the most significant improvement here, utilizing new algorithms to help chart your progression during the night. The Nest Hub uses its Soli sensors to more accurately detect both the quality and duration of each of your stages of sleep: light, deep, REM, and awake. In the morning, you’ll receive a complete chart showing exactly when you were fully asleep, along with exact time periods for all four stages.

According to Google’s AI blog, improved training is the biggest difference between this new iteration and the original feature. Sleep tracking now predicts the user’s sleep stages rather than looking for a basic sleep-wake status. Using public data from multiple sleep studies, the company utilized more than 10,000 sessions with polysomnography data to build its new algorithm.

…When the second-gen Hub initially hit store shelves in the spring, Google made it clear that sleep tracking wouldn’t be free forever. Part of our hesitance in recommending the sleep tracking at all was the promise of a switch to a subscription model, and we’re finally learning what that might entail with this upgrade. Although Nest Hub users will be able to keep using sleep tracking for free through 2022, the feature will require a paid Fitbit Premium subscription sometime in 2023.

That plan is pretty expensive — $9.99 per month or $80 annually — especially when you consider that not every Nest Hub owner has a Fitbit.

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PSA: sleep tracking isn’t even worth zero. You can’t act on it, and can’t even be sure it’s tracking you correctly.
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Running down to zero battery breaks Google Pixel 6 fingerprint sensor • Android Authority

C. Scott Brown:

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Now that lucky buyers have had time to play with their new Pixel 6 smartphones, we’re starting to see some issues. Unfortunately, most of the issues seem to stem around the fingerprint sensor, which we noted was fairly weak in our Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro reviews.

Disappointingly, it appears there’s more bad news for the Google Pixel 6 fingerprint sensor now. According to multiple users on Reddit, a dead battery can permanently disable your phone’s fingerprint sensor.

In the thread, you can see many different people all telling the same story: their Pixel 6 died from an empty battery and, upon rebooting, the fingerprint sensor became non-operational. So far, it appears the only way to fix the problem once it occurs is a factory reset, which is not exactly convenient.

However, at least one person claims they faced the issue without losing battery power. This suggests a dead battery could be a trigger for some other issue instead of the root cause.

Thankfully, there’s already an official Google issue tracker for this problem. That tracking page has even more people discussing the issue.

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Most phone “issues” are overblown and irrelevant, but this one seems like an absolutely terrible oversight.
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Samsung develops industry’s first LPDDR5X DRAM • Samsung Global Newsroom

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Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has developed the industry’s first 14-nanometer (nm) based 16-gigabit (Gb) Low Power Double Data Rate 5X (LPDDR5X) DRAM, designed to drive further growth throughout the high-speed data service applications including 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.

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“What should the press release say to make it seem new and buzzy?”
“Metaverse, definitely.”
“Anything else?”
“5G, I guess. Oh, yes, and AI.”

Notice what it doesn’t seem to be any good for? (Hint: starts with “block”, ends with “chain”.) Thus shall you know what manufacturers consider important for their field.
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Facebook whistleblower fears the metaverse • Associated Press

Raf Casert and Kelvin Chan:

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Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen warned Tuesday that the “metaverse,” the all-encompassing virtual reality world at the heart of the social media giant’s growth strategy, will be addictive and rob people of yet more personal information while giving the embattled company another monopoly online.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Haugen said her former employer rushed to trumpet the metaverse recently because of the intense pressure it is facing after she revealed deep-seated problems at the company, in disclosures that have energized legislative and regulatory efforts around the world to crack down on Big Tech.

“If you don’t like the conversation, you try to change the conversation,” the former product-manager-turned-whistleblower said. The documents she has turned over to authorities and her testimony to lawmakers have drawn global attention for providing insight into what Facebook may have known about the damage its social media platforms can cause. She is in the midst of a series of appearances before European lawmakers and regulators who are drawing up rules for social media companies.

Meta, the new name for the parent company of Facebook, denied it was trying to divert attention away from the troubles it faces by pushing the metaverse. “This is not true. We have been working on this for a long time internally,” the company said in a statement.

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Wouldn’t doubt that the metaverse thing has been in the works for a long time, as I pointed out yesterday (Zuckerberg bought Oculus, an essential element for the metaverse, in 2014).

It would be quite the thing if Haugen turned out to be right about this, wouldn’t it.
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Social networks are everywhere. Read Social Warming, my latest book, which looks at the way they influence our lives and thinking.

Chinese military builds dummy American aircraft carrier, warships – CNN

AnneClaire Stapleton, Hannah Ritchie and Mitch McCluskey:

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China’s military has constructed mockups in the shape of a US Navy aircraft carrier and US warships, possibly for target practice, according to Maxar satellite images reviewed by the independent United States Naval Institute (USNI).

Satellite images from China’s northwest Xinjiang region appear to show a full-scale outline of a “Ford-class” aircraft carrier currently being constructed for the US Navy, and the shapes of at least two Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers at a new target range complex in the Taklamakan Desert, according to the USNI, a private, non-profit, professional military association.

The complex has repeatedly been used for ballistic missile testing, according to USNI and Maxar Technologies, a space technology company.

“This new range shows that China continues to focus on anti-carrier capabilities, with an emphasis on US Navy warships,” USNI reported.

Militaries around the world regularly build mock-ups of real-world targets such as iconic landmarks, warships, and aircraft carriers.

China’s anti-ship ballistic missile programs are overseen by the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF). CNN has reached out to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of National Defense for comment.

In a news briefing Monday, Pentagon press secretary John F. Kirby said the US Defense Department was aware of media reports about the mockups but was instead focused on its own preparedness to support a free and open Indo-Pacific region.

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Just prepping for the sea off Taiwan in a few years’ time.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: it was wrong to say that Jane Brambauer is a professor of law at the University of Arizona. Her name is Jane Bambauer. (Thanks Wendy G.)

The latest mouse patent from Microsoft shows a “bendy” design – inspired perhaps by a famous artist? CC-licensed photo by Joel Kramer 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. Don’t drop them. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The global TV streaming boom is creating a severe translator shortage • Rest of World

Andrew Deck:

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Last month, bilingual Korean-American influencer Youngmi Mayer took to TikTok and Twitter, bemoaning what she considered to be botched English subtitles on Netflix’s hit series Squid Game. She argued that important nuances had been lost in translation. Others chimed in: the French and Hindi subtitles were junk too, and the English dubbing was a joke. Although many translation professionals say that the criticism was unfair, the pile-on was picked up by major news outlets.

The controversy drew a bright spotlight onto a rarely discussed industry at the heart of major international streaming platforms: language service providers, or LSPs. These are companies that provide outsourced subtitling, captioning, and dubbing through a global network of contract subtitle translators, voice-over actors, translation editors, and sound mixers. It also underscored a looming concern for streaming services: a shortage of quality translators who can handle an increasingly global audience.

“Squid Game is another sign that there is a demand for locally produced media entertainment content above and beyond local audiences — for Korean content outside of Korea, for Mexican content outside of Mexico,” Paolo Sigismondi, a professor at the University of Southern California who researches the global entertainment industry, told Rest of World. Most of the over 111 million viewers who have now seen the gory Korean-language Netflix series watched with subtitles in one of 31 languages or via 13 dubbed versions. LSPs are critical to the distribution of that local content on a global scale. But because of a labor shortage and no viable automated solution, the translation industry is being pushed to its limits.

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Fascinating: yet another supply chain that’s disrupted. (And a great story showing how Rest Of World, founded in 2019, is hitting some really good stories that are out of view of the west.)
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Google’s new Business Profile: when search becomes a political tool • Near Media

Mike Blumenthal:

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Google recently rebranded Google My Business as “Business Profile.” They have been heavily promoting the new name and features via email to get small businesses to interact with the new search and maps interface. Clicking though I discovered Google had an additional and more nefarious use for this campaign.

I was shocked that the first call to action wasn’t an invitation to edit my listing or even an incentive to buy Google Ads. It was a call to support Google’s fight against possible antitrust regulations.

With all of the buzz around the rebranding, Google apparently couldn’t resist the opportunity, however brazen, deceptive and totally misguided, to enlist the small business community in its antitrust fights.

When clicked, the call to action takes you to a page titled: Understand the impact new legislation could have on your business. On that page Google details, in a very Meta/Facebook-like fashion, all the pain small businesses will face if the government successfully manages to put in place a regulatory framework to limit Google’s unprecedented power and reach.

First up was a call to join an email list to help with advocacy on behalf of Google. After signing up the page notes, “Together, we can help shape the policy conversation and have an impact on regulations that affect you — and your business.” I assume that is the royal we.

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Shocked, shocked, I tell you, that Google would use space on its site to push things it wants. Though as Blumenthal says:

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Clearly this “feature” is not for the betterment of the user, as Google frequently claims. It’s about bamboozling small businesses to support Google in their fight to remain a monopoly.

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Five affiliates to Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware gang unplugged • Europol

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On 4 November, Romanian authorities arrested two individuals suspected of cyber-attacks deploying the Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware. They are allegedly responsible for 5 000 infections, which in total pocketed half a million euros in ransom payments. Since February 2021, law enforcement authorities have arrested three other affiliates of Sodinokibi/REvil and two suspects connected to GandCrab.

These are some of the results of operation GoldDust, which involved 17 countries*, Europol, Eurojust and INTERPOL. All these arrests follow the joint international law enforcement efforts of identification, wiretapping and seizure of some of the infrastructure used by Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware family, which is seen as the successor of GandCrab.

Since 2019, several large international corporations have faced severe cyber-attacks, which deployed the Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware. France, Germany, Romania, Europol and Eurojust reinforced the actions against this ransomware by setting up a Joint Investigation Team in May 2021. Bitdefender, in collaboration with law enforcement, made a tool available on the No More Ransom website that would help victims of Sodinokibi/REvil restore their files and recover from attacks made before July 2021.

In the beginning of October, a Sodinokibi/REvil affiliate was arrested at the Polish border after an international arrest warrant was issued by the US. The Ukrainian national is suspected of perpetrating the Kaseya attack, which affected up to 1,500 downstream businesses and for which Sodinokibi/REvil asked a ransom of about €70m. Additionally, in February, April and October 2021 authorities in South Korea arrested three affiliates involved in the GandCrab and Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware families, which had more than 1,500 victims.

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Bit by bit, putting a squeeze on the people around the centre. REvil seems to have vanished after their servers were hacked.
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Helion secures $2.2bn to commercialize fusion energy • TechCrunch

Haje Jan Kamps:

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Helion Energy, a clean energy company committed to creating a new era of plentiful, zero-carbon electricity from fusion, today announced the close of its $500m Series E, with an additional $1.7bn of commitments tied to specific milestones.

The round was led by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator. Existing investors, including co-founder of Facebook Dustin Moskovitz, Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital and notable sustainable tech investor Capricorn Investment Group also participated in the round. The funding includes commitments of an additional $1.7bn dollars tied to Helion reaching key performance milestones. Round-leader Altman has been involved in the company as an investor and chairman since 2015.

…Helion, as a company, has been focusing less on fusion as a science experiment and more on a more important question: Can their technology generate electricity at a commercial and industrial scale?

“Some projects in the fusion space talk about heat, or energy, or other things. Helion is focused on electricity generation. Can we get it out fast, at a low cost? Can we get it to industrial-scale power?” asks David Kirtley, Helion’s co-founder and CEO. “We are building systems that are about the size of a shipping container and that can deliver industrial-scale power — say on the order of 50 megawatts of electricity.”

In June of this year, Helion published results confirming it had become the first private fusion company to heat a fusion plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius, an important milestone on the path to commercial electricity from fusion. Soon after, the company announced it had broken ground on building its factory to start the process of preparing for manufacturing of its seventh-generation fusion generator, which the company calls “Polaris.”

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“Milestone” – bingo. “Commercial” – bingo. Big temperature (but what does it mean?) – bingo. Classic fusion story.
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China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear reactors • Smallcaps

Robin Bromby:

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It is the news that the uranium players have been waiting for: a potential new, huge surge in demand that will reward mining companies ready to go into production.

China has reported overnight to be planning 150 new nuclear reactors over the next 15 years — more than have been built around the world since 1980 — a signal that uranium production needs to be stepped up, fast and soon.

In a lucky coincidence, Paladin Energy (ASX: PDN) announced Wednesday that it is making progress on restarting its Langer Heinrich uranium mine in Namibia. 

And earlier this week, advanced uranium explorer Boss Energy (ASX: BOE) said it will begin a new drilling program at its flagship Honeymoon uranium project in South Australia with the aim of building mining inventory to extend production life and achieve higher rates.

Boss has so far built its uranium resource to 71.67 million pounds.

Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Council of Turkey has approved construction of a fourth reactor at the Akkuyu nuclear power plant in Mersin Province, southeast Turkey. The unit will be built by Akkuyu Nuclear, a subsidiary of Russian nuclear engineer Rosatom, and will be the final phase of the $20 billion project. 

There are already signs of short-term uranium shortage. Kazatomprom, the state-owned uranium miner in Kazakhstan, has reduced its expected production figures for 2021, due to COVID-related and supply chain delays in exploration and development.

Last week Canada’s Cameco cut its forecast for production for the year, also citing supply chain issues.

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I’ll bet most of these get built before a single working fusion reactor comes into view. Don’t get me wrong – I’d love fusion to happen. But it seems to be one of those things that’s constantly beyond our grasp.

Also, this is the counterpoint about China building coal stations. These are all intended to replace them. China is far more aware of climate change than most countries.
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Forget bendy screens—Microsoft patents “foldable mouse” • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Foldable screens have allowed for some wacky phone and PC designs over the past few years. As bendy tech continues to trend, Microsoft wants to bring the fold to the wireless mouse. According to an international patent spotted by German tech site WindowsUnited, Microsoft is exploring the idea of a “foldable mouse.”

The patent is listed on PatentScope, a service from the World Intellection Property Organization that provides a searchable database of international patent applications. Microsoft’s patent was published on Thursday and filed in March. It describes a mouse that looks similar to today’s Microsoft Arc wireless mouse but with the ability to become flatter and easy to carry.

Here’s how Microsoft describes the peripheral:

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A foldable computer mouse is provided that includes a deformable body configurable to be formed into a first expanded configuration usable for receiving inputs for controlling a computing device and a second folded configuration in which a first portion of the deformable body is folded over a second portion of the deformable body.

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Microsoft’s illustrations provide a good idea of what the company has in mind.

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And there was you thinking Salvador Dali had been dead all this time.
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Facial recognition as a less-bad option • Lawfare

Jane Brambauer is a professor of law at the University of Arizona:

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My argument goes as follows: (1) to the extent criminal justice reformers have political capital to spend, it should be spent dramatically reducing criminal liability and sentences for all crimes while increasing the probability that criminal conduct will be detected; and (2) facial recognition is a valuable tool for increasing the probability of detection because it reduces the discretion that police officers have as compared to other forms of surveillance.

Holding everything else constant, it is more efficient and more fair for police to run a photograph through facial recognition software to identify candidate suspects than to try to identify the suspect using witnesses or to solve the case without using the image.

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Fairly short at nine pages. Certainly there’s an argument that facial recognition, where shown to work, doesn’t discriminate. And misidentification is the serious problem in policing.
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How Facebook is stoking a civil war in Ethiopia • Vice

Nick Robins-Early:

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Every time Lucy Kassa publishes an article, she knows what will come next. As an Ethiopian freelance journalist covering her country’s intensifying civil war, Kassa has reported on killings, starvation, sexual violence, and other atrocities in the conflict. After each report, Facebook and other platforms erupt with threats against her. 

“It’s an everyday reality. Whenever I publish a story, there is a smear campaign on Facebook,” Kassa said. “The content is hate speech. It’s defamation, and its aim is to bully me and stop me from investigating, to harass and threaten me.”

After Kassa reported in May on a 13-year-old girl who suffered horrific burns from a possible incendiary weapons attack, a pro-government Facebook account with over 200,000 followers posted a photo of Kassa and openly called for her arrest—a serious incitement in a country where dozens of journalists have been detained during the conflict. In the weeks after, Kassa faced a wave of harassment across social media platforms that included death threats and threats of sexual violence. The Facebook post is still up months later, with over 6,000 likes and more than 1,000 comments. 

As Facebook struggles to address hate speech, radicalization, and misinformation in the United States, recently leaked internal company documents have made it clear that the problem is far worse and less addressed in countries across the global south. Even in Ethiopia—which Facebook has designated its highest risk level and repeatedly made assurances it is dedicating resources to monitoring—researchers and journalists say that hate is still spreading unabated and the platform is stoking ethnic and political conflict.

“People criticize them for how little they do in the U.S.,” said Timnit Gebru, Google’s former chief AI ethicist. “Imagine elsewhere: What we’re talking about is them doing absolutely nothing, as far as I’m concerned.” 

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I wrote about Ethiopia, well ahead of the civil war that has broken out, in my book: I picked it because it’s one of the least connected, lowest social media penetration countries in the world. I wasn’t looking for a country with trouble. It was meant to be a contrast with Myanmar, which had gone from nothing to widespread connectivity. But you still get the same social warming, even at low penetration.
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Since I’ve mentioned it, you can get my book Social Warming which will tell you about Ethiopia, Myanmar, South Africa and many more.

Currency crisis as New World MMORPG suffers deflation • Player Auctions

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Consider the ways a player can earn currency in a MMO (excluding player-to-player transactions, since that money is already in circulation): loot drops, quests, event rewards, dungeon or raid completions, and etc. Every mechanic in a game that rewards currency is spawning it out of thin air. In contrast to the real-world where the supply of money is usually, except rare exceptions, tightly controlled by central banks and regulatory authorities.

As players spend more time on a game, amassing wealth, prices inevitably soar. The only player-friendly solution is to develop currency sinks – think mounts or housing – to remove money from circulation. Supply-side interventions, i.e restrictions on currency rewards, are understandably not popular with players and so are used rarely.

New World is suffering the opposite, and significantly more rare issue, of deflation. The ways of obtaining coins in-game – monster drops, salvage, and quests – don’t offer enough raw currency to counterbalance the number of coins being used.

As a result, prices have been dropping for goods, particularly crafting materials such as ore, not necessarily because there isn’t enough coin to afford them but because the value of the currency is so much higher than the value of goods, given their relative scarcity. A punishing overhead “tax” burden exists in the game, where the cost for crafting, home-ownership, or repairs exceeds the players’ ability to accumulate coin. In addition, companies are taxed for territory ownership, essentially disincentivizing PvP since the marginal costs far exceed any potential benefits.

Currency is so valuable now that on certain servers, direct trades have become part and parcel of a makeshift barter economy, with neither party willing to be parted from their coin. Trades such as 1000 linen for 600 ore and 20 eggs, or star metal tools for 40 steel bars, are commonplace, as one would expect to see in a hunter-gatherer society. It’s surprisingly thematic, but nonetheless a frustrating experience for players.

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That story ran in late October. On Friday, Amazon (which owns New World) posted a note saying everything in the economy is tickety-boo. Well, apart from people scamming it. The economy turns out to be really hard to control in MMORPGs.
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Metabrand • Benedict Evans

He’s considering the renaming:

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though Facebook wrestles with toxicity (or even if you think it doesn’t care), it worries that teenagers prefer Snap or TikTok, and that Apple’s Tim Cook has his boot on their throat. These questions give Facebook’s investment in VR (over $10bn this year, it disclosed in the accounts) and now ‘the metaverse’ existential urgency. If there is something after smart phones, Facebook wants to be the landlord, not a tenant. It wants to set the agenda and invent new experiences (and – let’s be honest – it hasn’t invented much itself for quite a long time). Of course, today this is as speculative as smartphones were in 2001 – VR seems stuck as a subset of games, and ‘metaverse’ is more mood-board than product. When I wrote about the term a few weeks ago, I described it as the new ‘information superhighway’ – a bunch of really interesting ideas on a whiteboard, that probably won’t actually happen quite like that. There is probably some displacement here too – testing VR goggles is more fun than being shouted at in Congress.

But Facebook is protean – it shifts and turns and surfs user behaviour. It crushed MySpace and jumped from the web to mobile and then to Instagram. I think it would be wrong, or at least limited, to see this as a PR move – Facebook wants to move in a new direction. Perhaps ‘Facebook’ should be left behind as a ‘bad bank’ while Meta now builds quite new experiences again, this time perhaps even planning for those problems.

Indeed, it seems to me that the real rebrand this week wasn’t Facebook to Meta but VR to Metaverse. VR is an old and pretty stale term – a dad brand – and Facebook wants to make VR into much more than just a headset and some games.

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What people seem to me to be overlooking is how far out Zuckerberg is looking, and was looking. This is what we always underestimate with the really disruptive thinkers. Bill Gates could see a PC on every desktop when most people struggled with the idea of one in each company. Page and Brin could see phones as computers when most people could barely grasp text messaging. Facebook bought Oculus for $2bn in March 2014. Some revolutions are slow.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified