You may not have heard of the term ‘global stilling’, but it’s a key reason why wind power is down – and electricity prices are up. CC-licensed photo by Justin Smiley 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 picked by migrant workers. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I’m being gaslit by the TikTok Lamborghini • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick details how TikTokers have become bizarrely fascinated by a daft accident (maybe not an accident) involving a rented Lamborghini:

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What’s happening on TikTok right now seems to be a confluence of three things. First, I think a lot of this is connected to what I’ll call the traffic light livestream phenomenon. There have been several moments over the last few years where Twitch users have become obsessed with a static camera pointed at traffic, most recently it was a stop sign in Massachusetts where no one actually stopped. I’m from Massachusetts, stop signs don’t mean “stop,” they mean, “slowly roll through while sipping your gargantuan iced coffee.” But, basically, people on the internet will kind of obsess over whatever is put in front of them.

The next dimension to all of this is the fact that TikTok’s algorithm is extremely powerful and also very sticky. Trends and challenges go very viral, but also macro user behavior tends to stick around. Right now, everyone on the platform thinks every piece of media shared to the app is worth analyzing forensically. This, I believe, started with the gamified doxing of antivaxxers done by users like Sparks and @tizzyent earlier this year, but really kicked into high gear around the Gabby Petito case.

And, lastly, TikTok is, as we speak, supplanting Facebook as the main app of America. As more and more Americans begin to use TikTok, I suspect TikTok content will start to resemble Facebook content. The ugly American weirdness of Facebook — the casual racism, the petty small town drama, the nameless grifters, the weird old people, the Minion memes, the public meltdowns at fast food restaurants, the goths, the bored nurses, the men in their trucks talking on their phones, the extremely basic backyard viral challenges — it will all come to TikTok. It will hit the app’s sophisticated video production tools and aggressive algorithm and turn into endless content cycles, where it will probably spin out in weirder and darker directions than anything we’ve ever seen from Facebook.

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[Emphasis added.]
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TikTok’s algorithm leads users from transphobic videos to far-right rabbit holes • Media Matters for America

Olivia Little and Abbie Richards:

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TikTok’s “For You” page (FYP) recommendation algorithm appears to be leading users down far-right rabbit holes. By analyzing and coding over 400 recommended videos after interacting solely with transphobic content, Media Matters traced how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm quickly began populating our research account’s FYP with hateful and far-right content.

TikTok has long been scrutinized for its dangerous algorithm, viral misinformation, and hateful video recommendations, yet this new research demonstrates how the company’s recommendation algorithm can quickly radicalize a user’s FYP. 

Transphobia is deeply intertwined with other kinds of far-right extremism, and TikTok’s algorithm only reinforces this connection. Our research suggests that transphobia can be a gateway prejudice, leading to further far-right radicalization. 

To assess this phenomenon, Media Matters created a new TikTok account and engaged only with content we identified as transphobic. This included accounts that had posted multiple videos which degrade trans people, insist that there are “only two genders,” or mock the trans experience.

«

Never heard of a “gateway prejudice” before. See also: “Revealed: anti-vaccine TikTok videos being viewed by children as young as nine“. We’ve heard this story with YouTube. What is it about video?
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Sounds a lot like Social Warming, my latest book, which explains how any social network will create similar effects once it uses algorithms for attention.

The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects

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The Uncomfortable is a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects by Athens-based architect Katerina Kamprani

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Which makes you think about what makes other things comfortable, and what makes things that should be comfortable less comfortable. Recommended to put a shiver down your spine.
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Europe’s electricity generation from wind blown off course • Financial Times

Steven Bernard:

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The strength of the wind blowing across northern Europe has fallen by as much as 15% on average in places this year, according to data compiled by Vortex, an independent weather modelling group.

The cause of the decrease is uncertain, say scientists, but one possible explanation is a phenomenon called global stilling. This is a decrease in average surface wind speed owing to climate change.

“Near-surface wind speed trends across the globe found that winds have generally weakened over land over the past few decades,” said Paul Williams, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading. “This suggests that the phenomenon is part of a genuine long-term trend, rather than cyclic variability.”

One explanation for this could be that “human-related climate change is warming the poles faster than the tropics in the lower atmosphere,” Williams noted. “This would have the effect of weakening the mid-latitude north-south temperature difference and consequently reducing the thermal wind at low altitudes.”

Projections from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change support this trend. Wind speeds over western, central and northern Europe are predicted to drop by as much as 10% in the summer months by 2100, based on 1.5ºC warming above pre-industrial levels.

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Next you’ll be telling us that global warming also makes it cloudier so solar panels work less well.
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How the government’s ‘fake news’ rebuttal operation targets journalists on Twitter • Folded

Adam Bienkov is an editor and reporter who covers UK politics:

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Back in May this year I attended a lobby briefing in which the prime minister’s official spokesman was repeatedly asked to rule out accepting hormone-treated beef as part of a trade deal with Australia.

Their refusal to do so struck both myself and other journalists who attended the briefing as curious, so I tweeted out their response.

Adam Bienkov: “Boris Johnson’s spokesman refuses to explicitly rule out accepting hormone-treated beef as part of a trade deal with Australia.” (May 21st 2021, 740 Retweets, 1,160 Likes)

My tweet was an entirely accurate account of the briefing, which was later reported in print by other outlets who attended the briefing.

However, a few hours later I suddenly noticed that I was getting a lot of replies which linked in the Department for International Trade’s Twitter account.

I then realised that the department had targeted me with a tweet, including a gif about hormone-treated beef.

«

Bienkov then FOI’s the Department for International Trade to find out quite who was in charge of this rather cackhanded “rebuttal”. It’s quite the odyssey which also shows you that watching tweets being written by committee is one of the most painful things you can witness.
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Priceless NFT artwork vandalized with spray paint tool • The Onion

Perfection.
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The Steve Jobs deal with Michael Dell that could have changed Apple and tech history • CNET

Connie Guglielmo:

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Jobs offered to license the Mac OS to Dell, telling him he could give PC buyers a choice of Apple’s software or Microsoft’s Windows OS installed on their machine. 

“He said, look at this – we’ve got this Dell desktop and it’s running Mac OS,” Dell tells me. “Why don’t you license the Mac OS?”

Dell thought it was a great idea and told Jobs he’d pay a licensing fee for every PC sold with the Mac OS. But Jobs had a counteroffer: He was worried that licensing scheme might undermine Apple’s own Mac computer sales because Dell computers were less costly. Instead, Dell says, Jobs suggested he just load the Mac OS alongside Windows on every Dell PC and let customers decide which software to use – and then pay Apple for every Dell PC sold.

Dell smiles when he tells the story. “The royalty he was talking about would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, and the math just didn’t work, because most of our customers, especially larger business customers, didn’t really want the Mac operating system,” he writes. “Steve’s proposal would have been interesting if it was just us saying, “OK, we’ll pay you every time we use the Mac OS” – but to pay him for every time we didn’t use it … well, nice try, Steve!”

Another problem: Jobs wouldn’t guarantee access to the Mac OS three, four or five years later “even on the same bad terms.” That could leave customers who were using Mac OS out of luck as the software evolved, leaving Dell Inc. no way to ensure it could support those users.

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I think this did happen, but people are misreading the dates. They’re thinking Jobs spoke to Dell in 1997. Not at all. There was OSX in 2000-1-2, and Apple was losing money at that time (it propped its results up by selling ARM shares), and had OSX that ran on Intel. Dell was selling a truckload of PCs. It would have been an amazing deal for Apple, with no downside. Which is why I believe Jobs tried it. (Apple tried the same around the same time with Sony. Even more evidence.)
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How El Salvador is testing bitcoin’s promise of financial liberty • The New York Times

Anatoly Kurmanaev, Bryan Avelar and Ephrat Livni:

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Nearly a month after the introduction of bitcoin, it remains unclear where the dollar funds and the bitcoin held by the government, or reflected in Chivo Wallets, are, or what they are worth.

Although all bitcoin transactions carry a code to ensure transparency, Mr. Bukele has treated the bitcoin policy as a state secret. He has classified all information related to Chivo Wallet, which was created with taxpayer funds, but is run as a private enterprise by undisclosed individuals.

“He is playing Russian roulette with public money,” said Ruth López, a Salvadoran lawyer at the nonprofit organization Cristosal, which sued the government over the Chivo Wallet’s financing irregularities.

Mr. Bukele, his ministers of economy and finance, the trade secretary, the attorney general, the head of the congressional economic committee, the financial regulator, the central bank and the state bank financing the bitcoin fund all declined to comment.

On the streets, the policy’s impact has been mixed. Mr. Bukele says three million Salvadorans, or more than half of all adults, have installed Chivo Wallet, but in reality, the use of bitcoin remains limited. Most fear the cryptocurrency’s extreme price volatility, say they lack technological skills or distrust the government’s intentions.

…The adoption of bitcoin has also deepened Mr. Bukele’s impasse with international lenders. His talks with the International Monetary Fund over a crucial $1bn loan have stalled, as the lender became increasingly concerned about the deterioration of the rule of law and bitcoin’s threat to financial stability.

Lack of IMF funding has in turn blocked other traditional sources of funding, complicating Mr. Bukele’s populist spending programs. El Salvador’s bonds fell sharply after the adoption of bitcoin as Wall Street became concerned over Mr. Bukele’s ability to pay existing debts.

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A victory for free knowledge: Florida judge rules Section 230 bars defamation claim against the Wikimedia Foundation • Diff

Jacob Rogers:

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On September 15th, in a victory for the Wikimedia movement and for all user-driven projects online, a Florida judge dismissed claims of defamation, invasion of privacy, and infliction of emotional distress against the Wikimedia Foundation. The judge found that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes the Wikimedia Foundation from liability for third-party content republished on Wikipedia. In other words, Section 230 helps Wikimedia safely host the work of Wikipedia’s contributors and enables the effective volunteer-led moderation of content on the projects.

The case began when plaintiff Nathaniel White sued the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2021, claiming that the Foundation was liable for the publication of photos that incorrectly identified him as a New York serial killer of the same name. Because of its open nature, sometimes inaccurate information is uploaded to Wikipedia and its companion projects, but the many members of our volunteer community are very effective at identifying and removing these inaccuracies when they do occur. Notably, this lawsuit was filed months after Wikipedia editors proactively corrected the error at issue in September 2020. Wikimedia moved to dismiss the amended complaint in June, arguing that plaintiff’s claims were barred by Section 230.

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Ex-Ozy Media employees say company used dubious tactics to build newsletter following, raising legal questions • Forbes

Jemima McEvoy:

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Three ex-employees with knowledge of Ozy’s newsletter operations, who asked to remain anonymous because of non-disclosure agreements they signed, said the company on multiple occasions obtained large numbers of email addresses through marketing partnerships it formed with other companies and news outlets.

Ozy would offer to send an email for the other company as part of the partnership, and some companies would then share a list of addresses for a supposed one-time message. Instead, the former employees allege, those email addresses would then be permanently added to Ozy’s newsletter subscriber list.

Among the companies they say Ozy collectively accumulated millions of email addresses from were the McClatchy newspaper chain and the technology magazine Wired, according to two of the former employees (McClatchy and Conde Nast, the parent company of Wired, did not respond to requests for comment from Forbes). [A Wired staffer suggests in the story that this wouldn’t happen.]

Ozy would also buy in bulk email addresses from third-party websites like U.S. Data Corporation and Exact Data, ramping up the size of its newsletter following in order to fulfill advertising deals with its clients.

After Ozy added batches of new addresses to its mailing lists, many recipients would attempt to unsubscribe from the newsletters only to be kept on the distribution lists and even re-subscribed under the direction of Ozy management, a potential violation of commercial email laws.

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At this rate we’re going to find out in a week or so that the company wasn’t properly set up, nobody was really employed, and that it wasn’t called Ozy Media at all. Strongly suspect there are many charlatan companies like this; they just aren’t as high-profile.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Feast your eyes on photos of Intel wafers, because it’s not going to make any in the UK after Brexit wrecked the export market. CC-licensed photo by Intel in Deutschland 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. Forty down, eleven to go. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook’s own internal documents offer a blueprint for making social media safer for teens • The Conversation

Jean Twenge:

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One internal Facebook study of more than 50,000 people from 10 countries found that half of teen girls compare their appearance to others’ on Instagram. Those appearance-based comparisons, the study found, peaked when users were 13 to 18 and were much less common among adult women.

This is key, as body image issues seem to be one of the biggest reasons why social media use is linked to depression among teen girls. It also dovetails with research I reported in my book, “iGen,” finding that social media use is more strongly linked to unhappiness among younger teens than older ones.

This suggests another avenue for regulation: age minimums. A 1998 law called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule already sets the age minimum for social media accounts at 13. That limit is problematic for two reasons. First, 13 is a developmentally challenging time, right as boys and girls are going through puberty and bullying is at its peak.

Second, the age minimum is not regularly enforced. Kids 12 and under can simply lie about their age to sign up for an account, and they’re rarely kicked off the platform for being underage.

«

Twenge is a professor who has written a number of articles and books very critical of American teens’ social media use. She’s really got her teeth into this; it’s probably the worst possible news for Facebook that these documents have leaked in this way.
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Still a good time to understand what’s going on by buying Social Warming, my book on how and why social networks polarise and infuriate us.

We need to talk about Facebook PR guy Andy Stone • Input Mag

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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Stone’s communications style: brash and bitchy. He appears to love bringing the fight to reporters and whistleblowers who dare criticize the company’s actions. A former political communications staffer, he’s been with Facebook since 2014, and has been directly rebutting claims from reporters — to their increasing anger — for at least a year.

As with most of Stone’s tweets, the replies and quote tweets tell their own story.

If Facebook is the evil corporation trying to end the world in the comic book movie telling of our reckoning with big tech, Stone is the hired henchman with a black heart.

In the last 24 hours alone, Stone has gone after the New York Times’ Cecilia Kang, Engadget’s Karissa Bell, Forbes’ Marty Swant, and Protocol’s Issie Lapowsky. However, Stone’s abrasive behavior on social media seems to serve little purpose. It all raises the question: Why?

“I don’t understand what the strategy there could possibly be,” says one experienced public relations professional, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. “I don’t understand what you gain from taking that kind of attitude with anybody publicly.” A good communications strategy requires building, cultivating, and maintaining relationships with reporters. Turning into a reply guy and calling them out repeatedly, and in the most obnoxious way possible, doesn’t help build those relationships.

“Facebook’s crisis comms on this issue are embarrassingly bad,” says Bob Pickard, principal of Signal Leadership Communication, a C-suite communications consultancy with experience handling public relations for some of the world’s biggest companies, including AstraZeneca, Huawei, Microsoft, and Samsung. “Everyone is talking about Facebook’s poor PR, which is often a proxy for other issues, but I think the comms themselves are indeed crap.”

Pickard points out that the company is already a lightning rod for controversy, and instead of focusing on tackling the criticisms head-on, it’s sinking to discrediting a whistleblower and arguing with reporters. “It’s a breathtakingly bizarre lack of self-knowledge and glaring lack of professional judgment that is making fools of their spokespersons,” says Pickard.

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Why Facebook may be the true “Bad Art Friend” • Vanity Fair

Erin Vanderhoof:

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To delve into this week’s viral piece of long form, Robert Kolker’s New York Times Magazine feature “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?,” beyond the broad strokes—the woman who donated a kidney, the acquaintance who wrote a short story about the act, and the complicated legal battle that ensued—may deny readers the opportunity to use it as a mirror to examine their own sense of morality. But in a single day, it became omnipresent enough as a cautionary tale, fodder for jokes, and a procrastination tool; anyone who has made it this far has probably already come up with a schema for understanding its very real characters and their somewhat baffling motivations.

My own adjudication of the tale was shaped by the many moments of conflict that functioned as on- and off-ramps for sympathy. Are you the type of person who would join a group, any kind of group, called the Chunky Monkeys? (I would not.) Are you the type of person who would donate a kidney to a stranger? (I might, but not, like, randomly.) But there’s one interaction early on that stands out as the biggest Rorschach test for everything that follows: Are you the type of person who would ever confront someone for not reacting to your Facebook posts? I shuddered when the thought of doing so crossed my mind, though I do understand that plenty of people might not see the problem. Regardless, that detail in particular sets the narrative into motion, making it clear that though it might look like a story about community or making art, it’s really a story about Facebook.

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This was my first reaction too. If you haven’t read the Bad Art Friend piece (you haven’t?), it’s a vicious treat like popping bubblewrap where random ones pinch you hard. And note Vanderhoof’s advice: “It’s fine to gossip, but assiduously hide the receipts.”

Also:

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Essentially, Zuckerberg invented a machine that will continually serve you things that you hate from people you feel an obligation to be polite to, and we shouldn’t be surprised that it hasn’t turned out well.

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The founder of Facebook’s CrowdTangle tool is leaving • The Verge

Alex Heath:

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Brandon Silverman, the founder and CEO of the Facebook-owned analytics tool CrowdTangle, is leaving the company, according to an internal farewell post to colleagues posted Wednesday that was seen by The Verge.

His departure comes as Facebook is under pressure to publicly share more data about the content that spreads on its service. CrowdTangle, a free tool that lets anyone track popular posts across Facebook and Instagram, is at the center of that debate. In recent years, it has been used to show that far-right personalities are regularly the most engaged-with accounts on Facebook. That irritated some Facebook executives who felt that the data being shared by CrowdTangle was incomplete, and earlier this year, the CrowdTangle team was disbanded as a standalone team.

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CrowdTangle was a fantastically useful tool for journalists and researchers outside Facebook. This sounds like a clampdown – though he may have been planning this for a very long time.
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The Twitch List: The highest paid streamers on Twitch

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The following list shows how much people are being paid to play video games.

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Top payment: $9.6m. There are 10,000 listed here (probably not exhaustive) with a couple of probably erroneous data points (of payouts of $36m or more).

I checked whether the payouts follow Zipf’s Law – the power law found all over the internet – and yes, they absolutely do: the correlation of log value and log ranking is a straight line – correlation 0.9916.
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One month on, El Salvador’s bitcoin use grows but headaches persist • Reuters

:

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A growing number of El Salvadorans have experimented with bitcoin since the country became the first to adopt it as legal tender last month, with a couple of million dollars sent daily by migrants using the cryptocurrency.

But only a fraction of the Central American nation’s businesses have taken a bitcoin payment and technical problems have plagued the government’s cryptocurrency app, frustrating even committed users of the technology.

Construction worker Adalberto Galvez, 32, said he had lost $220 when trying to withdraw cash from the Chivo digital wallet.

Like Galvez, dozens of Salvadorans told Reuters they had at least one problem with Chivo, named after the local word for “good”, and few had used it on a daily basis.

“It took my money but gave me nothing,” said Galvez, who had already been using bitcoin successfully for months with another application at an experimental small-scale bitcoin economy project dubbed Bitcoin Beach in the coastal town of El Zonte.

…Others have also reported irregularities with transactions and attempts of stolen identity. President Nayib Bukele has blamed high demand for the issues Galvez and others have faced.

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I don’t think stolen identity is a “high demand” issue. Related, sorta: Investors spent millions on ‘Evolved Apes’ NFTs. Then they got scammed.
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Ozy Media employees didn’t get $5.7m in PPP loans: ex-staffers • CNBC

Brian Schwartz and Alex Sherman:

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While it wasn’t uncommon for media companies to participate in the PPP, Ozy specifically earmarked its loans for payroll. Full-time employees who worked for Ozy told CNBC that they had no idea where the money went and that it didn’t go to restoring their salaries after they took pay cuts.

“No one to my knowledge, and I’m talking to at least 10 people. No one had anything returned to them by way of salary post them receiving these PPP loans,” according to a former employee who left Ozy earlier this year.

“I must’ve followed up with [CFO] Samir [Rao] four to six times,” said another with respect to reinstating salary. “It was disheartening. You work so hard and give your life to this company, to be dismissed and disrespected.”

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Rao is the guy who, you’ll recall, pretended to be a YouTube executive on a call that Watson was also on. Watson didn’t say a thing on the call, nor anything until YouTube’s own investigation figured out the fakery. Sometimes though people are able to nail him:

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In an interview broadcast Monday on CNBC, Watson also disputed that he called Sharon Osbourne a friend.

“I didn’t say she was a friend. You know what? Play the tape, then. Please go ahead and play the tape. You know what, cue up the tape,” Watson said Monday.

The tape reveals that Watson did indeed describe the Osbournes as friends during the 2019 interview: “Fun fact: our friend Ozzy and Sharon sued us briefly, and then we decided to be friends and now they’re investors in Ozy.”

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I think the film Memento had a phrase for Watson.
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After Epic v. Apple, a small developer is challenging Apple’s in-app payment system • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

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The ambiguous finish to the Epic v. Apple trial opened a tiny crack in Apple’s control over in-app payments on the iPhone — and now, a small developer is trying to crawl through it.

A company called Paddle has announced its own in-app payment system that will take a smaller cut than Apple’s system — 5 to 10 percent, instead of the 15 to 30% cut claimed by Apple. It’s a way around the commission fees that started the fight with Epic in the first place and likely to be the beginning of a new fight for developers.

Paddle’s system is designed to take advantage of the Epic v. Apple verdict, which required Apple to allow external payment links. Prior to the verdict, an App Store rule had banned “external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms” — but the judge found that rule violated anti-steering laws. Paddle’s system offers just such an external link, kicking users off to an outside page where they can pay before returning to the app. It definitely adds friction to the process, but it’s a far cry from the workarounds you’d have to go through if you wanted to skirt Apple’s IAP system today.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment as to whether apps using the system would be allowed on the App Store.

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So now the fun starts, especially for popcorn vendors.
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New “Report a Problem” link on product pages • Apple Developer

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Since its introduction, the App Store has supported a way for users to report problems with their apps and purchases, and to request refunds. Now App Store product pages on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey display a “Report a Problem“ link, so users can more easily report concerns with content they’ve purchased or downloaded. This feature is currently available for users in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, and will expand to other regions over time.

In addition, users worldwide can now choose from “Report a scam or fraud” and “Report offensive, abusive, or illegal content” options at reportaproblem.apple.com, and report issues with their apps, including free apps that do not offer in-app purchases.

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I wonder quite how busy the “scam or fraud” button is going to be, and how quickly reports to it will be acted on. Kosta Eleftheriou, who has made a lot of noise over this problem, wonders why it’s only available in a few countries. No obvious answer.
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Snapchat says it will ramp up efforts to detect fentanyl sales on its platform • Boing Boing

Mark Fraunfelder:

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In acknowledging that its platform is being used to sell counterfeit drugs laced with the powerful synthetic opioid fentatnyl, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat said it’s intensifying measures to detect in-app drug deals.

It said in a statement issued today:

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We have significantly improved our proactive detection capabilities to remove drug dealers from our platform before they are able to harm our community. Our enforcement rates have increased by 112% during the first half of 2021, and we have increased proactive detection rates by 260%. Nearly two-thirds of drug-related content is detected proactively by our artificial intelligence systems, with the balance reported by our community and enforced by our team.

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Or, in other words, we’re not as rubbish at stopping this as we used to be!
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Intel not considering UK chip factory after Brexit • BBC News

Daniel Thomas:

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The boss of Intel says the US chipmaker is no longer considering building a factory in the UK because of Brexit.

Pat Gelsinger told the BBC that before the UK left the EU, the country “would have been a site that we would have considered”.

But he added: “Post-Brexit… we’re looking at EU countries and getting support from the EU”.
Intel wants to boost its output amid a global chip shortage that has hit the supply of cars and other goods.

The firm – which is one of the world’s largest makers of semiconductors – says the crisis has shown that the US and Europe are too reliant on Asia for its chip-making needs.

Intel is investing up to $95bn (£70bn) on opening and upgrading semiconductor plants in Europe over the next 10 years, as well as boosting its US output.

But while Mr Gelsinger said the firm “absolutely would have been seeking sites for consideration” in the UK, he said Brexit had changed this.

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No chips, and no fish either following the rubbish Brexit negotiations. (Didn’t honestly have Intel on the Brexit bingo card, but there you go.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

By next year all the new cars bought in Norway will be electric, on current trends – but petrol and diesel vehicles have a long way to go before they disappear there. CC-licensed photo by @abrunvoll 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. Fissioned, not fused. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I designed algorithms at Facebook. Here’s how to regulate them • The New York Times

Roddy Lindsay worked on the News Feed algorithm at Facebook from 2007:

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Facebook has had more than 15 years to demonstrate that algorithmic personal feeds can be built responsibly; if it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to happen.

…The solution is straightforward: Companies that deploy personalized algorithmic amplification should be liable for the content these algorithms promote. This can be done through a narrow change to Section 230, the 1996 law that lets social media companies host user-generated content without fear of lawsuits for libelous speech and illegal content posted by those users.

As Ms. Haugen testified, “If we reformed 230 to make Facebook responsible for the consequences of their intentional ranking decisions, I think they would get rid of engagement-based ranking.” As a former Facebook data scientist and current executive at a technology company, I agree with her assessment. There is no AI system that could identify every possible instance of illegal content. Faced with potential liability for every amplified post, these companies would most likely be forced to scrap algorithmic feeds altogether.

Social media companies can be successful and profitable under such a regime. Twitter adopted an algorithmic feed only in 2015. Facebook grew significantly in its first two years, when it hosted user profiles without a personalized News Feed. Both platforms already offer nonalgorithmic, chronological versions of their content feeds.

This solution would also address concerns over political bias and free speech. Social media feeds would be free of the unavoidable biases that A.I.-based systems often introduce. Any algorithmic ranking of user-generated content could be limited to nonpersonalized features like “most popular” lists or simply be customized for particular geographies or languages. Fringe content would again be banished to the fringe, leading to fewer user complaints and putting less pressure on platforms to call balls and strikes on the speech of their users.

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Still a good day to buy
Social Warming, my book about how algorithmic amplification leads to bad effects on social networks because of our human instincts.

Can nuclear fusion put the brakes on climate change? • The New Yorker

Rivka Galchen:

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In 1976, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration published a study predicting how quickly nuclear fusion could become a reality, depending on how much money was invested in the field. For around nine billion a year in today’s dollars—described as the “Maximum Effective Effort”—it projected reaching fusion energy by 1990. The scale descended to about a billion dollars a year, which the study projected would lead to “Fusion Never.” “And that’s about what’s been spent,” the British physicist Steven Cowley told me. “Pretty close to the maximum amount you could spend in order to never get there.”

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Which pretty much sums it up. This article also obeys Betteridge’s Law, unless something wonderful happens in the next few years.
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Norway to hit 100% electric vehicle sales early next year • Drive

Rob Margeit:

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According to monthly new car sales data released by Norway’s Road Traffic Information Council (OVF), the last internal combustion engine vehicle is set to leave the dealership next April, almost three years ahead of the Norwegian government’s 2025 stated target for the phasing out completely of sales of new petrol and diesel cars.

…[However] seven out of every eight cars bought and sold in Norway a used car. The NAF’s [Norwegian Automobile Federation] numbers show that of the 357,176 ownership registration changes so far in 2021, electric vehicles only accounted for 12%.

“Most people still own a used petrol or diesel car,” said Braadland. “Around 85% of cars on Norwegian roads still have a petrol or diesel engine. But new car sales show that we see the beginning of the end for the fossil-powered car.”

Norway’s numbers are in stark contrast to the Australian market, where electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles account for less than 1% (0.73%) of new car sales while petrol vehicles alone make up 55.5% of the new car market.

Diesel vehicles enjoy 33% market chare while conventional hybrid vehicles are outgunned by their Norwegian counterparts with 6.7% market share.

«

Norway shows how much inertia there is in the installed base: how long will it take for even a small country to switch over completely, even with all the incentives? We’d better hope hard for net zero to be a feasible solution to “only” leaving emissions as bad as they already are.
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Twitter’s latest pre-tweet prompts let you know when you’re about to jump into a Twitter fight • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

The prompts are the company’s latest attempt to reduce the persistent harassment and abuse on the platform. One other prompt, for example, warns you before you tweet something that might be offensive. Twitter also might show a prompt if you try to retweet an article it thinks you haven’t read, which could help decrease the spread of misinformation. While they might help prevent some bad tweets from being shared, the growing list of potential warnings to wade through before you tweet is a worrying indicator of the entire experience.

As always, if you’re not sure if you should post something, the best pre-tweet prompt is the one that Twitter won’t show you: never tweet.

«

I’m fairly sure I’ve pre-deleted three times more tweets than I’ve actually pressed “Tweet” on. Even so, it’s the ones you write that cause the trouble. Would be good to know whether the scheme to warn people before they tweet articles without reading them has worked to any appreciable degree.
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Africa internet riches plundered, contested by China broker • SF Gate

Alan Suderman, Frank Bajak and Rodney Muhumuza:

»

Millions of internet addresses assigned to Africa have been waylaid, some fraudulently, including through insider machinations linked to a former top employee of the nonprofit that assigns the continent’s addresses. Instead of serving Africa’s internet development, many have benefited spammers and scammers, while others satiate Chinese appetites for pornography and gambling.

New leadership at the nonprofit, AFRINIC, is working to reclaim the lost addresses. But a legal challenge by a deep-pocketed Chinese businessman is threatening the body’s very existence.

The businessman is Lu Heng, a Hong Kong-based arbitrage specialist. Under contested circumstances, he obtained 6.2 million African addresses from 2013 to 2016. That’s about 5% of the continent’s total — more than Kenya has.

The internet service providers and others to whom AFRINIC assigns IP address blocks aren’t purchasing them. They pay membership fees to cover administrative costs that are intentionally kept low. That left lots of room, though, for graft.

When AFRINIC revoked Lu’s addresses, now worth about $150m, he fought back. His lawyers in late July persuaded a judge in Mauritius, where AFRICNIC is based, to freeze its bank accounts. His company also filed a $80m defamation claim against AFRINIC and its new CEO.

«

All reminds me of the shenanigans over the ownership of sex.com, as detailed by Kieren McCarthy.
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First malaria vaccine approved by WHO • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli:

»

The vaccine, called Mosquirix, is not just a first for malaria — it is the first developed for any parasitic disease. Parasites are much more complex than viruses or bacteria, and the quest for a malaria vaccine has been underway for a hundred years.

“It’s a huge jump from the science perspective to have a first-generation vaccine against a human parasite,” Dr. Alonso said.

In clinical trials, the vaccine had an efficacy of about 50% against severe malaria in the first year, but the figure dropped close to zero by the fourth year. And the trials did not directly measure the vaccine’s impact on deaths, which has led some experts to question whether it is a worthwhile investment in countries with countless other intractable problems.

But severe malaria accounts for up to half of malaria deaths and is considered “a reliable proximal indicator of mortality,” said Dr. Mary Hamel, who leads the W.H.O.’s malaria vaccine implementation program. “I do expect we will see that impact.”

A modeling study last year estimated that if the vaccine were rolled out to countries with the highest incidence of malaria, it could prevent 5.4 million cases and 23,000 deaths in children younger than 5 each year.

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This isn’t the mRNA version, though; that’s still in development and testing.
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Two new studies suggest the coronavirus did not originate in China • Medical News Today

Hannah Flynn:

»

As the pandemic was thought to originate in Wuhan, many efforts have focused on China, with the assumption that, as the virus was first detected there, it probably started there.

Now, two papers under review by the journal Nature and published as preprints are casting some doubt on these assumptions and indicate that in order to discover the origins of the virus, researchers may have to look farther afield.

One of the reasons SARS-CoV-2 is so infectious is a region on its spike protein that gives it its ability to bind to a receptor present on the surface of many human cells called ACE2.

In a paper submitted to Nature, researchers from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, and from Laos have now reported finding viruses with receptor binding domains very similar to those found on SARS-CoV-2 in cave bats in North Laos.

The researchers took blood, saliva, anal feces, and urine samples from 645 bats from 46 different species found in limestone caves in North Laos, which is close to the Southwest China border.

They discovered three separate virus strains in three different species of Rhinolophus bat, commonly known as horseshoe bat. RNA sequencing revealed that these viruses were over 95% identical to SARS-CoV-2, and one, the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 found so far, was 96.8% similar.

Further experiments showed that the receptor binding domain of the viruses had a high affinity for human ACE2 receptors.

«

That 96.8% figure is significant because the previous closest match was in a cave of bats in China, at 96.1%. Doesn’t mean either is the direct precursor of SARS-Cov-2.
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Ten years after Steve Jobs’s death: what Apple lost and gained • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

For one thing, even Jobs didn’t change history with anything like the frequency that people thought he did. For another, Cook deserved more than two years to prove how much vision Apple would have under his leadership.

Enough time has passed that it’s now fair to compare Cook’s biggest products to Jobs landmarks such as the Apple II, Mac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad. Apples biggest all-new product since 2011 has unquestionably been the Apple Watch, which is now worn by 100 million people, including a third of iPhone users in the U.S. Judged purely as a revenue generator, the smartwatch deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Jobs’s signature products: It’s a bigger business than the iPod was at its height.

The other obvious megahit of the Cook years are AirPods, which defined the modern wireless-earbud category and still lead it; they’re as iconic as wired iPod earbuds once were—and vastly more profitable for Apple.

Any Apple rival would salivate at the prospect of creating a business as successful as the Apple Watch and AirPods have been. Still, neither is culturally transformative in the way that Jobs’s biggest successes were.

«

In hardware, Apple is absolutely fine: after some wobbles five years ago (unspecced laptops particularly) it’s righted ship. But the software is running into the sand: trying to coordinate five software platforms (iPhone, iPad, Mac, TV, Watch) is beginning to create problems in the user interface. Consistency is rotting. The designer is prized over the user. it’s bad.
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How Steve Jobs once chucked an iPhone prototype to impress a room full of journalists • CNET

Roger Cheng:

»

This was months before the iPhone actually went on sale, a little after Jobs unveiled the groundbreaking smartphone in January 2007. Jobs had paid a visit to The Wall Street Journal’s headquarters, then in Manhattan’s World Financial Center area, to offer more than two dozen editors and reporters a peek at the device. It was there that he fielded questions about the gadget, with someone asking about its durability.

Jobs’ response: tossing the prerelease model he held into the air toward the center of the room, eliciting a small gasp and then hushed silence as it hit the (carpeted) floor.

The memory underscores the lengths Jobs went to in order to make an impression. On the 10-year anniversary of Jobs’ death, those in the tech industry have begun to pay their respects by sharing stories and memories of the tech luminary, a visionary who shook up multiple industries and changed the way we interact with our mobile devices. This was mine.

As a telecom reporter based in New York, I rarely got the chance to attend Apple events, including the MacWorld at which Jobs unveiled the iPhone. But my beat meant I was invited to attend this private session with other editors and reporters at the Journal.

Jobs spent a good portion of the session answering general questions about Apple. I won’t share what was discussed at the meeting – it was off the record and Jobs insisted everyone not only turn off and put away their recorders, but also stow away their notebooks and pens. Everyone complied, eager to see the device.

It wasn’t until after he took out the iPhone that he was asked about its durability, prompting the throw. While the phone in his hand was more polished than the original, buggy prototype he showed off at MacWorld, knowing now just how prone to issues those early units were makes his nonchalant toss even more impressive. Imagine how disastrous it would’ve been if that iPhone had broken or shut down in front of so many journalists.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Air source heat pumps will have to replace gas boilers – but they’ll jack up electricity demand substantially. Can the grid cope? CC-licensed photo by Krzysztof Lis 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. Unregulated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook whistleblower urges lawmakers to regulate the company • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang:

»

In more than three hours of testimony before a Senate subcommittee, Frances Haugen, who worked on Facebook’s civic misinformation team for nearly two years until May, spoke candidly and with a level of insight that the company’s executives have rarely provided. She said Facebook had purposely hidden disturbing research about how teenagers felt worse about themselves after using its products and how it was willing to use hateful content on its site to keep users coming back.

Ms. Haugen also gave lawmakers information on what other data they should ask Facebook for, which could then lead to proposals to regulate the Silicon Valley giant as it increasingly faces questions about its global reach and power.

“I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” Ms. Haugen, 37, said during her testimony. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won’t make the necessary changes.”

…Facebook has repeatedly pushed back on the criticism, saying its research was taken out of context and misunderstood. On Tuesday after the hearing, the company defended itself by questioning Ms. Haugen’s credibility. Lena Pietsch, a Facebook spokeswoman, said Ms. Haugen had never attended a decision-making meeting with high-ranking executives.

«

Facebook’s PR team are completely stuffed over this. Attending a decision-making meeting doesn’t mean you don’t understand research discussed in it. (Haugen’s site doesn’t have much yet.) No clarity on what form the regulation should take, though.
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Still a good time to buy my book,
Social Warming, which explains how algorithmic amplication and our natural instincts create mayhem on social networks.

Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet • Cloudflare

Celso Martinho and Tom Strickx:

»

“Facebook can’t be down, can it?”, we thought, for a second.

Today at 15:51 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled “Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL” because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1.  But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.

Social media quickly burst into flames, reporting what our engineers rapidly confirmed too. Facebook and its affiliated services WhatsApp and Instagram were, in fact, all down. Their DNS names stopped resolving, and their infrastructure IPs were unreachable. It was as if someone had “pulled the cables” from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.

This wasn’t a DNS issue itself, but failing DNS was the first symptom we’d seen of a larger Facebook outage.

How’s that even possible?

«

This is a technical but clear description of what happened, at least as far as outsiders are able to tell. Facebook has published a couple of blog posts about the events, but they’re incredibly bland, with essentially zero detail – and certainly nothing admitting to staff being unable to get into server rooms because the card passes require the Facebook domain to be reachable.
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48-hour internet outage plunges nation into productivity • The Onion

»

An Internet worm that disabled networks across the US Monday and Tuesday temporarily thrust the nation into its most severe maelstrom of productivity since 1992.

“In all my years, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Price Stern Sloan system administrator Andrew Walton, whose effort to restore web service to his company’s network was repeatedly hampered by employees busily working at their computers. “The local-access network is functioning, so people can transfer work projects to one another, but there’s no e-mail, no eBay, no flaminglips.com. It’s pretty much every office worker’s worst nightmare.”

«

As ever, the most consistently accurate depictor of events, past, present and future. (This first appeared in October 2003.)
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Carlos Watson’s mismanagement of Ozy: ‘it was culty’ • NY Mag

Jeff Wise:

»

“Carlos didn’t like that people slept,” Crane says. “There was one meeting where he stood up and he said, ‘I’m sick of hearing about how people need to sleep! This is a start-up! This is not for the weak!’”

The way Watson and [COO Samir] Rao defined the editorial mission of the site created an ongoing challenge for the staff. It was hard enough to find topics that no major outlets had covered; to do that at a fast pace, with a freelance budget that might amount to no more than $150 per story, at times felt unworkable, former employees said. The story mix that resulted leaned toward obscure topics in remote places.

“The reason those stories weren’t reported by the big outfits is that they weren’t that significant,” says the former Ozy editor. “You have to be a real social-justice trooper to read article after article about, you know, the fight for women’s rights in some province in Nigeria. It’s great that Carlos wanted to cover stuff like that, but it turns out there’s no audience for it.”

Even as Watson was running around telling advertisers and investors that Ozy had tens of millions of readers, staffers knew the truth. Each story had a counter at the bottom showing how many people had read it. “You work your ass off on a thing, and then it gets like 60 readers, you know?” says the former editor. “There was just no one there. It’s crickets.”

Ozy removed the counters.

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Apple told a showbiz union it had less than 20 million North American TV+ subscribers • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

»

Apple claimed its TV+ service had less than 20 million subscribers in the US and Canada as of July, allowing it to pay behind-the-scenes production crew lower rates than streamers with more subscriptions, according to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, a union that represents TV and movie workers who perform jobs like operating cameras and building sets.

Apple has never revealed subscriber numbers for its Apple TV+ streaming service, which launched in the fall of 2019. Analysts are reluctant to offer estimates, but many say that its scale pales in comparison to services like Netflix, which claimed 209 million subscribers as of Q2, and Disney+, which claimed 116 million.

The fact that Apple can pay a discounted rate despite being the most valuable publicly traded company in the world highlights some of the issues facing Hollywood workers as streaming supplants linear TV and movies, and is raising ire among union members who are deciding whether to strike for better pay and working conditions.

«

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Company that routes billions of text messages quietly says it was hacked • Vice

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

A company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its clients and potentially millions of cellphone users worldwide. 

The company, Syniverse, revealed in a filing dated September 27 with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission that an unknown “individual or organization gained unauthorized access to databases within its network on several occasions, and that login information allowing access to or from its Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) environment was compromised for approximately 235 of its customers.”

A former Syniverse employee who worked on the EDT systems told Motherboard that those systems have information on all types of call records. 

Syniverse repeatedly declined to answer specific questions from Motherboard about the scale of the breach and what specific data was affected, but according to a person who works at a telephone carrier, whoever hacked Syniverse could have had access to metadata such as length and cost, caller and receiver’s numbers, the location of the parties in the call, as well as the content of SMS text messages.

«

So, basically, they’ve known absolutely everything about perhaps every text almost every American has been sending for years. Wonder who’s been using that data? Police? Spies? Private detectives?
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“It is truly bonkers”: Greg Jackson, Octopus CEO, on the UK’s broken energy system • New Statesman

Will Dunn:

»

Jackson accuses the management of the UK energy grid as being stuck in the past, describing the National Grid as a “monopoly” and its control room as “like a minicab office. There’s some blokes with phones, and what they’ve always done is phoned up coal and gas power stations and told them to turn on and off. What we have to do now is… a million times more complicated.”

The result of this simplified central planning could be seen the previous week, when “electricity prices were colossally high, we were having to use lots of back-up supplies… [and] we were literally paying wind generators in Scotland to turn off, because there weren’t enough cables connecting Scotland, where the electricity was being generated, to England, where we needed it.”

The solution, he says, is for the energy grid to become more like the internet. “It is truly bonkers,” he says, that the UK persists with a system in which “central planners decide what cables are going to go where… you can centrally plan a system that’s got 100 power stations. You can’t centrally plan a system that’s got 20 million electric cars, two million houses with solar panels, a million houses with batteries, and 5,000 large-scale wind and solar farms.”

Jackson applauds Boris Johnson’s aspiration to make the UK “the Saudi Arabia of wind”, and believes such a project could transform our economy: “If we build enough wind generation to meet our winter needs, nine months of the year we’re going to have unbelievably cheap electricity. You’ll be able to fuel your car for free, make steel for free, do indoor farming with virtually zero energy costs.” But the current reality is that in government, too, the pace of change is frustratingly slow: a wind farm can be built in 12 months, and an undersea cable between the UK and France can be laid in ten days, but approval and grid connections can take years.

«

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If – when – the UK installs heat pumps to replace gas boilers, electricity demand will spike • The Conversation

Ali Ehsan:

»

In its bid to massively reduce household use of greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050, the UK government aims to encourage the installation of 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028.

Heat pumps are a relatively new technology that take heat from the air outside, or the ground, to be circulated around a central heating and hot water system, using electricity. They are far more clean and energy efficient than gas.

The increased electricity demand caused by heat pumps if millions more people switch to this form of heating could place an “unmanageable burden” on the electrical grid, increasing the risk of power cuts, according to recent research using data from 6,600 gas-heated homes and 600 homes with heat pumps.

Without additional investments in electricity networks and additional innovations, such power cuts will be more likely.

«

What’s the betting the government will put off doing this until it’s much too late?
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Why carmakers can’t just transition to the newest chips • Jalopnik

Adam Ismail:

»

Car companies use a varied selection of chips that tend to be many times larger than what’s employed in most consumer electronics — perhaps as big as 45 or 90 nanometers. [For comparison, this year’s phones use 5nm processes.] These are often used for simple tasks like raising and lowering windows and climate control.

The dilemma is that if those chips are tiny rather than huge, a given size wafer will yield many more of them. Miniaturization thus makes supply easier to maintain, and allows chip manufacturers to reap a more lucrative return on their investments.

“So, chip fabrication for older (bigger) lithographic features tends to be retired or at least new fabs using these older technologies won’t be built to meet an increase in demand,” [Fellow at the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers, Thomas] Coughlin sums up. “Overall, the chip companies do have a valid point.”

However, to suggest as Gelsinger did that the burden to adapt should fall squarely on automakers simplifies the issue. General purpose chipmakers don’t seem to grasp the unique challenges of the automotive sector — something that became clear to me after chatting with Jon M. Quigley, Society of Automotive Engineers member and columnist at Automotive Industries.

“Qualifying a product, specifically testing activities, are costly and requires time, talent, and equipment,” Quigley said. “Some of the test equipment requirements are expensive and often not on hand at the OEM but will require an external lab, and booking time at this lab can be a long lead time activity, and is necessary for certain product certifications. Depending upon the vehicle system commonality, this testing might have to be performed on multiple vehicle platforms.”

«

So the chips aren’t in plentiful supply, and the fabs can’t really be turned on and off like light switches.
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Salesforce accidentally teaches us about visual weight • The Good Data Project

Nate Elliott, on a truly egregious bit of data misrepresentation from Salesforce’s site:

»

1. The bubble chart overweights the largest responses. The chart above says about twice as many companies involve IT in app development as involve marketing (81% vs 42%). But the bubble representing IT is 3.7x bigger than the bubble representing marketing — almost double the size it should be.

The problem: Salesforce used diameter rather than area to scale the bubbles. The “marketing” bubble is about half as wide as the “IT” bubble, which at first sounds correct. But as we learned in school, the area of a circle is πr². If you want to make one circle half the size of another, reduce the diameter by about 29%, not by 50%.

Nearly every bubble chart I see contains this error. If you’re going to represent data with bubbles, scale them based on their area.

2. Salesforce’s pyramid charts are even worse. Think this report can’t do worse than the bubble chart? Think again. Salesforce’s triangles are much more deceptive than their circles.

«

Then they have a pie chart that’s even worse. Just when you thought you couldn’t screw up a pie chart.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A speech had been prepared for Richard Nixon in case Apollo 11 crashed on the Moon in 1969. Now you can hear him read it – sort of. CC-licensed photo by GPA Photo Archive 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 surly at all. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

With all that’s going on, you’d be making a mistake not to buy Social Warming, my book about the inevitably deleterious effects of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

The Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, says she wants to fix the company, not harm it • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz:

»

Ms. Haugen resigned from Google at the beginning of 2014. Two months later, a blood clot in her thigh landed her in the intensive care unit.

A family acquaintance hired to assist her with errands became her main companion during a year she spent largely homebound. The young man bought groceries, took her to doctors’ appointments, and helped her regain the capacity to walk.

“It was a really important friendship, and then I lost him,” she said.

The friend, who had once held liberal political views, was spending increasing amounts of time reading online forums about how dark forces were manipulating politics. In an interview, the man recalled Ms. Haugen as having unsuccessfully tried to intervene as he gravitated toward a mix of the occult and white nationalism. He severed their friendship and left San Francisco before later abandoning such beliefs, he said.

Ms. Haugen’s health improved, and she went back to work. But the loss of her friendship changed the way she thought about social media, she said.

“It’s one thing to study misinformation, it’s another to lose someone to it,” she said. “A lot of people who work on these products only see the positive side of things.”

When a Facebook recruiter got in touch at the end of 2018, Ms. Haugen said, she replied that she might be interested if the job touched on democracy and the spread of false information. During interviews, she said, she told managers about her friend and how she wanted to help Facebook prevent its own users from going down similar paths.

She started in June 2019, part of the roughly 200-person Civic Integrity team, which focused on issues around elections world-wide. While it was a small piece of Facebook’s overall policing efforts, the team became a central player in investigating how the platform could spread political falsehoods, stoke violence and be abused by malicious governments.

«

More coverage at the NY Times; plus a transcript of her 60 Minutes interview.

Every week is Facebook week, isn’t it?
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It’s time to stand up to Facebook • The Washington Post

Jennifer Rubin:

»

Haugen’s claims follow similar warnings from others. In a viral TED talk last year, Yaël Eisenstat, who worked on elections integrity at Facebook and is currently a fellow at Berggruen Institute, said “social media companies like Facebook profit off of segmenting us and feeding us personalized content that both validates and exploits our biases.” She explained, “Their bottom line depends on provoking a strong emotion to keep us engaged, often incentivizing the most inflammatory and polarizing voices, to the point where finding common ground no longer feels possible. And despite a growing chorus of people crying out for the platforms to change, it’s clear they will not do enough on their own.”

«

Eisenstat was hired by Facebook in autumn 2018 – she thought, as a former CIA officer, that she’d be working on election integrity. Instead she got sidelined and found herself doing something around ads. She left within months, frustrated and angry. So it’s not only using Facebook that creates those emotions.
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Facebook is weaker than we knew • NY Times

Kevin Roose:

»

there’s another way to read the series [of leaked documents printed in the WSJ], and it’s the interpretation that has reverberated louder inside my brain as each new installment has landed.

Which is: Facebook is in trouble.

Not financial trouble, or legal trouble, or even senators-yelling-at-Mark-Zuckerberg trouble. What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. It’s a cloud of existential dread that hangs over an organization whose best days are behind it, influencing every managerial priority and product decision and leading to increasingly desperate attempts to find a way out. This kind of decline is not necessarily visible from the outside, but insiders see a hundred small, disquieting signs of it every day — user-hostile growth hacks, frenetic pivots, executive paranoia, the gradual attrition of talented colleagues.

…if these leaked documents proved anything, it is how un-Godzilla-like Facebook feels. Internally, the company worries that it is losing power and influence, not gaining it, and its own research shows that many of its products aren’t thriving organically. Instead, it is going to increasingly extreme lengths to improve its toxic image, and to stop users from abandoning its apps in favor of more compelling alternatives.

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There has certainly been a sort of desperation about how Facebook keeps trying new things which reminds me rather of how Google kept trying more things after its big hit of search. Google isn’t going away, but its presence in the rest of our lives feels more residual than expected, say, ten years ago.
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Clearview AI has new tools to identify you in photos • WIRED

Will Knight:

»

The company’s cofounder and CEO, Hoan Ton-That, tells WIRED that Clearview has now collected more than 10 billion images from across the web—more than three times as many as has been previously reported.

Ton-That says the larger pool of photos means users, most often law enforcement, are more likely to find a match when searching for someone. He also claims the larger data set makes the company’s tool more accurate.

Clearview combined web-crawling techniques, advances in machine learning that have improved facial recognition, and a disregard for personal privacy to create a surprisingly powerful tool.

Ton-That demonstrated the technology through a smartphone app by taking a photo of the reporter. The app produced dozens of images from numerous US and international websites, each showing the correct person in images captured over more than a decade. The allure of such a tool is obvious, but so is the potential for it to be misused.

Clearview’s actions sparked public outrage and a broader debate over expectations of privacy in an era of smartphones, social media, and AI. Critics say the company is eroding personal privacy. The ACLU sued Clearview in Illinois under a law that restricts the collection of biometric information; the company also faces class action lawsuits in New York and California. Facebook and Twitter have demanded that Clearview stop scraping their sites.

The pushback has not deterred Ton-That. He says he believes most people accept or support the idea of using facial recognition to solve crimes. “The people who are worried about it, they are very vocal, and that’s a good thing, because I think over time we can address more and more of their concerns,” he says.

«

Taking a picture of a reporter is, generally, an easy win – journalists are terribly vain. Though I wonder if there will be more support if Clearview is used to solve a really awful crime; CCTV is hard to argue against after it was used to detect the killer of Sarah Everard.
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How Ozy Fest was about to become the next Fyre Festival — until a heat wave (and insurance claim) bailed them out • Forbes

Jemima McEvoy:

»

One day before the July 2019 kickoff to “Ozy Fest,” a strange amalgam of speeches, panels and entertainment scheduled to be held on arguably the biggest stage in America, Central Park’s Great Lawn, Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson was all smiles: “I’ve heard people describe it as TED meets Coachella,” Watson told the audience on CNBC’s Squawk Box, as he sat across from one of his board members, hedge fund billionaire Marc Lasry, and baseball superstar turned Shark Tank mogul Alex Rodriguez, who had been positioned as co-host. More than 100,000 people had already been billed to attend — Watson boasted that a brunch event alone with chef Marcus Samuelsson would draw 10,000 people — putting it into the rarified air of South-by-Southwest and Art Basel, except that rather than just tech, music or art, Ozy Fest would feature, well, a bit of everything.

Or, in reality, nothing. Hours later, the event had been cancelled, with a sudden heat wave as the ostensible culprit. That masked something far more fundamental. “Things were not ready in every aspect,” says one employee involved with the festival. “It was going to be Fyre Fest.”

…What follows is an account of an event that devolved into a financial and logistics nightmare, from wildly-inflated ticket sales to exaggerated celebrity appearances, with a twist ending: the last-minute cancelation that turned what would have publicly exposed Ozy’s untruths into a large insurance windfall.

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It’s possible you can overdose on schadenfreude, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.
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Britain seeks views on plugging back into European power market • Reuters

Nora Buli:

»

Britain began a consultation on Thursday on how to realign its electricity market more closely to Europe and improve cross-border trading after Brexit decoupled it from a common system, leading to discrepancies in market prices.

Interconnecting cables increase the ability of Britain’s electricity market to trade with others, enhance energy system flexibility and aid decarbonisation, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) said.

“We’re seeking views on the current arrangements for trading electricity on power exchanges in the GB wholesale electricity market and our proposals to support efficient cross-border trading,” BEIS added in a statement.

The British electricity market previously operated a uniform day-ahead price which was settled through shared order books on exchanges Nord Pool and Epex Spot.

But when Britain’s EU exit was completed on Jan. 1, it left the bloc’s internal energy market and its market-coupling system, leading the exchanges to run fully separated auctions, settling and clearing at different and independent prices.

«

Oh, suddenly realised there might be some effects, did we? (The consultation is here.)
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In Event of Moon Disaster

Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund:

»

In July 1969, much of the world celebrated “one giant leap for mankind.” Fifty years later, nothing is quite so straightforward.

In Event of Moon Disaster illustrates the possibilities of deepfake technologies by reimagining this seminal event. What if the Apollo 11 mission had gone wrong and the astronauts had not been able to return home? A contingency speech for this possibility was prepared for, but never delivered by, President Nixon – until now.

In Event of Moon Disaster is an immersive art project inviting you into an alternative history, asking us all to consider how new technologies can bend, redirect and obfuscate the truth around us.

To construct the story a variety of techniques of misinformation were used – from simple deceptive editing to more complex deepfakes technologies.

«

Utterly stunning. A brilliant choice of material – because it’s about an old event, you’re not surprised by the audio quality. Completely worth six minutes of your time. And if you’ve got an extra four and a half, compare Ronald Reagan’s real address after the loss of seven Challenger astronauts, with its famous “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” phrase. For my money, the Nixon speech soars above it. (Via John Naughton.)
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Google is scrapping its plan to offer bank accounts to users • WSJ

Peter Rudegeair, David Benoit and Andrew Ackerman:

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Google is abandoning plans to pitch bank accounts to its users, marking a retreat from an effort to make the tech giant a bigger name in finance.

The Alphabet unit announced almost two years ago that users of its Google Pay digital wallet would be able to sign up for enhanced checking accounts and debit cards at a handful of financial institutions large and small, including Citigroup and Stanford Federal Credit Union.

The new offerings, called Plex accounts, would sync with Google Pay, carry both Google and bank branding and provide a digital dashboard of where and how users spent and saved. Plex was billed as a new way to bank, with an emphasis on simplicity and financial wellness and without monthly or overdraft fees.

The project was initially expected to debut in 2020. A series of missed deadlines, along with the April departure of the Google Pay executive who championed the project, prompted Google to pull the plug on Plex, people familiar with the matter said.

A Google spokeswoman said the company would now focus primarily on “delivering digital enablement for banks and other financial services providers rather than us serving as the provider of these services.”

«

Apparently there were about 10,000 people per week joining the waiting list, which had reached 400,000. The attraction of a Google-operated bank account to American users is obvious to anyone who has ever had the misfortune of tangling with the American banking system. To anyone outside the US, the idea that you’d hand over your finances to a search company seems weird, of course. (Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica says the root problem is upheaval at the Google Pay division.)
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Do Americans know what a massive ripoff American life really is? • Eudaimonia and Co

umair haque:

»

I’ve recently moved to the States — shudder — for a year or two. And I’m shocked at how expensive just life is. For no good reason at all.

When I put my economist hat on, a fact becomes clear to me. American life is a gigantic rip-off, one of the world’s biggest, and that’s why America is now effectively a country of poor people, and that makes it a nation of angry, cruel, and selfish ones, too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start over. American life is the biggest ripoff in the world. Or at least one of the biggest, in the top five, certainly. Just…existing. It costs way, way more than it should. So much so that America cannot ever move forward as a society. So, trapped in a cycle, which economists call a “poverty trap,” Americans now stay poor.

Americans don’t quite get this, though. Why would they? They’ve never lived anywhere else. So let me give you a few examples which, especially if you’re American, might be illuminating. We’ll begin with basic bills, and then zoom out from there.

«

Poverty traps are hardly unique to America. But this piece includes the shocking (and novel, to me) statistic that the average American dies $60,000 in debt. It also makes you realise where the impetus for globalisation came from: if prices couldn’t be brought down, the country would collapse under its own prices.
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You probably don’t need a VPN • Vice

Joseph Cox:

»

You probably don’t need a VPN. Despite all the marketing from VPN companies that you should pay them for a virtual private network to use from your home internet and, especially, from public wifi, most Americans may be better off not paying for a commercial VPN, according to multiple security experts.

The underlying reason: The internet is a very different landscape in 2021 than it was 10 or even five years ago. Although of course some people will still benefit from a VPN, and particularly those with a higher degree of threat against them, most Americans can probably save that $5 or so a month.

“It’s time we retire the stock advice to get a personal VPN,” Bob Lord, former chief security officer at the Democratic National Committee, told Motherboard in an email. “Most people do not need personal VPNs today because the internet is much safer than it was in 2010. Personal VPNs create additional risks. Giving everyone advice that only pertains to some people misdirects them from the steps that will actually help them secure their digital lives.”

…Security researcher Kenn White added that “for the vast majority of consumers, commercial VPN services add very little value and frankly most incur more security risk for the user.”

One risk is some VPN providers use self-signed root CAs [certificate authorities], which allow the creator to read encrypted traffic coming from a computer. White said this is done in the pursuit of malware prevention, but that “is just a different way of saying ‘intercepting your (otherwise) encrypted web and mail traffic.'”

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So the service to prevent people reading your web traffic is… reading your web traffic? I’ve been saying this for absolutely ages: VPNs are useful only for a tiny number of jobs (usually, pretending to be in another country).
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What investors saw in Ozy Media • The New York Times

Ben Smith has the body on the slab:

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nobody I spoke with over the last week was more piqued than Roland Martin and Todd Brown, two members of a group led by the mogul Byron Allen that shook the advertising industry this year, with a campaign meant to persuade marketers to spend more money with Black-owned media companies. The effort led to a wave of meetings and the hope that serious ad dollars would start flowing to companies like Mr. Martin’s Black Star Network, a streaming channel.

Instead, the giant ad agencies that steer much of the digital ad business “had found a safe Black space, a comfortable medium — and we were shocked that it was Ozy,” said Mr. Brown, a former head of ad sales of Ebony and Jet magazines whose company, Urban Edge Networks, owns a streaming service for sporting events at historically Black colleges and universities. “It was a story and not a business — but the story is what people wanted to buy,” he said in a telephone interview last week.

Mr. Martin said the campaign he had helped start didn’t wind up driving more advertising dollars to his channel. Particularly galling, he said, in light of the revelations that Ozy had exaggerated the size of its audience, was the reason the advertising agencies gave him when they turned him down: They were not confident that he was measuring his audience rigorously enough.

“I look at the demands they made on me — my metrics, numbers,” he said of the advertising agencies. “Now I’m sitting there going, ‘Y’all made me jump through all these hoops? It was that easy just to lie and make up this stuff?’”

«

Yup. They prefer the lie than the reality. Maybe, after WeWork and Theranos and now this, there will be a realisation that diligence is required. Also: if you read the story, Carlos Watson is still lying and lying and lying.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You too can stay on the International Space Station – though the charge for using the toilet is a bit more than a penny. CC-licensed photo by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center 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. What, don’t you like queueing? It’s still fashionable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook struggles to quell uproar over Instagram’s effect on teens • The New York Times

Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel and Ryan Mac:

»

some of Facebook’s containment has at times backfired with its own workers. This week, the company downplayed the internal research that The Journal had partly based its articles on, suggesting that the findings were limited and imprecise. That angered some employees who had worked on the research, three people said. They have congregated on group chats to decry the characterizations as unfair, and some have privately threatened to quit.

In one group text message chain shared with The New York Times, Facebook data scientists and researchers discussed how they were being “embarrassed” by their own employer. On a company message board, one employee wrote in a post this week: “They are making a mockery of the research.”

“Facebook’s UX research team is one of the best in the industry,” said Sahar Massachi, a Facebook engineer who worked on election integrity and left the company in 2019. “Instead of attacking their employees, Facebook should be giving integrity researchers the authority to more fully do their jobs.”

The furor is unlikely to die down. On Sunday, the whistle-blower who leaked the internal research and is a former Facebook employee is set to reveal her identity and discuss the documents on “60 Minutes.” She will then appear at a Senate hearing on Tuesday to testify about what she discovered while conducting research at Facebook.

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Look like I chose the wrong week to stop linking to stories about Facebook getting in hot water over its effects on users.
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• Learn more about the deleterious effects of Facebook (and other social networks) in Social Warming, my latest book.

Ozy Media, once a darling of investors, shuts down in a swift unraveling • The New York Times

Ben Smith and Katie Robertson:

»

Advertisers including Chevrolet, Walmart, Facebook, Target and Goldman Sachs itself — many of which had been paying for placement on “The Carlos Watson Show” — hit the brakes on their spending with Ozy.

By Friday afternoon, Mr. Watson and the other remaining board member, Michael Moe (another high-profile investment figure, who had published a book called “Finding the Next Starbucks”), concluded that the company could not recover and issued the farewell statement through a spokeswoman. Mr. Watson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

CNN, Insider and other publications reported this week that working conditions at Ozy were difficult, and The Times, along with other publications, raised questions about the company’s claims of audience size for its online videos and website.

The Ozy staff received the news that the company was no more on Friday afternoon. “It’s heartbreaking for all the people who poured their hearts and souls into this company and produced journalism often under grueling, sometimes hostile, conditions that deserved a much wider audience,” Pooja Bhatia, a writer who worked at Ozy from 2013 until 2017, said in an interview shortly after she got word.

Nick Fouriezos, an Ozy reporter who left in June, said, “We were all devastated by the amount of deception that was going on by leadership, but I would stand 100% by the journalism that was done there, and the people that were working there were some of the most passionate hardworking journalists anywhere.”

«

Gave up the ghost on the day I forecast it might last four weeks. I think the journalists there were deceiving themselves. They were producing utter internet chum: stuff you spread in the water to attract attention, nothing more. And I think it would be worth asking the investors how much they really put into it.

Other reading: Axios (which previously wrote articles lauding Ozy to the sky, based on numbers provided by Ozy) and, better, Ryan Broderick goes into the analytics.
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The media business has a bigger Ozy problem • The Rebooting

Brian Morrissey:

»

Back in 2003, Viacom’s Mel Karmazin visited Google, where founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin showed how the search engine could tell advertisers exactly what was working. Mel wasn’t impressed: “You’re fucking with the magic, boys.” Digital media, with its trackability and openness, would be where artifices crumble. The entire promise of internet publishing was that lazy gatekeepers would be overtaken by an army of newcomers that used the cheap reach of the internet to build solid businesses on the back of high quality content. Didn’t turn out that way.

In fact, more than being a source of truth, digital media has provided more opportunities to create what I think of as synthetic media. You can create Potemkin villages of media properties that appear like the real thing. Need numbers? Buy followers and email subscribers so you can boast about them in press releases. Pay ComScore to not report your internet traffic – and really, should we trust a company that’s admitted to accounting fraud to count audiences? Nobody takes sales kits as gospel, so why not redefine the metrics to make the numbers even bigger. Back in 2018, Vice claimed an audience of 288 million. Brit + Co still claims an audience of 175 million people. By the way, if you want high time on site, bots behave more reliably than humans. As Max Read memorably wrote in 2018, much of the internet is fake. Underpinning all of this is the fuel of digital media: the expectation to show hockey-stick growth. But publishing doesn’t work like that. Building sustainable brands, built on trust and habit, takes a long time.

This is a business culture problem. We tend to gloss over dishonesty as hustle and treat fake-it-till-you-make-it as a virtue when it’s just not being straight. I always felt naive and even moralistic because I have found this kind of dishonesty deplorable.

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NASA will allow private astronauts on the ISS for $11,250-$22,500 a day • Ars Technica

Jonathan Gitlin:

»

the space agency issued a new directive that allows commercial manufacturing and production to occur on the ISS, as well as marketing activities. It’s not quite “anything goes,” though—approved activities have to have a link to NASA’s mission, stimulate the development of a LEO [low earth orbit] economy, or actually require a zero-G environment. NASA has published a price list for the ISS, and it’s setting aside 5% of the station’s annual resources (including astronaut time and cargo mass) for commercial use.

Be prepared to pay to reach LEO. The cheapest cargo option is $3,000/kg to get it there, then an additional $3,000/kg to dispose of it in the trash. If you want it back again, that’ll be a $6,000/kg return fee, although round trip prices per kg are more expensive if you need power or life support on the way home.

In addition to manufacturing and production, NASA set pricing for space tourists—it’s calling them private astronaut missions—aboard the ISS, too. Regenerative life support and toilet access? That’s a snip at $11,250 per crew day. The more expensive “Crew Supplies” option—$22,500—sounds more hospitable, including as it does “food, air, crew provisions, supplies, medical kit, [and] exercise equipment.” NASA says it will support up to two short-duration private missions to the ISS each year, and those missions will travel on a US launch vehicle developed under the Commercial Crew program.

«

Somehow that “$3,000/kg to dispose of it” reminds me of the planet Bethselamin in the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, where

»

the net balance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave; so every time you go to the lavatory there, it is vitally important to get a receipt.

«

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Hundreds of scam apps hit over 10 million Android devices • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

»

Researchers from the mobile security firm Zimperium say the massive scamming campaign has plagued Android since November 2020. As is often the case, the attackers were able to sneak benign-looking apps like “Handy Translator Pro,” “Heart Rate and Pulse Tracker,” and “Bus – Metrolis 2021” into Google Play as fronts for something more sinister. After downloading one of the malicious apps, a victim would receive a flood of notifications, five an hour, that prompted them to “confirm” their phone number to claim a prize. The “prize” claim page loaded through an in-app browser, a common technique for keeping malicious indicators out of the code of the app itself. Once a user entered their digits, the attackers signed them up for a monthly recurring charge of about $42 through the premium SMS services feature of wireless bills. It’s a mechanism that normally lets you pay for digital services or, say, send money to a charity via text message. In this case, it went directly to crooks.

The techniques are common in malicious Play Store apps, and premium SMS fraud in particular is a notorious issue. But the researchers say it’s significant that attackers were able to string these known approaches together in a way that was still extremely effective—and in staggering numbers—even as Google has continuously improved its Android security and Play Store defenses.

«

My point here is to focus on the use of premium SMS scams. Years ago, hackers would take over the programs that dialled in to the internet (this used to be a thing, younger readers) so that rather than calling a local (cheap or free) number it would call a premium number. (British Telecom did nothing about this for ages, allowing people to unknowingly run up gigantic bills for their internet use. Under standard terms, BT got a slice of the revenue.)

Now it’s about premium text scams. But maybe you can see the connection: premium rate numbers. Always there to be abused.
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Low oxygen levels along Pacific Northwest coast a ‘silent’ climate change crisis • The Seattle Times

Michala Garrison:

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Nearly two decades ago, fishers discovered an odd occurrence off the coast of Oregon. They were pulling up pots of dead or lethargic crabs.

At first they suspected a chemical spill or a red tide. But instead, they learned, dangerously low levels of dissolved oxygen in the ocean water were to blame.

The crabs had suffocated.

These swaths of hypoxic areas have surfaced every summer on Pacific Northwest shores since it was first recorded in 2002. They are spurred by naturally occurring coastal upwellings and algae blooms, exacerbated by climate change, said Francis Chan, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies at Oregon State University.

Akin to fire season, hypoxia season arrived earlier this year — the earliest start in 20 years, according to Chan. But unlike wildfire, or other visible climate emergencies, it’s gone largely unrecognized.

“It’s kind of a silent problem happening out there,” said Chan. “This year, I can look out and see trees with one side burnt because of the heat wave. As I’m driving on McKenzie highway, I can see Mount Jefferson has no snow on it. But when you drive out to the ocean, it looks exactly the same as last summer.”

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Pulling methane out of the atmosphere could slow global warming—if we can figure out how to do it • MIT Technology Review

Casey Crownhart:

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Reducing methane in the atmosphere by 40% could reduce warming 0.4ºC by 2050, according to a new paper. Researchers also published a plan today outlining potential approaches and calling for more research into methane removal technology, which has so far been mostly confined to the lab.

Sucking methane from the air might deliver a bigger bang for the buck than just removing carbon dioxide.
“There’s probably nothing we could do that has a bigger effect on shaving peak temperatures over the next few decades than removing methane,” says Rob Jackson, a researcher at Stanford and a coauthor of both studies.

Methane is relatively scarce: carbon dioxide is about 200 times more concentrated in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, it has contributed around 30% of total global warming to date, or about 0.5ºC, according to a recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Though its lifetime in the atmosphere is only about ten years, over short time frames it is about 86 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

…Because of its short lifetime, if methane emissions were cut today, atmospheric levels would drop off quickly. In a recent UN Environment Programme report on methane that Naik coauthored, researchers estimated that cutting methane emissions 45% today could reduce warming 0.28ºC by midcentury—keeping the world under the target of less than 1.5ºC of warming over preindustrial levels, as defined by the Paris agreement.

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It’s always about controlling emissions. We’re just not going to drag this stuff out of the air. CO2 is 0.04% of the air. So methane is an infinitesimal part of it. We have to rely on the decay, and control emissions.
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October 2011: the crypto-currency • The New Yorker

Joshua Davis, writing in October 2011:

»

When bitcoin launched, my laptop would have had a reasonable chance of winning from time to time. Now, however, the computing power dedicated to playing the bitcoin lottery exceeds that of the world’s most powerful supercomputer. So I set up an account with Mt. Gox, the leading bitcoin exchange, and transferred a hundred and twenty dollars. A few days later, I bought 10.305 bitcoins with the press of a button and just as easily sent them to the Howard Johnson [hotel].

It was a simple transaction that masked a complex calculus. In 1971, Richard Nixon announced that US dollars could no longer be redeemed for gold. Ever since, the value of the dollar has been based on our faith in it. We trust that dollars will be valuable tomorrow, so we accept payment in dollars today. Bitcoin is similar: you have to trust that the system won’t get hacked, and that Nakamoto won’t suddenly emerge to somehow plunder it all. Once you believe in it, the actual cost of a bitcoin—five dollars or thirty?—depends on factors such as how many merchants are using it, how many might use it in the future, and whether or not governments ban it.

My daughter and I arrived at the Howard Johnson on a hot Friday afternoon and were met in the lobby by Jefferson Kim, the hotel’s cherubic twenty-eight-year-old general manager. “You’re the first person who’s ever paid in bitcoin,” he said, shaking my hand enthusiastically.

Kim explained that he had started mining bitcoins two months earlier. He liked that the currency was governed by a set of logical rules, rather than the mysterious machinations of the Federal Reserve. A dollar today, he pointed out, buys you what a nickel bought a century ago, largely because so much money has been printed. And, he asked, why trust a currency backed by a government that is 14 trillion dollars in debt?

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It’s fascinating to read this, almost exactly ten years later. Those hotel payment bitcoins are now equivalent to half a million dollars (but the hotel owner sold them at once). Mt Gox was hacked into oblivion. And bitcoin is hardly used to *buy* things any more – unless the Great Experiment in El Salvador is regaining that ground. I suspect not.
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Britain is heading into a nightmarish winter • The New York Times

Samuel Earle:

»

The signs of breakdown are everywhere: empty shelves in supermarkets, food going to waste in fields, more and more vacancy posters tacked to the windows of shops and restaurants. Meat producers have even called on the government to let them hire prisoners to plug the gap.

One of the main causes of this predicament is Brexit, or at least the government’s handling of Brexit. Britain’s protracted departure from the bloc, undertaken without any real effort by Mr. Johnson to ensure a smooth transition, led to an exodus of European workers — a process then compounded by the pandemic. As many as 1.3 million overseas nationals left Britain between July 2019 and September 2020.

Yet as it became clear that Britain faced substantial shortages in labor, the Conservatives refused to respond. They bloviated, calling it a “manufactured situation.” They prevaricated, assuring the public there was nothing to worry about. And, seeing the chance to recast their negligence as benevolence, they claimed their failure to act was because they wanted companies to pay British workers more instead of rely on cheap foreign labor.

This alibi for inaction is unconvincing. In the Netherlands, for example, new legislation has improved the pay and working conditions for truck drivers. In Britain, conditions remain among the worst in Europe.

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Nice use of “bloviated”.
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Fuel supplies: mortar tanker tailed by drivers looking for petrol • BBC News

»

A tanker driver has told how he was tailed by about 20 drivers who were dismayed to discover he was not transporting petrol.

Johnny Anderson, who drives for Weaver Haulage, was transporting 44 tonnes of mortar from Bilston, Wolverhampton, to a building site in Northamptonshire.

When he reached his destination, he saw a line of traffic backed up behind him.

“The man at the front… actually said ‘You could have stopped and told us you weren’t a petrol tanker,” he said.

The incident came as lengthy queues formed at forecourts amid petrol and diesel supply problems.
Mr Anderson, from Harworth, Nottinghamshire, said he was delivering cement to the David Wilson Homes development at Overstone on Thursday.

He was on the A43 when he first realised he was being followed. “I didn’t notice initially but then on the dual carriageway, I noticed nobody was overtaking me and saw a string of about 20 cars behind me,” he said.

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It’s basically a sort of imprinting, except with humans rather than ducklings.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Apologies for Friday, when those who subscribe by email received a 10-edition version, followed on Saturday by the email that should have gone out on Friday.

Why did this happen? Mailchimp is set up to poll the RSS feed for a new post that it hasn’t seen before at 0800 British time (BST or GMT). If I’ve failed to get the day’s post published by then, it won’t be in the RSS feed, so no email. In that situation, I can publish a little later and run an “urgent” (substitute) Mailchimp run – but that looks at the RSS feed and takes in the most recent 10, because it usually hasn’t been run in the previous 10 days.

But why was the post late? I usually do it the night before. In fact, I usually automate almost all the process (apart from writing the headlines and choosing the picture): I have a script that clicks the buttons on the web pages.

Except WordPress keeps changing the underlying HTML names of the buttons. This completely confuses the script, which then falls over, so I have to press the buttons myself. This I can usually manage, but on Thursday night WordPress (like many sites) had an SSL certificate failure (according to my install of MacOS, which is quite old), which meant I had to tweak some of the scripts so the curl command would work with the failed certificate.

In all the commotion, I forgot to press the key button to schedule the post. So you didn’t get an email on time. Until you did, and then got more.

This could be fixed if WordPress would stop monkeying around with the HTML, which seems to change almost from month to month. It was stable for years – and then in October 2020, they changed it all. Sometimes, not changing is the best change.

Your phone can tell if you’re being affected by marijuana use, say researchers. CC-licensed photo by Cold%2C Indrid 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. Half full. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook endures Senate grilling over Instagram’s effects on teens • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang:

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[Instagram CEO Adam] Mosseri announced [this week] that Facebook would pause plans to release a version of Instagram aimed at children in elementary and middle school — a rare decision by Facebook to change business plans after public pressure. But he has continued to defend the idea of the app, saying the reality is that children are online at very young ages and that Facebook is best equipped to create a safe environment for children on social media. The company has said it could provide stronger safety and privacy features on an app for young children than what is possible on its main Instagram app, pointing to what YouTube has done with YouTube Kids.

[Facebook global head of safety, Antigone] Davis reiterated some of that message in the hearing. But lawmakers balked at the company’s justification for an app for even younger children in light of the research on teenagers.

“Exploiting the peer pressure of popularity and ultimately endangering their health,” said Senator Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. “Facebook is just like Big Tobacco, pushing a product that they know is harmful to the health of young people, pushing it to them early.”

Congress has held numerous hearings with senior leaders at Facebook and other large tech companies in recent years, questioning them about issues including the spread of misinformation, market power and privacy. But legislators have struggled to write laws that address their concerns about those issues.

Though members of Congress have become more sophisticated about the tech industry, they have been focused narrowly on privacy and antitrust, said Karen Kornbluh, a senior fellow focused on internet issues at the German Marshall Fund.

“This week the dam seemed to break,” Ms. Kornbluh said. The scrutiny on Facebook has made more lawmakers realize that researchers should have access to company data, to be able to assess how the services are working, she said.

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Honestly, I do try not to include “Facebook accused of doing bad things, hauled in front of lawmakers” links, but you can’t ignore this sort of thing. The stakes are rising all the time.
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If you want to understand more about Facebook (and other social networks), read Social Warming, my latest book.

Half of unvaccinated workers say they’d rather quit than get a shot – but real-world data suggest few follow through • The Conversation

Jack Barry, Ann Christiano and Annie Neimand:

»

while it is easy and cost-free to tell a pollster you’ll quit your job, actually doing so when it means losing a paycheck you and your family may depend upon is another matter.

And based on a sample of companies that already have vaccine mandates in place, the actual number who do resign rather than get the vaccine is much smaller than the survey data suggest.

Houston Methodist Hospital, for example, required its 25,000 workers to get a vaccine by June 7. Before the mandate, about 15% of its employees were unvaccinated. By mid-June, that percentage had dropped to 3% and hit 2% by late July. A total of 153 workers [less than 1%] were fired or resigned, while another 285 [1.1%] were granted medical or religious exemptions and 332 [1.3%] were allowed to defer it.

At Jewish Home Family in Rockleigh, New Jersey, only five of its 527 workers [less than 1%] quit following its vaccine mandate. Two out of 250 workers [less than 1%] left Westminster Village in Bloomington, Illinois, and even in deeply conservative rural Alabama, a state with one of the lowest vaccine uptake rates, Hanceville Nursing & Rehab Center lost only six of its 260 employees [~2%].

Delta Airlines didn’t mandate a shot, but in August it did subject unvaccinated workers to a US$200 per month health insurance surcharge. Yet the airline said fewer than 2% of employees have quit over the policy.

«

So basically it’s big talk but there’s no conviction behind it at all. Having the detail from the real-world experiment tells us a lot more. The UK has mandated vaccination for care home workers: it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens there, because care homes are petrified. Perhaps though social networks (looking at you, Facebook) amplify this stuff disproportionately.
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Smartphone sensors are capable of detecting cannabis high and have the potential to provide early intervention • Phys.org

Stevens Institute of Technology:

»

With the rise of marijuana legalization in the United States, existing cannabis intoxication detection methods such as blood, urine, or saliva tests have limitations. Given the possible impairment in psychomotor functioning related to a cannabis “high,” such as slowed response time, this study can provide a way toward a just-in-time adaptive intervention among cannabis users.

Smart phone sensors that detect motion were monitored in young adults who reported cannabis use at least twice-per-week. More than 100 features were used to detect whether each participant was intoxicated, including GPS, noise, light and activity levels. Researchers then looked at day of week and time of day smartphone usage, while subjects self-reported being either “high” or “sober.”

Bae and her colleagues, including those at Rutgers and Carnegie Mellon University, found that the combination of the two datasets predicted cannabis intoxication with 90% accuracy in a natural environment. Bae created the AI to detect marijuana intoxication, which can potentially be applied to detect the emergence of a risky behavior, leading to early intervention in everyday settings.

“It’s important to give people the chance to change their behavior before something negative happens,” Bae said. “This study aims to predict human behavior as a way to support people while physically or cognitively impaired.”

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So the reports the other day about iPhones monitoring mood can sort of be done. (I didn’t link to it because it is soooo speculative. This is much more realistic.)
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USB-C cables are getting new, confusing logos for faster 240W charging standard • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

»

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) — the group that maintains the USB standard across its many varied incarnations — has introduced new, official logos for companies to use to brand their USB-C cables and packaging to go with its USB4 and 240W power standards. The goal is a noble one, aiming to help ease the confusion about the different types of USB-C cables (which can differ widely in things like charging and data transfer speeds) when you’re buying one.

Naturally, the USB-IF, in its… unique wisdom, has chosen to simplify things the only way it knows how: a slew of new logos that will soon adorn packaging for cables and chargers to help indicate to customers what charging and data speeds their devices support. Because nothing says “simple” like a chart of seven new logos for charging and data specifications.

The new branding is meant to tie in with the recent USB Power Delivery (USB PD) 3.1 specification that was announced earlier this year, which (confusingly) is part of the USB Type-C Release 2.1 specification, and offers devices that can charge with up to 240W of power — assuming you have the right cable and charger.

«

Never simplify, always confuse. That’s the electronic way. (I was going to say “the American electronic way”, but have you seen the SKU names for Samsung or Sony TVs?)
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18-hour days and panic attacks: former Ozy staffers allege an abusive environment • CNN

Kerry Flynn:

»

[24-year-old Eva] Rodriguez went back to work for a time after she completed the program. It was not until she tested positive for Covid-19 in February and was asked to work through it that she decided to quit, she said.

“It’s like a cult,” Rodriguez said. “I really felt like I would be nothing without them because they had given me so many great opportunities and that I would let them down severely if I ever quit.”

Interviews with nine former Ozy employees suggest Rodriguez’s story was not an isolated incident but rather part of a pervasive trend of staffers being worked to the point of exhaustion or worse. Seven of these former employees spoke with CNN Business on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution — some specifically cited concerns that Watson would try to damage their career prospects if he found out they spoke to the press.

Several of these former employees said they were angered after reading the Times’ story and seeing that Watson had attributed [COO Samir] Rao’s impersonation of a YouTube executive to a mental health crisis and said the company “stood by him,” noting that they’d seen Watson lacking support and empathy for such concerns with other employees in the past.

Watson, who previously worked as a host and commentator at CNBC, CNN and MSNBC, launched Ozy in 2013 as a digital media site with ambitions to cover “what’s new and what’s next.” That tagline, which has not really changed, was partly what attracted many reputable journalists to work for the startup. It was an opportunity, they believed, to not chase other outlets’ reporting and instead tell uncovered stories from across the globe.

«

Ozy saw its chairman resign on Thursday night. (Back when Harvey Weinstein’s company was collapsing, he resigned from that board too.) This story also has an interesting detail about Rao’s behaviour relating to telephone calls. Apparently the company name comes from the poem Ozymandias – which they insist is about the importance of being humble, not the risks of hubris.

How long do we give it – a month?
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Nintendo Switch 4K: developers make games for nonexistent console • Bloomberg

Takashi Mochizuki and Olga Kharif:

»

a system capable of handling 4K games isn’t expected to be released until late next year at the earliest, people familiar with the plans said. That leaves Nintendo at a technical disadvantage to rivals, whose shares have soared this year while Nintendo’s have lost 20%. It also risks alienating developers who have spent months tailoring their games to take advantage of upgraded hardware capabilities.

Nintendo responded to a list of questions by saying Bloomberg’s reporting is “inaccurate” and declined to specify which parts of the information it was referring to. In a tweet after the story’s publication, the company refuted it is supplying tools to drive 4K game development and reiterated it has “no plans” for any new Switch model beside the OLED variant.

After publication, Zynga spokeswoman Sarah Ross disputed what the people familiar with the matter said. “To clarify, Zynga does not have a 4K developer kit from Nintendo,” she said in a statement.

Bloomberg began reporting on details of the product more than a year ago, including the bigger OLED display, the fall release and the higher price. It was also supposed to contain a faster chip from Nvidia Corp. that would enable 4K graphics when connected to a television, people familiar with the plan said in March. Nvidia declined to comment.

But the 4K capability didn’t come to pass. It’s unclear exactly when the design changed. The reason, according to a person familiar with Nintendo’s hardware planning, was component shortages, a far-reaching problem born out of the Covid-19 pandemic. After unveiling the Switch OLED, Nintendo said it had “no plans for launching any other model at this time.”

«

So, let’s unravel. Either Bloomberg is miiiiles wrong, or is dead right. Bloomberg says it has eleven independent sources on this. One, two, three could be wrong, but eleven? Nope. Thus it seems Nintendo is going to do a 4K something. Maybe not called “Switch”. (Thanks Ravi for the pointer.)
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Apple: top 10 podcast subscriptions, free channels (podcast roundup) • Variety

Todd Spangler:

»

Apple for the first time has shared the top paid podcast subscriptions and free channels worldwide, from June 15 through September 15, providing a look at the most popular properties three months after the tech giant launched the services.

Apple’s top paid subscriptions are ranked in order of total subscribed listeners worldwide over the past three months and includes both channels and individual shows. The top free channels ranking is based on total listeners worldwide over the past three months for shows united under each channel and excludes fully paid or “freemium” channels (those with a mix of free and paid content). Apple Podcasts measures listeners as the number of unique devices that have played at least 1 second of an episode.

«

This is very American-oriented, and I don’t listen to any in either set. It would be good to see nation-level versions: those would be properly interesting.
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Why has nuclear power been a flop? • Roots Of Progress

Jason Crawford reviews a book on this topic by Jack Devanney:

»

The proximal cause of nuclear‘s flop is that it is expensive. In most places, it can‘t compete with fossil fuels. Natural gas can provide electricity at 7–8 cents/kWh; coal at 5 c/kWh.

Why is nuclear expensive? I‘m a little fuzzy on the economic model, but the answer seems to be that it‘s in design and construction costs for the plants themselves. If you can build a nuclear plant for around $2.50/W, you can sell electricity cheaply, at 3.5–4 c/kWh. But costs in the US are around 2–3x that. (Or they were—costs are so high now that we don‘t even build plants anymore.)

Why are the construction costs high? Well, they weren‘t always high. Through the 1950s and ‘60s, costs were declining rapidly. A law of economics says that costs in an industry tend to follow a power law as a function of production volume: that is, every time production doubles, costs fall by a constant% (typically 10 to 25%). This function is called the experience curve or the learning curve. Nuclear followed the learning curve up until about 1970, when it inverted and costs started rising.

Plotted over time, with a linear y-axis, the effect is even more dramatic. Devanney calls it the “plume,” as US nuclear constructions costs skyrocketed upwards:

Devanney Figure 7.10: Overnight nuclear plant cost as a function of start of construction. From J. Lovering, A. Yip, and T. Nordhaus, “Historical construction costs of global nuclear reactors” (2016)

This chart also shows that South Korea and India were still building cheaply into the 2000s. Elsewhere in the text, Devanney mentions that Korea, as late as 2013, was able to build for about $2.50/W.

The standard story about nuclear costs is that radiation is dangerous, and therefore safety is expensive. The book argues that this is wrong: nuclear can be made safe and cheap. It should be 3 c/kWh—cheaper than coal.

«

But then Safety reared its unnecessary head.
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Sunak faces the brutal maths of electric vehicles • Financial Times

Chris Giles:

»

Economics teaches us that people respond to incentives and, not surprisingly, the big switch in motoring is happening. Electric vehicles represented 11% of all new car registrations in August, close to double that of a year ago. The speed of the transition is far exceeding expert opinion and Norway’s experience suggests electric vehicles will be getting close to the majority of new sales by 2027, when current official forecasts suggest they might account for roughly a fifth of sales.

So far, the story of the electrification of Britain’s vehicle fleet is one of environmental gains and happy consumers. But this does not take into account the cost to taxpayers and other road users of the switch. Compared with a VW Golf driver, the ID. 3 owner benefits from a £2,500 plug-in grant for the new car, a 5% value added tax rate on electricity, no fuel duty and no annual vehicle excise duty. In addition, company car drivers benefit from much lower income tax on their benefit in kind, in effect giving them a few thousand pounds of additional (almost) tax-free income.

For a private buyer choosing an ID. 3 over a Golf, I calculate the Treasury loses roughly £1,250 a year in revenues. The net loss rises to £2,780 for a basic rate taxpaying company car driver and £4,160 annually for a higher rate taxpayer.

So, for higher-rate taxpayers, every million people who switch to an electric vehicle currently comes with a £4bn annual exchequer cost. That is enough to wipe out a third of the tax increases on earnings that Rishi Sunak has just imposed to bail out the health service and social care.

«

Giles points out, as many are now doing (me included), that road pricing will be a necessity. Who’s going to grasp the nettle and tell everyone?
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Vice-versa • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser, on Wednesday:

»

Strange thought this morning: I bought an electric car and everyone else in the UK has range anxiety!

«

By the end of Thursday the Petrol Retailer’s Association was still reporting that nearly a quarter of fuelling stations were empty, and [only] 50% were full up. There have been stories of stations being emptied within a few hours of a refuelling tanker arriving.

Good for “pure EV” owners. Meanwhile even hybrid owners have to fret because they need the petrol to power the small engine that recharges the battery once that’s discharged. (QSF has been driving EVs for the past six years, so he’s served his time among the range anxious.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Beethoven never finished his Tenth symphony – but an AI has, and the first performance happens in October. CC-licensed photo by David Hall 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. Refuelled. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google search’s next phase: context is king • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

»

At its Search On event today, Google introduced several new features that, taken together, are its strongest attempts yet to get people to do more than type a few words into a search box. By leveraging its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) machine learning technology in small ways, the company hopes to kick off a virtuous cycle: it will provide more detail and context-rich answers, and in return it hopes users will ask more detailed and context-rich questions. The end result, the company hopes, will be a richer and deeper search experience.

Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan oversees search alongside Assistant, ads, and other products. He likes to say — and repeated in an interview this past Sunday — that “search is not a solved problem.” That may be true, but the problems he and his team are trying to solve now have less to do with wrangling the web and more to do with adding context to what they find there.

For its part, Google is going to begin flexing its ability to recognize constellations of related topics using machine learning and present them to you in an organized way. A coming redesign to Google search will begin showing “Things to know” boxes that send you off to different subtopics. When there’s a section of a video that’s relevant to the general topic — even when the video as a whole is not — it will send you there. Shopping results will begin to show inventory available in nearby stores, and even clothing in different styles associated with your search.

…We are very far from the so-called “ten blue links” of search results that Google provides. It has been showing information boxes, image results, and direct answers for a long time now. Today’s announcements are another step, one where the information Google provides is not just a ranking of relevant information but a distillation of what its machines understand by scraping the web.

«

I understand that this is Bohn reporting what Google is (kind of) promising, but there’s an inherent naiveté in failing to realise that Google search does not understand, in a human sense, what it is reading and indexing. Its method rewards popularity, not accuracy. Search is so far from being a “solved problem” that in essence we’re still in 1996. If you want understanding, you use Wikipedia.
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YouTube to remove videos containing vaccine misinformation • WSJ

Dave Sebastian:

»

YouTube said it would remove content that falsely alleges approved vaccines are dangerous and cause severe health effects, expanding the video platform’s efforts to curb Covid-19 misinformation to other vaccines.

Examples of content that would be taken down include false claims that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility or that they don’t reduce transmission or contraction of diseases, the Alphabet division said Wednesday.

The policies cover general statements about vaccines—not only those for Covid-19—and about specific routine immunizations such as those for measles and hepatitis B. YouTube said it has removed more than 130,000 videos for violating its Covid-19 vaccine policies since last year.

“We’ve steadily seen false claims about the coronavirus vaccines spill over into misinformation about vaccines in general,” YouTube said. “We’re now at a point where it’s more important than ever to expand the work we started with Covid-19 to other vaccines.”

«

Typically what now happens (as we’ve seen on Facebook) is that the makers of the misinformation videos begin using different language to refer to the same things (perhaps calling vaccines “vitamins” or something). Will YouTube follow that too?

Also note how this is YouTube moving closer to choosing “authoritative” over “popular”, at least for information that could get you killed.
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Getting an AI to complete Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony • The Conversation

Ahmed Elgammal is Professor, Director of the Art & AI Lab, at Rutgers University:

»

When Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1827, he was three years removed from the completion of his Ninth Symphony, a work heralded by many as his magnum opus. He had started work on his 10th Symphony but, due to deteriorating health, wasn’t able to make much headway: All he left behind were some musical sketches.

Ever since then, Beethoven fans and musicologists have puzzled and lamented over what could have been. His notes teased at some magnificent reward, albeit one that seemed forever out of reach.

Now, thanks to the work of a team of music historians, musicologists, composers and computer scientists, Beethoven’s vision will come to life.

I presided over the artificial intelligence side of the project, leading a group of scientists at the creative AI startup Playform AI that taught a machine both Beethoven’s entire body of work and his creative process.

A full recording of Beethoven’s 10th Symphony is set to be released on Oct. 9, 2021, the same day as the world premiere performance scheduled to take place in Bonn, Germany – the culmination of a two-year-plus effort.

«

When he calls them “sketches” he’s not kidding – it’s basically a few squiggles on a stave. There’s going to be a lot of interest around this. If it’s at all convincing, then what’s to stop new Mozart or Bach work emerging? Then we’ll be in the realm, like art, of trying to figure out if something is legitimate or not.
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Natural-gas prices are spiking around the world • The Economist

»

Across the world, a natural-gas shortage is starting to bite. Prices of power in Germany and France have soared by around 40% in the past two weeks. In many countries, including Britain and Spain, governments are rushing through emergency measures to protect consumers. Factories are being temporarily switched off, from aluminium smelters in Mexico to fertiliser plants in Britain. Markets are frantic. One trader says it is like the global financial crisis for commodities. Even in America, the world’s biggest natural-gas producer, lobby groups are calling on the government to limit exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the price of which has climbed to $25 per million British thermal units (mBTU), up by two-thirds in the past month.

In one sense the crisis has fiendishly complex causes, with a mosaic of factors from geopolitics to precautionary hoarding in Asia sending prices higher. Viewed from a different perspective, however, its causes are simple: an energy market with only thin safety buffers has become acutely sensitive to disruptions. And subdued investment in fossil fuels may mean higher volatility is here to stay.

«

Simple part of the fiendishly complex cause: longer-than-expected winter, storage facilities reduced in many countries. That last sentence isn’t encouraging, though. It feels very possible that as fossil fuels that we rely on are tapered out in favour of slightly less reliable renewables (🎶 so build more nuclear 🎵), that effect will happen more regularly. (Same effect visible with coal prices, as noted yesterday.)
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A $23.7m Ethereum transaction fee post mortem…

You might recall a few days ago that some trivial blockchain transaction also turned out to have an astronomically high transaction fee. This is the “explanation”, which is written using English words as if to prove a Wittgenstein theorem about the non-inevitability of meaning.

I’m still not convinced there wasn’t some quiet money laundering going on. It’s amazing in particular how the people who perfectly legally get $23.7m arriving in their account, apparently through no malicious action on their part, are perfectly happy to give it back. It’s as if this wasn’t about money, and the transactions weren’t irreversible.

As a sort of “finder’s fee” they gave them 50 ETH, equivalent to 3.43BTC, equivalent (if you can do it) to about $140,000.
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Telegram bots are trying to steal your one-time passwords • ZDNet

Charlie Osborne:

»

Telegram-powered bots are being utilized to steal the one-time passwords required in two-factor authentication (2FA) security. 

The ransomware threat is growing: What needs to happen to stop attacks getting worse? (ZDNet YouTube)
On Wednesday, researchers from Intel 471 said that they have seen an “uptick” in the number of these services provided in the web’s underground, and over the past few months, it appears the variety of 2FA circumvention solutions is expanding — with bots becoming a firm favorite. 

Two-factor authentication (2FA) can take the form of one-time password (OTP) tokens, codes, links, biometric markers, or by tapping a physical dongle to confirm an account owner’s identity. Most often, 2FA tokens are sent through a text message to a handset or an email address. 

While 2FA can improve upon the use of passwords alone to protect our accounts, threat actors were quick to develop methods to intercept OTP, such as through malware or social engineering. 

According to Intel 471, since June, a number of 2FA-circumventing services are abusing the Telegram messaging service. Telegram is either being used to create and manage bots or as a ‘customer support’ channel host for cybercriminals running these types of operations. 

“In these support channels, users often share their success while using the bot, often walking away with thousands of dollars from victim accounts,” the researchers say. 

«

Which is why, wherever humanly possible, you shouldn’t use SMS-sent OTPs, but instead have a code generator (such as Authy, which is great) on your device(s).

Though it’s not just bots – one of my children, attempting to sell an item on an exchange, had the other person demanding she send her the Paypal OTP for the transaction (which would have let the other person hack her account). Luckily she had a mistrustful parent to ask for advice.
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Facebook grew Marketplace to one billion users. Now scammers are using it to target people around the world • ProPublica

Craig Silverman, A.C. Thompson and Peter Elkind:

»

For years, Carman Alfonsi relied upon Facebook Marketplace to buy and sell used pool tables for his Michigan billiards business. He banked a steady stream of income from the wildly popular online bazaar.

But this July, Alfonsi’s Facebook account was hacked and used to post roughly 100 scam listings for cell phones and vehicles. The Marketplace posts directed buyers to contact an email address controlled by the scammers. When customers were left empty-handed, they sent enraged messages to Alfonsi by phone and Facebook Messenger.

Alfonsi repeatedly contacted Facebook to warn that his account had been hijacked by fraudsters. Instead of fixing the problem, the social media giant banned him from using Marketplace, at one point removing his profile from its platform.

Now Alfonsi carries a gun in his own home. He’s concerned that an angry Marketplace customer might show up at his front door.

“I’m thinking I’m in trouble and someone’s going to come to my house and kick my ass,” Alfonsi said.

Facebook’s Marketplace is unquestionably a business success. It hit 1 billion users a month this spring, and the company recently told investors that it’s one of its most promising new sources of revenue. That growth has been built, in part, on the company’s assurances about the safety of its platform.

“Marketplace lets you see what real people in your own community are selling. You can see their public Facebook profile, mutual friends and seller ratings so you can feel confident in your purchase,” the company says.

«

Or.. not. As ever, Facebook lets things scale much faster than it scales its moderation.
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It seems almost unnecessary to suggest you buy my book Social Warming, but this might be your first rodeo

The supply-chain mystery • The New Yorker

Amy Davidson Sorkin:

»

What’s often at the heart of a supply-chain issue is a labor issue. Last week, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach were approaching a crisis state because more than seventy container ships were idling offshore, in what had become a maritime parking lot; there aren’t enough dockworkers to unload their cargo, or enough truck drivers to move it out of the ports. (Shipping rates have spiked, too.) Labor shortages are the reason that so many things just seem to be in the wrong place—the prime symptom of a supply-chain squeeze. “Just in time” delivery works only if you can deliver.

The labor situation, too, is no doubt related to covid-19, but there is wide disagreement about exactly how. A significant number of people who were laid off early in the pandemic because of closures haven’t gone back to work, even as more businesses reopen. The factors cited include a fear of infection and an aversion to dealing with customers who are angry about policies, or the lack of them, requiring masks and proof of vaccination—a particular concern for restaurant workers, who are also in short supply. Some essential workers, such as health aides and delivery drivers, who were hit hard by the pandemic, may be reassessing their jobs; and many of the more than six hundred thousand people who have died of covid were members of the workforce.

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Good to know that it’s not only Brexit and Britain that’s having weird issues due to supply-chain labour shortages. Something to read between fights in the queue for fuel.
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The melting face emoji has already won us over • The New York Times

Anna Kambhampaty:

»

There are times when words feel inadequate — when one’s dread, shame, exhaustion or discomfort seems too immense to be captured in written language.

That’s where the melting face emoji comes in.

The face, fixed with a content half-smile even as it dissolves into a puddle, is one of 37 new emojis approved this year by the Unicode Consortium, the organization that maintains the standards for digital text. Other emojis that made the cut include saluting face, dotted line face [invisibility] and a disco ball.

These new emojis will roll out over the course of the next year. But already the melting face has found fans on social media, who see it as a clear representation of the coronavirus pandemic’s vast psychological toll.

“This melting smiley face is quite the pandemic mood,” one Twitter user said.

Others viewed the new emoji as a visual proxy for climate anxiety. “Something tells me that in this climate change apocalypse era, we’re going to be using the new melting face emoji a lot,” another user wrote.

«

If it’s going to be for climate anxiety, shouldn’t there be a drowning face emoji too? (There isn’t, I checked.) At least the disco ball one is nicely timed for Abba’s return.
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Something weird is happening on Facebook • Political Orphans

Chris Ladd:

»

How this works is murky, but it’s clear that someone has found a way to gain absolutely stellar reach for these apparent spam posts. What they have in common is help from affiliate networks.

If you spend any time on Facebook you’ve probably noticed a blizzard of question memes coming from clickbait accounts. You’ve likely either commented on them yourself or seen comments from close friends. Many of these posts look like they’re probing for answers to security/verification questions, but the ugly reality is that your passwords are nearly worthless. Chances are your passwords are already circulating on the dark web, sold in batches of millions for as little as a few thousand dollars. Unless you hold the password to something wildly valuable, like major corporate or government assets, nobody cares except kids playing around.

By contrast, what could I learn about someone by knowing their answers to these questions?
[screenshots of Facebook posts asking: “What was your first car?” “How old were you when you got your first job?” “First celebrity crush?” “What do your grandchildren call you?”]

How valuable would it be to build up profiles of millions of social media accounts based on these answers, while also learning the contours of their social networks? Feed that kind of sentiment data through a machine learning algorithm and I could build a dataset on which to build a powerful disinformation campaign. Someone seems to think there’s value here, investing significant time and money by recruiting affiliate networks to distribute this content and gather results.

«

Ladd reckons someone – or lots of someones – are trying to do personality profiling that makes Cambridge Analytica’s effort look piddling, which in many ways it was, relatively. Ladd’s advice:

»

Don’t take candy from strangers and don’t feed your personal information to bots. If that mommy blog is jammed with ads and promotions, leave immediately.

«

Or just, you know, delete your Facebook account.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: I wondered how much power might be lost in the 10.5GW link between Morocco and the UK over a 3,800km subsea link. According to @magnayn, it’s about 15%. So that’s ~8.9GW arriving in the UK.

What if the ‘psychohistory’ in Asimov’s Foundation novels is actually a discipline in common usage today? CC-licensed photo by James 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. In a queue. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook’s effort to attract preteens goes beyond Instagram Kids, documents show • WSJ

Georgia Wells and Jeff Horwitz:

»

Facebook has come under increasing fire in recent days for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future.

Internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the company formed a team to study preteens, set a three-year goal to create more products for them and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business opportunities presented by these potential users. In one presentation, it contemplated whether there might be a way to engage children during play dates.

“Why do we care about tweens?” said one document from 2020. “They are a valuable but untapped audience.”

Facebook isn’t the only technology company to court children and face scrutiny for doing so. Virtually every major social-media platform, including ByteDance’s TikTok and YouTube, has confronted legal or regulatory problems related to how children use its products. Federal privacy law forbids data collection on children under 13, and lawmakers have criticized tech companies for not doing more to protect kids online from predators and harmful content.

The Facebook documents show that competition from rivals, in particular Snapchat and TikTok, is a motivating factor behind its work.

The company’s approach to young users is expected to be addressed during a Senate subcommittee hearing on Thursday, which is expected to probe the effects of Facebook’s Instagram platform on mental health.

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Every week I hope there won’t be stories about Facebook behaving terribly in some way or other, because it feels like they’re unending. But they are.
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‘The Big Delete:’ inside Facebook’s crackdown in Germany • Associated Press

David Klepper:

»

Days before Germany’s federal elections, Facebook took what it called an unprecedented step: the removal of a series of accounts that worked together to spread COVID-19 misinformation and encourage violent responses to COVID restrictions.

The crackdown, announced Sept. 16, was the first use of Facebook’s new “coordinated social harm” policy aimed at stopping not state-sponsored disinformation campaigns but otherwise typical users who have mounted an increasingly sophisticated effort to sidestep rules on hate speech or misinformation.

In the case of the German network, the nearly 150 accounts, pages and groups were linked to the so-called Querdenken movement, a loose coalition that has protested lockdown measures in Germany and includes vaccine and mask opponents, conspiracy theorists and some far-right extremists.

Facebook touted the move as an innovative response to potentially harmful content; far-right commenters condemned it as censorship. But a review of the content that was removed — as well as the many more Querdenken posts that are still available — reveals Facebook’s action to be modest at best. At worst, critics say, it could have been a ploy to counter complaints that it doesn’t do enough to stop harmful content.

“This action appears rather to be motivated by Facebook’s desire to demonstrate action to policymakers in the days before an election, not a comprehensive effort to serve the public,” concluded researchers at Reset, a UK-based nonprofit that has criticised social media’s role in democratic discourse.

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Good old Facebook, still ineffectual at moderating the really important effects that it has.
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Amazon’s Astro home robot is like having Alexa on wheels • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

»

The Astro, which will initially cost $999.99 and available as a Day 1 Edition product that you can request an invite for the privilege of buying, is Amazon’s most ambitious in-home product yet. Amazon sees it as bringing together many different parts of the company — robotics, AI, home monitoring, cloud services — all into one device. Best described as the love child between a Roomba and an Echo Show smart display, the Astro is meant to be the next step in what Amazons believes to be the seemingly inevitable home robot.

Amazon claims the Astro can do a wide variety of things you might want from a home robot. It can map out your floor plan and obey commands to go to a specific room. It can recognize faces and deliver items to a specific person. It can play music and show you the weather and answer questions like any Echo smart display. It can be used for video calls, always keeping you in frame by literally following your movements. It can roam around your house when you aren’t home, making sure everything is okay. It can raise its periscope camera to show you whether you’ve turned the stove off. It can use third-party accessories to record data like blood pressure.

But as ambitious as the Astro is, it still is very much a first cut at what a home assistant robot could be. It doesn’t have any arms or appendages; it can’t clean your floors; it can’t climb stairs; it can’t go outside of your home; and it probably can’t do a zillion other things I’m not thinking of at the moment.

«

There’s a rundown of all Amazon’s new things, which includes an in-house drone.
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The world’s longest subsea cable will send clean energy from Morocco to the UK • Electrek

Michelle Lewis:

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A 10.5 gigawatt (GW) solar and wind farm will be built in Morocco’s Guelmim-Oued Noun region, and it will supply the UK with clean energy via subsea cables. The twin 1.8 GW high voltage direct current (HVDC) subsea cables will be the world’s longest.

UK-based renewables company Xlinks is the project’s developer. The Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project, as it’s known, will cover an area of around 579 square miles (1,500 square kilometers) in Morocco and will be connected exclusively to the UK via 2,361 miles (3,800 km) of HVDC subsea cables. They’ll follow the shallow water route from Morocco to the UK, past Spain, Portugal, and France.

The project will cost $21.9bn. Xlinks will construct 7 GW of solar and 3.5 GW of wind, along with onsite 20GWh/5GW battery storage, in Morocco. The transmission cable will consist of four cables. The first cable will be active in early 2027, and the other three are slated to launch in 2029. An agreement has been reached with the National Grid for two 1.8GW connections at Alverdiscott in Devon.

Xlinks says that the Morocco-UK Power Project will be capable of powering seven million UK homes by 2030. Once complete, the project will be capable of supplying 8% of Britain’s electricity needs.

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Creates lots of jobs (and money?) in Morocco. Quite a significant chunk of energy, at a point when some of the UK’s nuclear plants will be going offline. Probably quicker to build this than a nuclear plant, though you could argue about which will produce the more reliable base load. Can’t help wondering how much power will be lost over 2,361 miles of cable.
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Apple AirTag bug enables ‘Good Samaritan’ attack • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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The AirTag’s “Lost Mode” lets users alert Apple when an AirTag is missing. Setting it to Lost Mode generates a unique URL at https://found.apple.com, and allows the user to enter a personal message and contact phone number. Anyone who finds the AirTag and scans it with an Apple or Android phone will immediately see that unique Apple URL with the owner’s message.

When scanned, an AirTag in Lost Mode will present a short message asking the finder to call the owner at at their specified phone number. This information pops up without asking the finder to log in or provide any personal information. But your average Good Samaritan might not know this.

That’s important because Apple’s Lost Mode doesn’t currently stop users from injecting arbitrary computer code into its phone number field — such as code that causes the Good Samaritan’s device to visit a phony Apple iCloud login page.

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Something of an oversight on Apple’s part. Fixable with a software update, which Apple plans to roll out at some point, apparently.
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How Apple built the iPhone 13’s Cinematic Mode • TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

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The A15 Bionic and Neural Engine are heavily used in Cinematic Mode, especially given that they wanted to encode it in Dolby Vision HDR as well. They also didn’t want to sacrifice live preview — something that most Portrait Mode competitors took years to ship after Apple introduced it.

But the concept of Cinematic Mode didn’t start with the feature itself, says [Human Interface Team designer Johnnie] Manzari. In fact, he says, it’s typically the opposite inside of this design team at Apple.

“We didn’t have an idea [for Cinematic Mode]. We were just curious — what is it about filmmaking that’s been timeless? And that kind of leads down this interesting road and then we started to learn more and talk more … with people across the company that can help us solve these problems.”

[Apple VP Kaiann] Drance says that before development began, Apple’s design team spent time researching cinematography techniques for realistic focus transitions and optical characteristics.

“When you look at the design process,” says Manzari, “we begin with a deep reverence and respect for image and filmmaking through history. We’re fascinated with questions like what principles of image and filmmaking are timeless? What craft has endured culturally and why?”

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Portrait Mode, for stills, was introduced in the iPhone 7 Plus in October 2016. That’s five years to go from stills to video.
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Coal prices hit decade high despite efforts to wean the world off carbon • WSJ

Joe Wallace:

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A shortfall of natural gas, rebounding electricity usage and scanty rainfall in China have lifted demand for thermal coal. Supplies have been crimped by a closed mine in Colombia, flooding in Indonesia and Australia and distorted trade flows caused by a Chinese ban on Australian coal.

Prices for thermal coal—which power plants burn to boil water into steam, spin turbines and generate electricity—have more than doubled over the past year as a result. Coal delivered into northwest Europe earlier this month hit its highest price since November 2011, having climbed 64% in 2021. Prices for coal exported from Newcastle in Australia, most of which heads to Asia, have risen 56%, according to Argus Media.

Both coal-price benchmarks have outstripped gains in oil, copper and other commodity markets that are benefiting from a vaccine-fired burst of economic activity. The upswing in fuel markets is contributing to higher electricity prices in the US and Europe.

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Another one of the candidates for “everything’s connected, everything’s fragile”: not enough rain means not much hydro power, forcing coal plants not to run in China pushes up the price of power there.
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Trump’s former press secretary details his mysterious 2019 hospital visit in behind-the-scenes look at his White House • CNNPolitics

Kate Bennett:

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[Stephanie] Grisham served as White House press secretary, chief of staff to Melania Trump and East Wing communications director during the Trump administration before resigning after the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. In her book, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” which was obtained by CNN, Grisham gives a firsthand account of her time in the White House and describes a culture of lies in the Trump administration.

In the book, Grisham does not use the term colonoscopy but heavily implies that’s what the trip was for. She says Trump’s hospital visit, which stirred weeks-long speculation about his health was a “very common procedure,” during which “a patient is put under.” She also writes that former President George W. Bush had a similar procedure while in office; Bush had multiple colonoscopies during his time in office. Grisham writes Trump did not want then-Vice President Mike Pence to be in power while he was sedated, which was part of the reason he kept his visit private. He also “did not want to be the butt of a joke” on late-night television, writes Grisham.

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Wa-hey. So that’s that mystery solved. There’s some more minor revelations. As ever, hard to know what, if any, impact they’ll have.
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Density is destiny: economists predict the far future • Marginal REVOLUTION

Alex Tabarrok, in March 2019:

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In a paper that just won the JPE’s Robert Lucas Prize, Desmet, Krisztian Nagy and Rossi-Hansberg model the evolution of the world economy over the next 400-600 years! Is it laughable or laudatory? I’m not entirely sure. The paper does have an insight that I think is very important, in addition to a number of methodological advances.

If we look around the world today we see that the places with the densest populations, such as China and India, are poor. But in the long-run of history that doesn’t make sense. As Paul Romer, and others, have emphasized, ideas are the ultimate source of wealth and more people means more ideas. As a result, innovation and GDP per capita should be higher in places and times with more people. The fact that China and India are poor today is an out-of-equilibrium anomaly that happened because they were slower than the West to adopt the institutions of free markets and capitalism necessary to leverage ideas into output. China and India weren’t relatively poor in the past, however, and they won’t be relatively poor in the future. With that in mind, a key long-run prediction of Desmet, Krisztian Nagy and Rossi-Hansberg becomes clear. If people are not allowed to migrate then the places that are densest today will not only equal the West, they will overtake the West in innovation and productivity.

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Why this link now? Because Apple TV+ has a new series based on the Asimov “Empire and Foundation” SF books, in which the “psychohistorian” Hari Seldon predicts the future thousands of years ahead. For psychohistory, read “economics”, really.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess which is the latest app to hit a billion (monthly) users? CC-licensed photo by Solen Feyissa on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Fill ‘er up! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook is ‘pausing’ work on Instagram kids app after widespread criticism • The Verge

James Vincent:

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Instagram says it’s “pausing” development of what’s been dubbed “Instagram Kids” — a version of the photo-sharing app aimed at children under 13. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced the news in a blog post on Monday, saying that the Facebook-owned company would continue to work on parental-supervised experiences for younger users.

In a blog post and series of accompanying tweets, Mosseri blames the media and critics for misunderstanding the purpose of the app. “It was never meant for younger kids, but for tweens (aged 10-12),” he writes. In a separate tweet, he adds that news of the project “leaked way before we knew what it would be. People feared the worst, and we had few answers at that stage. It’s clear we need to take more time on this.”

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Related: Facebook is going to publish two internal slide decks from its research into how Instagram affects teens’ mental health. First to Congress, then to the public. Mysterious how difficult it seems to be. Though one slide was released, and seems to portray Instagram as not wholly negative.
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Doctors are being forced off Clubhouse by anti-vax harassment • Vice

Sophia Smith Galer:

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[Siyab] Panhwar is part of a group of doctors who have tried their best to counter misinformation on Clubhouse, which has about 2 million weekly active users. Many were excited when Clubhouse first came on the scene; emergency physician Dr Rocky Jedick in Utah created a club with other doctors called The Evidence Base to provide, as the name suggests, an evidence-based approach to answering difficult questions. 

But soon, he realised that Clubhouse rooms were spiralling out of control. He recalled the controversial evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein one day telling almost 1,500 listeners that Ivermectin was “100% effective as COVID prophylaxis,” and that health agencies restricting access to this medicine were “killing millions.” Weinstein has 59,000 followers on the app.

Now, many of the doctors are fed up. “Most of us have decreased our time on Clubhouse,” said Dr Danish Nagda from St. Louis, “especially in COVID rooms because anti-vaxxers are actively disruptive on the stage. I have reported account after account with zero feedback or actions taken from Clubhouse.”

«

Again and again you’ll see the same patterns in unmoderated systems like this: the people who have the time to waste will spend it harassing those who don’t, until the latter group gives up because they have more important things to do. It’s repeated again and again – essentially, a version of Gresham’s Law (bad money drives out good) for information when there’s no reward for providing good information.
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China power outages close factories and threaten growth • The New York Times

Keith Bradsher, in Dongguan, eastern China:

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The outages have rippled across most of eastern China, where the bulk of the population lives and works. Some building managers have turned off elevators. Some municipal pumping stations have shut down, prompting one town to urge residents to store extra water for the next several months, though it later withdrew the advice.

There are several reasons electricity is suddenly in short supply in much of China. More regions of the world are reopening after pandemic-induced lockdowns, greatly increasing demand for China’s electricity-hungry export factories.

Export demand for aluminum, one of the most energy-intensive products, has been strong. Demand has also been robust for steel and cement, central to China’s vast construction programs.

As electricity demand has risen, it has also pushed up the price of coal to generate that electricity. But Chinese regulators have not let utilities raise rates enough to cover the rising cost of coal. So the utilities have been slow to operate their power plants for more hours.

In the city of Dongguan, a major manufacturing hub near Hong Kong, a shoe factory that employs 300 workers rented a generator last week for $10,000 a month to ensure that work could continue. Between the rental costs and the diesel fuel for powering it, electricity is now twice as expensive as when the factory was simply tapping the grid.

“This year is the worst year since we opened the factory nearly 20 years ago,” said Jack Tang, the factory’s general manager.

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China also outlawed bitcoin mining last week. If this is the start of a big power crunch, the supply chain problems will only worsen.
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Petrol station chaos worsened by motorists filling up with wrong fuel • The Guardian

Gwyn Topham:

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The chaos on Great Britain’s petrol station forecourts has been worsened by hundreds of panicking motorists filling their tanks with the wrong kind of fuel, breakdown services have reported.

With queues snaking hundreds of metres from some filling stations – and tension building between motorists in places [fisticuffs have been filmed at more than one place – CA] – more than five times as many people as usual in the UK have mistakenly put diesel in their petrol engine or vice versa.

Misfuelling can cause significant damage to cars, and motorists are advised to not switch on the ignition at all once they realise their mistake – meaning such breakdowns potentially block the already crowded forecourts. Hapless drivers also need to have their tanks fully drained while the contaminated fuel has to be jettisoned.

The AA said it had attended 250 such incidents over the weekend compared with an average of 20-25 on an average day. The breakdown company has a fleet of specialist “fuel assist” vans to deal with this type of incident. Should the driver not immediately notice their mistake, large amounts of smoke can come from the exhaust, and the engine is apt to misfire and cut out. Using petrol in a diesel car is the more serious mistake in terms of possible damage.

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I have put petrol into a diesel car (a long time ago). The moment of realisation is appalling. It must be a million times worse if you’re on a forecourt filled with angry drivers.
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TikTok reaches 1 billion monthly users • CNBC

Jessica Bursztynsky:

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TikTok revealed Monday it has 1 billion active global users, indicating steady growth of the short-form video app.

TikTok, which is privately held and owned by the Chinese company Bytedance, has reported a surge in users over the past few years, with a large amount of its US audience joining amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

TikTok said it had about 55 million global users by January 2018. That number grew to more than 271 million by December 2018 and 507 million by December 2019. The company reported nearly 700 million monthly active users in August 2020.

In comparison, Facebook said in the second quarter it had 3.51 billion monthly users across its family of apps, up from 3.45 billion in the first quarter.

Still, the company launched one of the most successful short-form video apps, with many of its large tech competitors racing to recreate their own versions. Facebook launched its TikTok clone, Instagram Reels, broadly last August. Snap announced a similar feature called Spotlight last year. Google’s YouTube launched its competitor, Shorts, last September.

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That’s pretty much straight-line growth: adding about 30m users per month consistently for nearly three years. It’s naturally going to run out of people who want or like its format at some point, but there’s plenty of headroom yet. Facebook should be worried: TikTok has brought the NewsFeed idea of “an algorithm for attention” to a new peak.
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Goldman Sachs, Ozy Media and a $40m conference call gone wrong • The New York Times

Ben Smith:

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the Zoom videoconference on Feb. 2 that [media company] Ozy arranged between the Goldman Sachs asset management division and YouTube was supposed to be about [a $40m investment by GS in Ozy]. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals. He was running late and apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he’d had trouble logging onto Zoom, and he suggested that the meeting be moved to a conference call, according to four people who were briefed on the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of a private discussion.

Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: that Ozy was a great success on YouTube, racking up significant views and ad dollars, and that Mr. Watson was as good a leader as he seemed to be. As he spoke, however, the man’s voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said.

After the meeting, someone on the Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that Mr. Watson had provided before the meeting, but through Mr. Piper’s assistant at YouTube. That’s when things got weird.

A confused Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper on the call with Ozy.

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You’ve probably already worked out which company the faker worked for; the excuse provided for their presence on the call is wonderfully modern. The phrase “Potemkin village” appears in the piece, though “house of cards” might have served as well.
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Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith pleads guilty on North Korea sanctions charge • Decrypt

Liam Frost:

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Griffith [aged 38] was arrested in November 2019 after traveling to the North Korean capital Pyongyang and giving a talk at a blockchain conference there. Facing a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison over conspiracy to violate the Emergency Economy Powers Act, Griffith reportedly took a plea deal [on the first day of his trial] that would see him face a maximum of six and a half years in prison.

The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York argued that Griffith violated the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that prohibits exporting goods, services, or technology to North Korea.

In a statement, US Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman later alleged that Griffith “provided highly technical information to North Korea, knowing that this information could be used to help North Korea launder money and evade sanctions.”

“Griffith jeopardized the sanctions that both Congress and the president have enacted to place maximum pressure on North Korea’s dangerous regime,” Berman explained.

Apart from giving “valuable information” to the North Korean audience, Griffith also entered the country in April 2019 without approval from the US—despite being warned about traveling to the country, the criminal complaint also alleged.

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Quite a dramatic example of thinking that the law won’t apply to you because you’re doing libertarian technology, maaaan, and that asking forgiveness rather than permission always works. North Korea was completely aware of the benefits of cryptocurrency for evading sanctions well before that, of course, but that doesn’t make Griffith any less foolish. Sentencing in January 2022.
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DeversiFi says user funds are safe after $23.7m gas fee blunder • CoinDesk

Andrew Thurman:

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Decentralized exchange DeversiFi is looking to calm user jitters after a simple ERC-20 token transaction somehow cost the platform $23.7m in fees.

The transaction occurred early Monday morning and was flagged two hours later on Twitter. The transaction was for $100,000 in stablecoin Tether – a ERC-20 token transfer that, at the time of writing, should have cost under $5.

While early reports indicated that the transaction originated from centralized exchange Bitfinex, DeversiFi’s tweet seems to indicate that it was an internal transaction. Both Etherscan and on-chain analytics service Nansen have the originating address labeled as belonging to Bitfinex, and the address holds nearly $1.5bn in ETH – orders of magnitude more than DeversiFi’s $45m in total value locked, per DeFi Pulse.

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If you squint, you can see how an “internal transaction” that charges gazillions for a tiny transaction could be a wonderful opportunity for fraud – either money laundering (dirty money comes in, big fee gets oopsie-charged, repayment is in “clean” money which can wash back out) or simple fraud where you charge absurd amounts. One difference, I suppose, is that it’s harder to hide these things with blockchain operations. That assumes that enough people are watching – though if you get caught then all you say is that it’s an internal error and user funds are safe, exactly the same as you’d say if it were an innocent error.

The fact that Bitfinex was involved has made a lot of people suspicious.
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NBC gets super aggressive in YouTube TV dispute • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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NBC is one of several NBCUniversal channels running prominent banner ads on YouTube TV streams, warning customers that they could lose access over a carriage dispute with Google. The banner lists over a dozen channels that could disappear if a deal isn’t reached by Wednesday, September 30th, and directs customers to an NBCU-owned website offering various ways to pressure Google. These include a pre-written tweet directed at YouTube TV, links to Google’s customer support, and a tool to find alternative providers.

“Attention YouTube TV Customers,” the banner, which runs roughly every 10 minutes, reads, “YouTube may drop 14+ channels including NBC, Telemundo, USA, SYFY, Brave, Oxygen, MSNBC, NBCSN, CNBC, GOLF Channel, and E!. Go to YouNeedChannels.com and tell YouTube TV not to drop your favorite channels.”

…Responding via a blog post, Google says negotiations are ongoing and that it’s seeking the “the same rates that services of a similar size get from NBCU” and for YouTube TV to be treated like “any other TV provider.” Google added that if it’s unable to reach an agreement it’ll drop its US prices by $10 (bringing its monthly price down from $64.99 to $54.99) while NBCU’s lineup is off the service. Google says that customers are free to cancel anytime and can sign up for Peacock separately for $4.99 a month.

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America-only (and look at those prices!), though what I find notable here is that YouTube TV has been drawn into being Just Another TV Service, at the mercy of the content providers and begging to be treated as a little minnow, rather than an arm of a company that could swallow some of the TV providers without burping.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: yesterday’s video pushing a single charging standard dated from 2009, and wasn’t made by the EU – it was created by a guerilla marketing agency trying to get a contract. You can read more about the EU’s proposal in this Twitter thread. Or the Wikipedia page.