You’ll never guess which animal the next coronavirus outbreak is coming from. CC-licensed photo by angieandsteve on Flickr.

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

As Twitter and Facebook clamp down, Republicans claim ‘election interference’ • The New York Times

Mike Isaac and Kate Conger:

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On Thursday, simmering discontent among Republicans over the power that Facebook and Twitter wield over public discourse erupted into open acrimony. Republicans slammed the companies and baited them a day after the sites limited or blocked the distribution of an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The criticism did not stop the companies. Twitter locked the personal account of Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, late Wednesday after she posted the article, and on Thursday it briefly blocked a link to a House Judiciary Committee webpage. The Trump campaign said Twitter had also locked its official account after it tried promoting the article. Twitter then doubled down by prohibiting the spread of a different New York Post article about the Bidens.

The actions brought the already frosty relationship between conservatives and the companies to a new low point, less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election, in which the social networks are expected to play a significant role. It offered a glimpse at how online conversations could go awry on Election Day and underlined how the companies have little handle on how to consistently enforce what they will allow on their sites.

“There will be battles for control of the narrative again and again over coming weeks,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies social media companies. “The way the platforms handled it is not a good harbinger of what’s to come.”

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None of the major papers has been able to stand the Hunter Biden story up – not surprising, because it’s Swiss cheese with a Möbius twist which makes no sense, no matter where you start; the more you read the less it hangs together. So of course the noise is all about the cackhanded approach Twitter took. They must envy Facebook’s ability to simply turn the volume down.
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Robinhood hack: almost 2,000 accounts infiltrated, more widespread than known • Bloomberg

Sophie Alexander:

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Almost 2,000 Robinhood Markets accounts were compromised in a recent hacking spree that siphoned off customer funds, a sign that the attacks were more widespread than was previously known.

A person with knowledge of an internal review, who asked not to be identified because the findings aren’t public, provided the estimated figure.

When Bloomberg first reported on the hacking spree last week, the popular online brokerage disclosed few details. It said “a limited number” of customers had been struck by cyber-criminals who gained access by breaching personal email accounts outside of Robinhood, an assertion that some of the victims acknowledge and others reject.

The attacks unleashed a torrent of complaints on social media, where investors recounted futile attempts to call the brokerage, which doesn’t have a customer service phone number. Robinhood, which has more than 13 million customer accounts, is now considering whether to add a phone number along with other tools, the person said.

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A phone number. All your money is siphoned off and there’s no way to call anyone. Amazing anyone is still with Robinhood after that. Some of the accounts were access despite having two-factor authentication – which suggests someone getting very deep into the system (as happened with Twitter.)
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FCC chairman says he will move forward with plans to ‘clarify’ Section 230 • Deadline

Ted Johnson:

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The chairman of the FCC issued a statement on Thursday saying that he plans to move forward with efforts to clarify Section 230, the provision of a 1996 law that gives immunity to internet companies like Facebook and Twitter over the way that they moderate content.

Chairman Ajit Pai issued a statement as President Donald Trump and his allies have blasted Twitter and Facebook for steps they have taken to restrict the sharing of a New York Post story on Hunter Biden. Twitter has disabled links to the story, and the Trump campaign said that its account was briefly locked after it tried to share it.

“As elected officials consider whether to change the law, the question remains: What does Section 230 currently mean?” Pai said in a statement. “Many advance an overly broad interpretation that in some cases shields social media companies from consumer protection laws in a way that has no basis in the text of Section 230. The Commission’s General Counsel has informed me that the FCC has the legal authority to interpret Section 230. Consistent with this advice, I intend to move forward with a rulemaking to clarify its meaning.”

He added, “Throughout my tenure at the Federal Communications Commission, I have favored regulatory parity, transparency, and free expression. Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech.  But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters.”

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The thing is, the FCC doesn’t have the power to regulate companies in this way. Section 230 is completely unambiguous, despite the tortured attempts by Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court to suggest that it isn’t. (Looking forward, by the way, to learning what the writers of the US Constitution knew about the internet.) Any attempt the FCC makes to regulate social media companies (and what would that even look like?) will end up tangled in the courts for years, by which time Pai will have been replaced. Or, alternatively, the US will be in flames and it won’t matter anyway.
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Cruise gets the green light to test fully driverless cars in California • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

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Cruise, the self-driving company owned by General Motors, has been approved to test its driverless cars on public roads in California. The company says it plans to test vehicles without a human safety driver behind the wheel before the end of 2020.

Cruise is the fifth to receive a driverless permit from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the others being Waymo, Nuro, Zoox, and AutoX. Currently, 60 companies have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in California.

Dan Ammann, CEO of Cruise, said in a blog post that the company may not have been the first to receive a driverless permit, but it intends to be the first to test fully driverless cars in San Francisco.

“Before the end of the year, we’ll be sending cars out onto the streets of SF — without gasoline and without anyone at the wheel,” Ammann said. “Because safely removing the driver is the true benchmark of a self-driving car, and because burning fossil fuels is no way to build the future of transportation.” (Cruise’s fleet of vehicles is composed of 200 electric Chevy Bolts.)

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This is a pretty good time to do it: roads are going to be emptier than usual. Though maybe a lot more cyclists?
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YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation • Reuters

Elizabeth Culliford and Paresh Dave:

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Alphabet Inc’s YouTube said on Wednesday it would remove videos from YouTube containing misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, expanding its current rules against falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the pandemic.

The video platform said it would now ban any content with claims about COVID-19 vaccines that contradict consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization.

YouTube said in an email that this would include removing claims that the vaccine will kill people or cause infertility, or that microchips will be implanted in people who receive the vaccine.

A YouTube spokesman told Reuters that general discussions in videos about “broad concerns” over the vaccine would remain on the platform.

YouTube says it already removes content that disputes the existence or transmission of COVID-19, promotes medically unsubstantiated methods of treatment, discourages people from seeking medical care or explicitly disputes health authorities’ guidance on self-isolation or social distancing.

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Remarkable how the platforms are all doing this almost in lockstep. It’s not quite coordinated, but it’s certainly as if they’re looking at each other and following each other. Holocaust denial next to go from YouTube? (It’s already going after QAnon.)
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The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust • BBC Future

Tim Maughan:

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From where I’m standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge.

Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the refineries that surround the lake. The smell of sulphur and the roar of the pipes invades my senses. It feels like hell on Earth.

Welcome to Baotou, the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia. I’m here with a group of architects and designers called the Unknown Fields Division, and this is the final stop on a three-week-long journey up the global supply chain, tracing back the route consumer goods take from China to our shops and homes, via container ships and factories.

You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking. It is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of “rare earth” minerals. These elements can be found in everything from magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors, to the electronic guts of smartphones and flatscreen TVs. In 2009 China produced 95% of the world’s supply of these elements, and it’s estimated that the Bayan Obo mines just north of Baotou contain 70% of the world’s reserves. But, as we would discover, at what cost?

…You can see the lake on Google Maps, and that hints at the scale. Zoom in far enough and you can make out the dozens of pipes that line the shore. Unknown Fields’ Liam Young collected some samples of the waste and took it back to the UK to be tested. “The clay we collected from the toxic lake tested at around three times background radiation,” he later tells me.

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A new coronavirus that could be even more dangerous was just discovered in China • BGR

Mike Wehner:

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As the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage many parts of the world, researchers have been working hard to develop a safe and effective vaccine that could bring life back a bit closer to normal. Of course, the development of a vaccine and the good it could do for humanity assumes that another, separate strain of the virus isn’t poised to make a jump to humans and start the process all over again.

Now, researchers are warning that a type of coronavirus seen in pigs may indeed be capable of jumping to humans, and if it does, it could cause even more problems. It’s called SADS-CoV, which is short for “Swine Acute Diarrhea Syndrome Coronavirus” and, yeah, it’s as bad as it sounds.

As you might have gathered from the virus’s name, the SADS-CoV virus infects pigs, but it originated in bats. It’s been found in China, and it appears to be taking a similar route to the virus that causes COVID-19. Humans and pigs are shockingly close when it comes to genetics, making it easier for a virus to jump from pigs to humans.

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I’m reminded of the cascading environmental collapses of John Brunner’s “The Sheep Look Up”.
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Fifth of countries at risk of ecosystem collapse, analysis finds • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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Natural “services” such as food, clean water and air, and flood protection have already been damaged by human activity.

More than half of global GDP – $42tn (£32tn) – depends on high-functioning biodiversity, according to the report, but the risk of tipping points is growing.

Countries including Australia, Israel and South Africa rank near the top of Swiss Re’s index of risk to biodiversity and ecosystem services, with India, Spain and Belgium also highlighted. Countries with fragile ecosystems and large farming sectors, such as Pakistan and Nigeria, are also flagged up.

Countries including Brazil and Indonesia had large areas of intact ecosystems but had a strong economic dependence on natural resources, which showed the importance of protecting their wild places, Swiss Re said.

“A staggering fifth of countries globally are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing due to a decline in biodiversity and related beneficial services,” said Swiss Re, one of the world’s biggest reinsurers and a linchpin of the global insurance industry.

“If the ecosystem service decline goes on [in countries at risk], you would see then scarcities unfolding even more strongly, up to tipping points,” said Oliver Schelske, lead author of the research.

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There’s still no good news on this front. Emissions are down, but that doesn’t mean there’s less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; just that we’re not adding to it as quickly.
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Students are rebelling against eye-tracking exam surveillance tools • Vice

Todd Feathers and Janus Rose:

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Students’ and educators’ objections to exam proctoring software go beyond the privacy concerns around being watched and listened to in their bedrooms while they take a test. As more evidence emerges about how the programs work, and fail to work, critics say the tools are bound to hurt low-income students, students with disabilities, students with children or other dependents, and other groups who already face barriers in higher education.

Every day for the last week, Ahmed Alamri has opened ExamSoft and attempted to register for the practice version of the California state bar exam. Every time, the software’s facial recognition system has told him the lighting is too poor to recognize his face. Alamri, who is Arab-American, has attempted to pass the identity check in different rooms, in front of different backgrounds, and with various lighting arrays. He estimates he’s attempted to verify his identity as many as 75 times, with no success. “It just seems to me that this mock exam is reading the poor lighting as my skin color,” he told Motherboard.

Alamri isn’t alone. Law students around the country are organizing to fight against the use of any kind of digital proctoring software like ExamSoft on bar exams. In California, two students have filed an emergency petition with the state supreme court requesting that it cancel the exam entirely and institute a new form of assessment. A similar effort is underway in Illinois, while Louisiana, Oregon, and Wisconsin have already scrapped their upcoming bar exams as a result of student pressure. Other states, including New York, are fumbling for solutions as deadlines for the exams quickly approach; at one point, New York’s test proctor announced it was going to ban the use of “desktop computers” to take the test.

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Nightmarish. You can see that organisations that rely on exams are going to be concerned about the possibility of people cheating now they’re working from home. But how do you monitor those fairly? If you give up entirely, that doesn’t seem ideal either.
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Google Pixel 5 review: new phone, old tricks • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

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TheThe clearest signal that Google isn’t trying to compete directly with top-tier phones isn’t the $699 price; it’s the Snapdragon 765G processor. For all of 2020, the best Android phones have had Qualcomm’s fastest chip, but Google has chosen to go with something a little slower in the Pixel 5G.

I don’t disagree with this choice. Although it doesn’t have the raw power of Qualcomm’s fastest chip, it’s still fast enough to not feel slow. I can detect a bit of a lag in rendering complex webpages or opening heavy apps like big games, but that’s mainly because I’ve reviewed so many flagship Android phones. In day-to-day use, I have had no problems with speed. There’s also 8GB of RAM for multitasking, which is enough to keep apps from closing in the background — a problem that frequently plagued older Pixel models.

There is one processor decision I do disagree with, though: removing the Pixel Neural Core processor for image processing. It means I’m waiting for photos to process way more often than I did with the Pixel 4. There’s a lag between shots when in portrait mode, which keeps me from shooting as quickly as I’d like, and I frequently have to wait for the HDR processing to finish when I review a shot after the fact.

…It may be disappointing to see Google shy away from the big leagues this year, but I think sticking to making a premium midrange phone is more true to the Pixel’s whole ethos. The Pixel 5 is not an especially exciting phone, but instead of overreaching, Google focused on the fundamentals: build quality, battery life, and, of course, the camera.

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I’ll admit, I don’t understand Google’s smartphone strategy. What is it aiming to do with the Pixel? It’s not competing at the high end. Fine. So what is it demonstrating? That it can make a middling phone with a really good machine learning-powered camera? Perhaps the imaging ML, not the phone, is the real point.

Plus, as Bohn also points out, things like Soli (wave your hand to control the phone!) and the squeeze-to-click and face unlock are gone. After one outing. That makes it feel like the designers are just throwing things at the wall. Contrast with Apple, which only drops features such as 3D Touch after years, once completely certain developers and users aren’t using it. (Mumble mumble Touch Bar.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: the headline about polling in yesterday’s edition should have said people want to “rein in” tech companies. We all know the difference.

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.

What if these were augmented reality glasses? Who’d be a good boy then? CC-licensed photo by Adrian Smalley on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not locked up or down. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Twitter cites ‘Hacked Materials Policy’ to justify censorship of NY Post Hunter Biden article • Yahoo News

Tobias Hoonhout:

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Twitter said Thursday that it censored a New York Post article based on emails between Hunter Biden and a Burisma executive in accordance with its “hacked materials policy.”

“In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesperson told National Review when asked why the platform was not allowing users to share the Post’s article.

Twitter’s Hacked Materials Policy states that it does not “permit the use of our services to directly distribute content obtained through hacking that contains private information, may put people in physical harm or danger, or contains trade secrets,” though the platform does currently allow leaked and hacked material from other sources, including Wikileaks, to be shared.

The platform said that the policy applied in this case due to concerns about the “lack of authoritative reporting” in regards to the origins of the material included in the article, and subsequently locked the Post’s Twitter account. Twitter’s actions came after Facebook announced it would limit the sharing of the story while fact-checkers reviewed the piece.

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If you read further on, the actual story that the NY Post has gone with is remarkably sketchy – the emails were on the disk drive of a laptop that was taken to a repair shop and never picked up and then subpoenaed by the FBI? The fact that both Twitter and Facebook find this story dodgy is very unusual.

More to the point, this Hacked Materials Policy is new, dating back only to March 2019. Yet it says

»

You can discuss a hack that has taken place (including reporting on a hack, or sharing press coverage of hacking), provided that you don’t include someone’s private information, information that could put people at risk of physical harm or danger; and/or information related to trade secrets.

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The big question is whether this really was hacking, or if it’s just Russian (or, even more wildly, Trump campaign-ian) disinformation. The timing, too, is amazing.
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Large majority in Senate battleground states agree government needs to act now to reign in big tech companies • Public Policy Polling

Jim Williams runs Public Policy Polling:

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A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that a large majority of voters across Senate battleground states agree that big tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have grown too big and powerful, and the government needs to act now to rein in their power.

A total of 84% of voters agree with this sentiment, with 53% strongly agreeing and 31% somewhat agreeing, with 7% who say they somewhat disagree and only 2% strongly disagreeing. 61% of voters say they would be more likely to vote for a Senator who voted to rein in the power of big tech companies, with thirty six% saying they would be much more likely, and only 11% saying they would be less likely to vote for them.

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A few words about the methodology:
• carried out on landlines and mobiles, robocalling rather than humans (which these days is reckoned to make people more likely to answer truthfully, at least on voting intention
• total of 701 voters (just about enough to be statistically valid) in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina
• 41% Democrat, 34% Republican, 25% independent; in 2016 voted 46% Trump, 45% Clinton, 9% someone else/didn’t vote
• 47% approve of Trump’s job performance, 47% approve, 3% “not sure”. What on earth more do they need to know after the past four years?

There’s lots of fascinating data to be found in the cross-tabulations, but the sentiment is clearly bipartisan, and running against tech companies. That will surely be reflected in the next Senate from January 2021. (Thanks Jim for the link.)
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How software infuses racism into US health care • STAT

Casey Ross:

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A STAT investigation has found that a common method of using analytics software to target medical services to patients who need them most is infusing racial bias into decision-making about who should receive stepped-up care. While a study published last year documented bias in the use of an algorithm in one health system, STAT found the problems arise from multiple algorithms used in hospitals across the country. The bias is not intentional, but it reinforces deeply rooted inequities in the American health care system, effectively walling off low-income Black and Hispanic patients from services that less sick white patients routinely receive.

These algorithms are running in the background of most Americans’ interaction with the health care system. They sift data on patients’ medical problems, prior health costs, medication use, lab results, and other information to predict how much their care will cost in the future and inform decisions such as whether they should get extra doctor visits or other support to manage their illnesses at home. The trouble is, these data reflect long-standing racial disparities in access to care, insurance coverage, and use of services, leading the algorithms to systematically overlook the needs of people of color in ways that insurers and providers may fail to recognize.

“Nobody says, ‘Hey, understand that Blacks have historically used health care in different patterns, in different ways than whites, and therefore are much less likely to be identified by our algorithm,” said Christine Vogeli, director of population health evaluation and research at Mass General Brigham Healthcare in Massachusetts, and co-author of the study that found racial bias in the use of an algorithm developed by health services giant Optum.

The bias can produce huge differences in assessing patients’ need for special care to manage conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, or mental illness

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Of course, the algorithm works on what it’s given. What does that tell us about health care in the US?
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PC sales soared in Q3, Chromebook shipments up 90% • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

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PC sales boomed in Q3 2020, driven by massive new demand in the education market and continuing strong sales in business and gaming segments. The coronavirus has fueled a tremendous surge in PC sales throughout 2020. Initially, demand was expected to taper off in Q3, but we now know the market grew significantly.

How much the market grew depends on whether you count Chromebooks. Gartner (which doesn’t) reports that PC sales grew 3.6% compared with Q3 2019. Now, understand — 3.6% is not nothing for a market that’s been in almost continuous decline for a decade now.

But the 3.6% growth Gartner reports is dwarfed by the 14.1% growth that IDC recorded, and the difference comes down to Chromebooks. IDC counts them. According to Gartner’s figures, counting Chromebooks, the market grew at 9%, with Chromebooks representing about 11% of total shipments. A 9%/14% gap between the two firms is still large, but it’s much closer than the previous figure.

Chromebook shipments surged an astounding 90% year-on-year, driven by massive demand ahead of the deployment of remote learning in US school systems. Non-Chromebook sales were driven by an increase in Windows laptops and in gaming systems, but the huge 28% surge in laptop sales was undercut by a nearly equivalent decline in desktops. Outside of gaming, where they remain fairly popular, overall desktop adoption declined sharply.

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Echoing the Canalys figures earlier this week. That’s an amazing figure for Chromebooks: being cheap, reliable and virus-free really counts for something for schools.
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First room-temperature superconductor reported • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

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In the period after the discovery of high-temperature superconductors, there wasn’t a good conceptual understanding of why those compounds worked. While there was a burst of progress toward higher temperatures, it quickly ground to a halt, largely because it was fueled by trial and error. Recent years brought a better understanding of the mechanisms that enable superconductivity, and we’re seeing a second burst of rapidly rising temperatures.

The key to the progress has been a new focus on hydrogen-rich compounds, built on the knowledge that hydrogen’s vibrations within a solid help encourage the formation of superconducting electron pairs. By using ultra-high pressures, researchers have been able to force hydrogen into solids that turned out to superconduct at temperatures that could be reached without resorting to liquid nitrogen.

Now, researchers have cleared a major psychological barrier by demonstrating the first chemical that superconducts at room temperature. There are just two catches: we’re not entirely sure what the chemical is, and it only works at 2.5 million atmospheres of pressure.

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Woo-h….what? Room-temperature superconductivity and routine nuclear fusion: incorporated ages ago into science fiction, endlessly out of reach in real life.
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Augmented reality dog goggles could help protect soldiers • The United States Army

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The augmented reality goggles are specially designed to fit each dog with a visual indicator that allows the dog to be directed to a specific spot and react to the visual cue in the goggles. The handler can see everything the dog sees to provide it commands through the glasses.

“Augmented reality works differently for dogs than for humans,” said Dr. Stephen Lee, an ARO senior scientist. “AR will be used to provide dogs with commands and cues; it’s not for the dog to interact with it like a human does. This new technology offers us a critical tool to better communicate with military working dogs.”

The initial prototype is wired, keeping the dog on a leash, but researchers are working to make it wireless in the next phase of development.

“We are still in the beginning research stages of applying this technology to dogs, but the results from our initial research are extremely promising,” Peper said. “Much of the research to date has been conducted with my rottweiler, Mater. His ability to generalize from other training to working through the AR goggles has been incredible. We still have a way to go from a basic science and development perspective before it will be ready for the wear and tear our military dogs will place on the units.”

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Normally it’s done by pointing, but AR would allow remote interaction. Or a whole new way to throw the ball to be fetched.
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Poor numerical literacy linked to greater susceptibility to Covid-19 fake news • The Guardian

Natalie Grover:

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People in Ireland, Spain, Mexico, the US and the UK took part in the study. Their numerical literacy levels were calculated on the basis of three different numeracy tests.

Participants were presented with nine statements about Covid-19, some false (for example, 5G networks may be making us more susceptible to the coronavirus) and some true (for instance, people with diabetes are at higher risk of complications from coronavirus).

Participants were also asked about their risk perception of Covid-19, what extent they complied with public health guidance and their likelihood of getting vaccinated if a vaccine were to become available.

Overall, higher susceptibility to fake news was associated with lower self-reported compliance with public health guidance for Covid-19, as well as people’s willingness to get vaccinated against the virus and recommend the vaccine to vulnerable family and friends.

Some scientists think that susceptibility to misinformation is related to political views, while others think it is linked to reasoning abilities, study author Dr Sander van der Linden explained.

“My take is that both are relevant. And I was surprised to see numeracy playing such a strong role here … it was one of the single most important predictors,” he said. “I like that finding in a sense because it gives me hope that there’s a solution out there.”

…The research, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, also found that people who were more receptive to misinformation viewed themselves as minorities and appeared resistant to voices in authority such as scientists and politicians

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That latter sentence is a bit of a mixture. Scientists, fine, but which politicians should we regard as an authority on this topic? Jacinda Ardern, perhaps, but you’d hardly look to Donald Trump for your best advice on avoiding it.
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Exclusive: Huawei in talks to sell parts of its Honor smartphone business – sources • Reuters

Julie Zhu:

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Embattled Huawei is resetting its priorities due to US sanctions and will focus on its higher-end Huawei phones rather than the Honor brand which is aimed at young people and the budget conscious, they said.

The assets to be sold have yet to be finalised but could include Honor’s brand, R&D capabilities and related supply chain management business, two of the people said.

The deal may be an all-cash sale and could end up smaller, worth somewhere between 15 billion yuan and 25 billion yuan ($2.2bn-$3.7bn), one of the people said.

Digital China, the main distributor for Honor phones, has emerged as the frontrunner but other prospective buyers include Chinese electronics maker TCL and rival smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp, the people said, declining to be identified as the talks were confidential.

…Kuo Ming-chi, an analyst at TF International Securities, has said that any sale by Huawei of the Honor smartphone business would be a win-win situation for the Honor brand, its suppliers and China’s electronics industry.

“If Honor is independent from Huawei, its purchase of components will no longer be subject to the U.S. ban on Huawei. This will help Honor’s smartphone business and the suppliers,” he wrote in a research note last week.

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Huawei’s executives must be praying that Trump loses and that they’ll get a chance to reset with a new administration, but even that won’t happen until January. This feels like testing the market in case things don’t turn out well in November. Note the inclusion of the R&D: is that really separate for the high-end phones and the cheaper Honor brand?
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Google and Facebook have a news labelling problem • Columbia Journalism Review

Emily Bell and Sara Sheridan:

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When the Institute for Nonprofit News was approached several years ago by a news organization targeting African American readers, executive director Sue Cross was intrigued. Although the organization did not pass the transparency of funding standards for INN membership, Cross followed their journalism closely over a period of months. While much of the reporting seemed solid, Cross noted “a pattern of stories emerging; particularly positive stories about coal and stories about how particular types of new energy have a racist impact.” The undisclosed money funding the site was clearly aligned with the interests of the fossil-fuel industry, but as Cross put it recently, “You had to read the output of a number of months to even detect it.”

Sites like this one were the subject of a recent Tow Center discussion on the phenomenon of covertly partisan money funding local news. Tow Center research into understanding how partisan online news networks operate ahead of elections revealed over a thousand politically backed sites cropping up across the US producing largely automatically generated stories. The Metric Media network at the center of the study is the largest, but by no means the only example of organizations that are serving lobbying or political interests by producing what appears to be local news content. As Cross pointed out, the lack of transparency around funding sources is designed to deceive readers by making it difficult to detect political or commercial motives. 

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Of course, as they acknowledge, the world of print and cable has seen partisan funding (the right-wing press in the UK; Sinclair Media in the US). But Facebook lets anyone define themselves as a media/news company, while Google doesn’t apply it consistently. That, in turn, creates problems of “pink slime” news: regurgitated, reused content with undeclared partisan intent.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Eli Pariser reckons it’s time we had the equivalent of properly public parks on the internet? CC-licensed photo by Dmitry Ryzhkov 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. Undeniably. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

To mend a broken internet, create online parks • WIRED

Eli Pariser:

»

To build the thriving digital public spaces we need, we must address three surmountable challenges.

First: money. While the internet started out as a publicly supported network, digital spaces in the last 20 years have been mostly funded by venture capitalists who are looking for enormous returns on investment. Scaling a product so that millions of people know about it and can use it fluidly can cost billions.

While a multi-billion-dollar price tag seems massive, we implicitly value our physical public infrastructure at many times that. Central Park’s land value alone is, by one calculation, $37 trillion. (That’s more than 50 Facebooks, if you’re keeping score.)

History suggests that a guilty-but-loaded tech mogul could step up and solve the funding problem, becoming the Andrew Carnegie of the 21st century. But philanthropic money often comes with strings attached. That’s why it’s worth investing in the more radical notion recently proposed by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ report on American citizenship. The Academy suggests taxing targeted advertising, and using those funds to shore up democratic functions that the big tech platforms have eroded, such as local journalism. Public digital infrastructure could also be funded in this way.

Second, there’s a talent and research problem. People outside of tech generally underestimate how hard it is to build something seamless, intuitive, and irresistible that allows millions of people to interact. We need to rally a diverse, representative generation of builders to this cause. And given that digital products live and die by metrics, we need to identify signals that correspond to flourishing public digital space.

Finally, there’s a problem of public imagination. Fixing our ability to connect and build healthy communities at scale is arguably an Apollo mission for this generation—a decisive challenge that will determine whether our society progresses or falls back into conspiracy-driven tribalism. We need to summon the creative will worthy of a problem of this urgency and consequence.

«

Pariser, of course, is the author of The Filter Bubble, the iconic work on the topic. This point about the lack of a public space for people to gather virtually has also been made, some time ago, by Zeynep Tufekci. If both Pariser and Tufekci think something is a good idea, it’s a good idea.
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Apple’s iPhone 12 event: the seven biggest announcements • The Verge

The bits I find interesting (given that the addition of 5G was predictable):
• the HomePod Mini – at just $99 (£99 in the UK of course), that will sell well to iPhone users, even if it’s about three years too late
• the “MagSafe” brand reappearing as a way to implement reliable wireless charging, which Apple is encouraging third-party companies to use too, which in turn implies that the Lightning charging port is going away over time
• looks like the iPhone 4 design – flat sides – has come back into fashion.

Otherwise: big screens, lots of pixels, lowest price version still doesn’t quite have enough storage.
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Gangstalking forums are hurting people even as some on them try to help • MIT Technology Review

Amelia Tait:

»

Right now, on Facebook pages, forums, blogs, YouTube channels, and subreddits across the internet, thousands of people are sharing their belief that they are being “gangstalked.” These self-described “targeted individuals” say they are being monitored, harassed, and stalked 24/7 by governments and other organizations. Targeted individuals claim that seemingly ordinary people are in fact trained operatives tasked with watching or harassing them—delivery men, neighbors, colleagues, roommates, teachers, even dogs. And though small compared with the most popular online forums, gangstalking communities are growing quickly; one estimate from 2016 suggested that there might be 10,000 people in such groups across the internet. Today, just one subreddit and one Facebook group adds up to over 22,000—and there are hundreds more groups scattered across different platforms.

The only academic study on gangstalking, a 2015 research article published in The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, involved a questionnaire of 128 gangstalking victims undertaken by forensic psychologist Lorraine Sheridan and stalking expert David James. Sheridan and James found that—compared to people who experienced stalking from an individual—people who believed they were being gangstalked scored more highly on depressive and post-traumatic symptoms, and “had a clear need for psychiatric support.” The authors concluded that gangstalking is “delusional in basis,” with those surveyed making improbable claims about hostile gangstalkers in their children’s schools, traffic lights being manipulated to always turn red, mind-controlled family and friends, and the invasion of their dreams.

Every day, the internet legitimizes these beliefs. A post entitled “confessions from a gangstalker” has been copied-and-pasted widely, while people share their own stories of being targeted by strangers or incapacitated by technology in their homes. Often, people log on looking for help—“Am I going crazy or am i being stalked?” reads a post on a gangstalking subreddit shared at the beginning of 2020 by a teen who claimed to have a schizophrenia diagnosis—and leave with what they believe are the answers.

«

This reminds me of the people who think they have weird fibres under their skins – morgellons. The internet won’t tell you you’re wrong, even if you have a delusion.
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Facebook to ban ads discouraging vaccination • The Guardian

Kari Paul and agencies:

»

Facebook will ban ads that discourage people from getting vaccinated, the social media company announced Tuesday, as it launches a new public health campaign aimed at spreading flu vaccine information.

The changes are a departure from Facebook’s previous policy, which prohibited ads with vaccine misinformation but allowed ads expressing opposition to vaccines if they did not contain false claims.

The company said in a blogpost, however, that it would still allow ads advocating for or against legislation or government policies on vaccines, including a Covid-19 vaccine. Several ads discouraging vaccine mandates remained on the platform as of Tuesday.

Anti-vaccine content agnd discussion will still be allowed to appear organically on the platform, including in Facebook groups. A Guardian analysis found engagement with anti-vaccine posts on a sample of Facebook pages soared this summer. The company did not respond to request for comment regarding the policing of user-generated content relating to vaccines.

«

So this has become quite a thing. Militias one day, postal voting disinformation the next, then QAnon, then Holocaust denial, and now vaccine denial. Two obvious questions: what’s the next one to drop, and who inside Facebook has been driving the change in thinking about this? Sure, Zuckerberg gives it the final yes/no, but there must be a strand of executive thinking that’s pushing this.
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Facebook gives Bletchley Park £1m to help it through pandemic • CNBC

Sam Shead:

»

Bletchley Park, a top-secret British codebreaking hub in World War Two, has received a £1m ($1.3m) donation from Facebook to help it through the coronavirus pandemic.

The donation comes after Bletchley Park, which is now a national heritage attraction and computing museum, said in August that it had lost over 95% of its income between March and July as a result of the virus. It reopened on July 4 but with reduced visitor numbers and is expecting to record a £2m deficit this year.

Iain Standen, chief executive of Bletchley Park, said in a statement: “We are very grateful to Facebook for their generous donation.”

“With this significant support, the Bletchley Park Trust will be better positioned to operate in the ‘new world’, and keep its doors open for future generations.”

«

Pros: getting on the side of the people who fought Nazis (and also who helped invent modern computing). Cons: you know, Facebook, you probably could have made it £2m.
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Why Facebook can’t fix itself • The New Yorker

Andrew Marantz on Facebook’s moderation problem:

»

Mildka and Chris Gray left Facebook in 2018. Shortly afterward, in the U.K., Channel 4 aired a documentary that had been filmed by an undercover reporter posing as a content moderator in their office. At one point in the documentary, a trainer gives a slideshow presentation about how to interpret some of the Implementation Standards regarding hate speech. One slide shows an apparently popular meme: a Norman Rockwell-style image of a white mother who seems to be drowning her daughter in a bathtub, with the caption “When your daughter’s first crush is a little Negro boy.” Although the image “implies a lot,” the trainer says, “there’s no attack, actually, on the Negro boy . . . so we should ignore this.”

There’s a brief pause in the conference room. “Is everyone O.K. with that?” the trainer says.

“No, not O.K.,” a moderator responds. The other moderators laugh uneasily, and the scene ends.

After the footage became public, a Facebook spokesperson claimed that the trainer had made a mistake. “I know for a fact that that’s a lie,” Chris Gray told me. “When I was there, I got multiple tickets with that exact meme in it, and I was always told to ignore. You go, ‘C’mon, we all know exactly what this means,’ but you’re told, ‘Don’t make your own judgments.’ ”

A former moderator from Phoenix told me, “If it was what they say it is—‘You’re here to clean up this platform so everyone else can use it safely’—then there’s some nobility in that. But, when you start, you immediately realize we’re in no way expected or equipped to fix the problem.” He provided me with dozens of examples of hate speech—some of which require a good amount of cultural fluency to decode, others as clear-cut as open praise for Hitler—that he says were reviewed by moderators but not removed, “either because they could not understand why it was hateful, or because they assumed that the best way to stay out of trouble with their bosses was to leave borderline stuff up.”

«

There’s lots of this. (The C4 documentary is still online, and still shocking.) Two moderators who spoke to Marantz called Facebook’s minimalist approach “a kind of libertarian imperialism”, which is spot on.
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2018: the AskHistorians subreddit banned Holocaust deniers, and Facebook should too • Slate

Johannes Breit, writing in July 2018 when Mark Zuckerberg had said he wouldn’t ban Holocaust denial on Facebook:

»

Zuckerberg got into hot water on Wednesday when he stated that Facebook wouldn’t necessarily remove Holocaust deniers from its platform because people “get things wrong” and because it’s not always possible to understand the deniers’ intent.

This position fundamentally fails to grasp how Holocaust deniers spread anti-Semitic propaganda, underscoring a flaw in how the purportedly neutral platform thinks it ought to handle particularly odious ideas. Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: we ban it immediately. Deniers need a public forum to spread their lies and to sow doubt among readers not well-informed about history. By convincing people that they might have a point or two, they open the door for further radicalization in pursuit of their ultimate goal: to rehabilitate Nazism as an ideology in public discourse by distancing it from the key elements that make it so rightfully reviled—the genocide against Jews, Roma, Sinti, and others.

…The Holocaust is the obvious proof that the ideology of National Socialism is, at its core, racist, anti-Semitic, and genocidal. Holocaust denial erases this massive crime to blunt the horror of Nazi ideas as a whole.

The point of JAQing off [“Just Asking Questions”, in faux “good faith”, about minor details of the Holocaust] is not to debate facts. It’s to have an audience hear denialist lies in the first place. Allowing their talking points to stand in public helps sow the seeds of doubt, even if only to one person in 10,000.

«

It’s worth reading Breit’s piece in full, because this isn’t just a rhetorical game. What remains puzzling is that Zuckerberg was so certain he knew better than people who had been immersed in this subject literally for decades, until his abrupt reversal this week. I’m very much looking forward to whoever can winkle out of him an explanation of what shifted his position.
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Computers Are Hard: building software with David Heinemeier Hansson • Medium

Wojtek Borowicz interviews DHH, who Has Opinions:

»

Software, in most cases, is inherently unpredictable, unknowable, and unshaped. It’s almost like a gas. It can fit into all sorts of different openings from the same basic idea. The notion of trying to estimate how long a feature is going to take doesn’t work because you don’t know what you’re building and because humans are terrible at estimating anything. The history of software development is one of late or cancelled projects. If you were to summarize the entire endeavor of software development, you’d say: ‘The project ran late and it got canceled’. Planning work doesn’t work, so to speak.

…So the problem with those methodologies is they put too much focus on estimating, which is inherently impossible with software?
I’d go even further and say that estimation is bullshit. It’s so imprecise as to be useless, even when you’re dealing with fixed inputs. And you’re not. No one is ever able to accurately describe what a piece of software should do before they see the piece of software. This idea that we can preemptively describe what something should do before we start working on it is bunk. Agile was sort of onto this idea that you need running software to get feedback but the modern implementations of Agile are not embracing the lesson they themselves taught.

…The magic really is in shifting your mindset from estimates to budgets. Don’t think about how long something takes. Think about how long are you willing to give something. This flips the entire idea. It lets the requirements float. The project definition that is vague is actually more realistic. Highly specific project definitions usually go astray very quickly.

«

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UK plans new law to undo foreign deals on security grounds • Bloomberg

Tim Ross and Alex Morales:

»

Boris Johnson’s government is drawing up plans for a radical new law that would give ministers power to unravel foreign investments in U.K. companies – potentially casting major doubt on deals that have already been concluded – to stop hostile states gaining control over key assets.

The National Security and Investment Bill is in the final stages of drafting and could be published later this month, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject is sensitive.

It aims to cover deals in sectors such as defense and critical infrastructure, and will make provisions to protect sensitive intellectual property.

Among the most potentially controversial parts of the draft law is a proposal to allow the government to intervene retrospectively in circumstances where national security is an issue. That would mean allowing government officials to look back at past takeovers and mergers where concerns have been raised.

…Under the plans, the bill would include certain elements that are retroactive, enabling ministers to look back at past investments. One person familiar with the draft suggested this was with a particular deal in mind, though another denied that was the case.

«

I bet the “particular deal” is Softbank’s purchase of ARM, and NVidia’s new attempt to buy it. The question though is: how would the investment be unraveled, exactly? What would the government pay, and how would it compensate the companies involved?
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Winning bid: how auction theory took the Nobel memorial prize in economics • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

»

A well-designed auction forces bidders to reveal the truth about their own estimate of the prize’s value. At the same time, the auction shares that information with the other bidders. And it sets the price accordingly. It is quite a trick.

But in practice it is a difficult trick to get right. In the 1990s, the US Federal government turned to auction theorists — [Nobel prize winners] Milgrom and Wilson prominent among them — for advice on auctioning radio-spectrum rights. “The theory that we had in place had only a little bit to do with the problems that they actually faced,” Milgrom recalled in an interview in 2007. “But the proposals that were being made by the government were proposals that we were perfectly capable of analysing the flaws in and improving.”

The basic challenge with radio-spectrum auctions is that many prizes are on offer, and bidders desire only certain combinations. A TV company might want the right to use Band A, or Band B, but not both. Or the right to broadcast in the east of England, but only if they also had the right to broadcast in the west. Such combinatorial auctions are formidably challenging to design, but Milgrom and Wilson got to work.

Joshua Gans, a former student of Milgrom’s who is now a professor at the University of Toronto, praises both men for their practicality. Their theoretical work is impressive, he said, “but they realised that when the world got too complex, they shouldn’t adhere to proving strict theorems”.

«

Further auction possibilities: carbon credits. If more governments would implement them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You won’t believe the things Eddie Van Halen did to his guitars and amps. CC-licensed photo by National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution 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. Could be misinformation. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

On Facebook, misinformation is more popular now than in 2016 • The New York Times

Davey Alba:

»

have the platforms really become more sophisticated at handling misinformation?

Not necessarily.

People are engaging more on Facebook today with news outlets that routinely publish misinformation than they did before the 2016 election, according to new research from the German Marshall Fund Digital, the digital arm of the public policy think tank. The organization, which has a data partnership with the start-up NewsGuard and the social media analytics firm NewsWhip, published its findings on Monday.

In total, Facebook likes, comments and shares of articles from news outlets that regularly publish falsehoods and misleading content roughly tripled from the third quarter of 2016 to the third quarter of 2020, the group found.

About two thirds of those likes and comments were of articles published by 10 outlets, which the researchers categorized as “false content producers” or “manipulators.” Those news outlets included Palmer Report and The Federalist, according to the research.

The group used ratings from NewsGuard, which ranks news sites based on how they uphold nine journalistic principles, to sort them into “false content producers,” which repeatedly publish provably false content; and “manipulators,” which regularly present unsubstantiated claims or that distort information to make an argument.

«

Somehow, so unsurprising.
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Wisconsin rejects Foxconn’s subsidies after contract negotiations fail • The Verge

Josh Dzieza:

»

Through the many twists and turns of Foxconn’s troubled Wisconsin project, one thing has long been clear: the company is not building the promised 20 million-square-foot Gen 10.5 LCD factory specified in its contract with the state. Even before President Trump broke ground on the supposed factory in June 2018, Foxconn said it would instead build a far smaller factory than it had proposed.

The discrepancy between what Foxconn is doing and what it said it would do in its contract has only grown since then, and it has brought Wisconsin and the company to an impasse. Documents obtained by The Verge show that attempts to renegotiate that contract have so far failed, and today, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), which oversees the deal, rejected Foxconn’s application for tax subsidies on the grounds that Foxconn had not carried out the Gen 10.5 LCD factory project described in its original contract.

WEDC also noted that even if whatever Foxconn is currently doing had been eligible under the contract, it had failed to employ the minimum number of people needed to get subsidies.

«

Let’s just rewind to June 2018, when Trump broke ground and (according to the speech) said it was “one of the most advanced places of any kind you’ll see anywhere in the world” and “Think of it: more than 20 million feet. And that’s probably going to be a minimal number.”

We’re going to look back on stuff like that (the White House transcript is, indeed, a transcript) and marvel that anything so doltish could happen in public.
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Eddie Van Halen: how the rock legend hacked his guitar • Popular Mechanics

The man himself wouldn’t just hack his guitar; he’d go at his amps too:

»

If it was movable, or turnable, or anything that resembled something that could go up or down, I would mess with it to make the amp run hotter. I opened the amp up and saw this thing. I found out later it was a bias control, which controls the power to the output tubes. I’m poking around, and all of a sudden I touch this huge blue thing and my God, it was like being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson. My whole body flexed stiff, and it must have thrown me five feet. I’d touched a capacitor. I didn’t know they held voltage.

The Marshall amp I brought home from the store where I worked was only good if you turned it all the way up. Any lower and you’d lose the distortion. I needed that, but it was impossible to play anywhere with the volume that loud, so I tried everything, from leaving the thick plastic cover on it to facing it backwards to putting it face down. I’d blow a fuse twice an hour.

«

There’s pretty much no aspect of his guitars (the pickup, the frets, the nut, the back of the neck) or kit that he didn’t mess with.

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Facebook to ban posts that deny Holocaust, reversing policy • Bloomberg

Sarah Frier:

»

Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who has been lobbied by civil rights groups such as the Anti-Defamation League to make the change, said he is concerned about the “current state of the world” and hate-based violence.

“I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “My own thinking has evolved as I’ve seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence.”

Facebook said its decision was supported by the documented evidence of a rise in anti-Semitism globally and “the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people.” According to a recent survey of adults age 18-39 in the U.S., almost a quarter said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, that it had been exaggerated or they weren’t sure, Facebook’s head of content policy, Monika Bickert, said in a separate post. The Holocaust was the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their allies during World War II.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, said he’s pushed Facebook to make the change for years. It’s “a big deal,” Greenblatt wrote on Twitter. “Glad it finally happened.”

«

As recently as July 2018 Zuckerberg was insisting that it was all just a matter of opinion. The real puzzle is still why he has changed his position on this. Where has this rise in anti-Semitic violence occurred? Yet there are a lot of changes afoot at Facebook.

Meanwhile, other genocide denial is just fine.
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Twitter flags Trump’s false claim about his Covid-19 immunity. Facebook, however, does nothing • CNN

Jason Hoffman and Jordan Valinsky:

»

There is no evidence that people are immune to coronavirus if they have been infected once, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC specifically cautions people not to assume they are immune.

Twitter’s warning label says the tweet “violated the Twitter Rules about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to Covid-19.”

“We placed a public interest notice on [President Trump’s] Tweet for violating our Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy by making misleading health claims about Covid-19,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “As is standard with this public interest notice, engagements with the Tweet will be significantly limited.”

Trump posted the same message on his Facebook account, but the platform hasn’t added a warning label despite the fact that it violates its rules. The post has been up for four hours and shared more than 24,000 times on Facebook.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

«

Now if he had said that coronavirus made him immune to the Holocaust…
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Ad tech could be the next internet bubble • WIRED

Gilad Edelman:

»

[Ex-Googler Tim] Hwang thinks online ads are heading in the same direction, since no one really grasps their worthlessness. There are piles of research papers in support of this idea, showing that companies’ returns on investment in digital marketing are generally anemic and often negative. One recent study found that ad tech middlemen take as much as a 50% cut of all online ad spending. Brands pay that premium for the promise of automated microtargeting, but a study by Nico Neumann, Catherine E. Tucker, and Timothy Whitfield found that the accuracy of that targeting is often extremely poor. In one experiment, they used six different advertising platforms in an effort to reach Australian men between the ages of 25 and 44. Their targeting performed slightly worse than random guessing. Such research indicates that, despite the extent of surveillance tech, a lot of the data that fuels ad targeting is garbage.

Even when targeting works as promised, and the ads are served to their intended audience, many are simply never seen, because they load somewhere out of sight, like the bottom of a webpage. The rise of ad blocking makes the problem even more acute. Hwang cites a 2015 Adobe estimate that ad blockers deprived online publishers of $21.8bn in annual revenue, more than Facebook’s entire take for that year. Then there’s the astonishing level of digital ad fraud, including “click farms” that serve no purpose other than for bots or paid humans to constantly refresh and click ads, and “domain spoofing,” in which a bottom-dweller site participates in ad auctions while disguised as a more prestigious one. Hwang cites a 2017 study finding that, between lousy ad placement and outright fraud, “as much as 56% of all display ad dollars were lost to fraudulent or unviewable inventory in 2016.”

«

Hwang is very sure that it’s all going to collapse, like the US housing market in 2008. To me, the difference seems to be that everyone has an interest in the online advertising market continuing. And there’s no downside for them if it continues.
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Feds may target Google’s Chrome browser for breakup • Politico

Leah Nylen:

»

In the advertising investigation, DOJ and state attorneys general have asked rivals and other third parties for their views on which businesses Google should have to sell. They have also asked whether any existing competitors should be off-limits as potential buyers, the people said.

The lawyers have also asked whether any of Google’s properties outside of the advertising technology market should be targeted for potential sale — leading some to single out Google’s Chrome browser, they said.

The browser, which Google introduced in 2008 and has the largest market share in the US, has been at the centre of rivals’ accusations that the search giant uses its access to users’ web histories to aid its advertising business.

That criticism escalated in January, when Google said it would phase out the use of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser within two years to enhance consumer privacy. But cookies — small files a browser uses to track visits to websites — are also a key tool for publishers to demonstrate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns to ad buyers.

Google’s own estimates show that eliminating those cookies will reduce advertising revenue to news outlets that show online ads by as much as 62%.

«

If the US somehow goes mad and implements this, will Google also have to do it in other countries? Chrome is the biggest browser in the world. The logic makes a kind of sense – through Chrome, Google can dictate how websites can behave and what tracking can and can’t be done. Wouldn’t be great news for Chromebooks, of course.
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Apple Watch at five • Asymco

Horace Dediu:

»

The Watch has an always-on altimeter which is working to help with tracking effort by the wearer.

The Watch can detect hand washing and provide a timer so you do it well enough.
The Watch can track all physical activity and provide motivational reminders to meet daily goals.
The Watch can monitor exercise with precision and provide data that helps you improve your performance.
The Watch can also be used to pay for your groceries at the register.

The reason the Watch can do all these things is because it’s a computer. A computer with a dual core processor based on the A13 bionic chip also used in the iPhone 11, a retina display that is always on(!) and displaying at least 500nits at all times. It has on-board storage for music, WiFi, Bluetooth and a touch screen.

But although being a computer allows the Watch to do all this and more, no PC can do even one of these things. Nor does a PC have GPS, or Cellular connectivity or NFC and is certainly not swimproof. You don’t wear a PC in bed and it does not stay with you 24×7.

…The story of phones, tablets and wearables is a story of creating new markets, not substituting for old ones. In so doing the new markets are greater than their putative substitutions would allow. This is happening over and over again but it still seems to go largely unnoticed. Keep an eye out for a lot more of this.

«

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Covid-19: China’s Qingdao to test nine million in five days • BBC News

»

The Chinese city of Qingdao is testing its entire population of nine million people for Covid-19 over a period of five days.

The mass testing comes after the discovery of a dozen cases linked to a hospital treating coronavirus patients arriving from abroad.

In May, China tested the entire city of Wuhan – home to 11 million people and the epicentre of the global pandemic.

The country has largely brought the virus under control. That is in stark contrast to other parts of the world, where there are still high case numbers and lockdown restrictions of varying severity.

In a statement posted to Chinese social media site Weibo, Qingdao’s Municipal Health Commission said six new cases and six asymptomatic cases had been discovered. All the cases were linked to the same hospital, said the state-run Global Times.

«

Those are stunning numbers – both the small number of positives and the size of the testing – though in context: 9m people in China’s 1.4 billion is equivalent to 0.6%, or 405,000 of the UK’s 63m population. The UK has a PCR testing capacity of about 310,000 tests per day.
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100-watt wireless charging could be a thing next year • Android Authority

Hadlee Simons:

»

We’ve seen major strides in fast charging in the last two years, as smartphone manufacturers like Huawei, BBK, and Xiaomi upped the ante for both wired and wireless charging. We’ve previously seen wired charging top out at ~120W in recent months, but wireless charging solutions aren’t far behind, either.

Now, frequent leaker Digital Chat Station has claimed that several manufacturers are targeting 100W wireless charging for phones launching in 2021. Check out the post below.

This would be a major leap over current wireless charging standards. We’ve seen 40W wireless charging in the likes of the Oppo Ace 2 and Huawei P40 Pro Plus respectively. Oppo has also announced 65W wireless charging technology earlier this year, although we haven’t seen it on a commercial device just yet.

Nevertheless, we do wonder about heat and battery degradation with a move to 100W wireless charging. Oppo in particular stated that its 125W wired charging solution degraded the battery to 80% capacity after 800 charging cycles, compared to its 65W wired solution dropping down to 90% capacity after 800 cycles.

«

The heat alone would be a concern. Plus that degradation: 800 charging cycles would be around two years and two months, on a daily schedule. Nor would the degradation mean you go from 100% to 80% on day; you’d lose a bit more each time, so you’d need to charge sooner, so the degradation would get worse… Wireless charging strikes me as a waste. What’s wrong with doing it slowly overnight on a power-efficient wire?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Here comes the mobile internet; there goes (some) trust in government. CC-licensed photo by Toujours Passages 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. Depending what the meaning of “link” is. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Space is becoming too crowded, Rocket Lab CEO warns • CNN

Jackie Wattles:

»

Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said that the sheer number of objects in space right now — a number that is growing quickly thanks in part to SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation, Starlink — is making it more difficult to find a clear path for rockets to launch new satellites.

“This has a massive impact on the launch side,” he told CNN Business. Rockets “have to try and weave their way up in between these [satellite] constellations.”

Part of the problem is that outer space remains largely unregulated. The last widely agreed upon international treaty hasn’t been updated in five decades, and that’s mostly left the commercial space industry to police itself.

Rocket Lab set out to create lightweight rockets — far smaller than SpaceX’s 230-foot-tall Falcon rockets — that can deliver batches of small satellites to space on a monthly or even weekly basis. Since 2018, Rocket Lab has launched 12 successful missions and a total of 55 satellites to space for a variety of research and commercial purposes. Beck said the in-orbit traffic issues took a turn for the worst over the past 12 months.

It was over that time that SpaceX has rapidly built up its Starlink constellation, growing it to include more than 700 internet-beaming satellites. It’s already the largest satellite constellation by far, and the company plans to grow it to include between 12,000 and 40,000 total satellites. That’s five times the total number of satellites humans have launched since the dawn of spaceflight in the late 1950s.

…Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist at the University of Texas at Austin and a leading expert in space traffic, said most of Earth’s orbit below about 750 miles is becoming a danger zone.

«

The “Gravity” scenario (aka Kessler Syndrome) becomes more likely every day.
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Facebook and the group that planned to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer • The New York Times

Charlie Warzel:

»

Just how effective these bans [on QAnon and political adverts after the US election] will be depends on their implementation. Facebook’s record on this is spotty, but so far the takedowns seem comprehensive. Both decisions are steps in the right direction.

Still, taken together, Facebook’s pre-election actions underscore a damning truth: With every bit of friction Facebook introduces to its platform, our information ecosystem becomes a bit less unstable. Flip that logic around and the conclusion is unsettling. Facebook, when it’s working as designed, is a natural accelerating force in the erosion of our shared reality and, with it, our democratic norms.
A good example of this appeared on Thursday in a criminal complaint released by the F.B.I. The complaint details a federal investigation that successfully stopped a plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and put her on “trial.” The investigation is the latest example of anti-government domestic terrorism among far-right extremists. The group also discussed plans to attack the Michigan State Capitol building in what the state attorney general, Dana Nessel, called an attempt to “instigate a civil war.”

…Near the beginning of his 2017 speech on community, Mr. Zuckerberg revealed part of his motivation to focus on groups and communities. “Every day, I say to myself, I don’t have much time here on Earth, how can I make the greatest positive impact?” he mused.

Normally, that’s a hard question for a company of Facebook’s size. But if Mr. Zuckerberg is still asking himself that question every morning, the answer right now should be crystal clear. Facebook itself seems to know what it ought to do. That’s why it is quietly, temporarily dismantling normally crucial pieces of its infrastructure in anticipation of a crucial moment for American democracy. It’s a tacit admission that what is good for Facebook is, on the whole, destabilizing for society.

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Apple’s T2 security chip has an unfixable flaw • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

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In general, the jailbreak community haven’t paid as much attention to macOS and OS X as it has iOS, because they don’t have the same restrictions and walled gardens that are built into Apple’s mobile ecosystem. But the T2 chip, launched in 2017, created some limitations and mysteries. Apple added the chip as a trusted mechanism for securing high-value features like encrypted data storage, Touch ID, and Activation Lock, which works with Apple’s “Find My” services. But the T2 also contains a vulnerability, known as Checkm8, that jailbreakers have already been exploiting in Apple’s A5 through A11 (2011 to 2017) mobile chipsets. Now Checkra1n, the same group that developed the tool for iOS, has released support for T2 bypass.

On Macs, the jailbreak allows researchers to probe the T2 chip and explore its security features. It can even be used to run Linux on the T2 or play Doom on a MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. The jailbreak could also be weaponized by malicious hackers, though, to disable macOS security features like System Integrity Protection and Secure Boot and install malware. Combined with another T2 vulnerability that was publicly disclosed in July by the Chinese security research and jailbreaking group Pangu Team, the jailbreak could also potentially be used to obtain FileVault encryption keys and to decrypt user data. The vulnerability is unpatchable, because the flaw is in low-level, unchangeable code for hardware.

…There are a few important limitations of the jailbreak, though, that keep this from being a full-blown security crisis. The first is that an attacker would need physical access to target devices in order to exploit them. The tool can only run off of another device over USB. This means hackers can’t remotely mass-infect every Mac that has a T2 chip. An attacker could jailbreak a target device and then disappear, but the compromise isn’t “persistent”; it ends when the T2 chip is rebooted.

…In this case, you’d likely have to be a very high-value target to register any real alarm. But hardware-based security measures do create a single point of failure that the most important data and systems rely on.

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Still, at least they found a good use for the Touch Bar. “Using [X] to play Doom” has now become the hacking existence proof, like “hello world” for programming.
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PC market shipments grow a stellar 13% in Q3 2020 to break ten-year record • Canalys

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Recently released Canalys data shows the global PC market climbed 12.7% from a year ago to reach 79.2 million units in Q3 2020 as it continued to benefit hugely from the COVID-19 crisis. This is the highest growth the market has seen in the past 10 years. After a weak Q1, the recovery in Q2 continued into Q3 this year, and it even grew on top of a strong market the previous year. Global notebook shipments touched 64 million units (almost as much as the record high of Q4 2011 when notebook shipments were 64.6 million) as demand continued to surge due to second waves of COVID-19 in many countries and companies continued to invest in longer-term transitions to remote working. Shipments of notebooks and mobile workstations grew 28.3% year-on-year. This contrasted with desktop and desktop workstations, which saw shipments shrink by 26.0%.

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Canalys rushed this out before IDC and Gartner could get their quarterly figures out (probably on Wednesday or Thursday). The growth might be big, but the actual level of shipments is less than Q4 or Q3 of 2014. You can see from the graph how there’s been a gradual decline. That figure for the fall in desktops is dramatic – is that business going to come back?

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Web of distrust: faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives • The Economist

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Most of the 4.1bn people now online got connected after 2010. To measure how new users’ views changed as a result, the authors combined two datasets. First, for each year in 2007-18, they estimated the share of people in each of 2,232 regions (such as states or provinces), spread across 116 countries, that could access at least 3g-level mobile internet. Then they used surveys by Gallup, a pollster, to measure how faith in government, courts and elections changed during this period in each area.

In general, people’s confidence in their leaders declined after getting 3G. However, the size of this effect varied. It was smaller in countries that allow a free press than in ones where traditional media are muzzled, and bigger in countries with unlimited web browsing than in ones that censor the internet. This implies that people are most likely to turn against their governments when they are exposed to online criticism that is not present offline. The decline was also larger in rural areas than in cities.

A similar pattern emerged at the ballot box. Among 102 elections in 33 European countries, incumbent parties’ vote-share fell by an average of 4.7 percentage points once 3G arrived.

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Twitter bans calls for polling disruptions and early victory declarations to curb election abuse • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg:

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Twitter will impose new warnings on politicians’ lies, restrict premature declarations of victory and block calls for polling violence or other disruptions, the company announced Friday as it rolled out wide-ranging changes designed to harden the platform against abuse related to the US election on Nov. 3.

The moves also will temporarily alter the look and feel of Twitter, a service built on instantaneous conversation, quips and breaking news. Retweeting others, for example, will require an extra step designed to encourage users to add their own thoughts before posting. Recommendations and trends will get new curbs intended to prevent abuse.

Twitter’s moves, like those announced recently by Facebook, are aimed mainly at combating efforts to manipulate the political landscape at critical moments in the hotly contested national vote.

…Trump campaign spokeswoman Samantha Zager said in a statement Friday after the announcement, “Make no mistake, this corporation is attempting to silence voters and elected officials to influence our election, and this is extremely dangerous for our democracy.”

The campaign for Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic rival, did not respond to a request for comment.

Democrats, civil rights activists and independent researchers, by contrast, have generally praised efforts by social media companies to prevent abuse and manipulation of platforms that are potent, far-reaching sources of news and opinion to billions of people worldwide.

“It’s really important these companies are understanding the unique role they play in amplifying or cutting off disinformation,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights,

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The contrast between the Trump and Biden campaign comments is telling. One gets the feeling that Silicon Valley has chosen its timing on this very carefully.
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Put Trump’s tweets on a time delay • WIRED

Mike Ananny is a professor at USC, and Daniel Kreiss is a principal researchers at UNC Center for Information:

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Twitter and Facebook have extensive and well-documented content rules that prohibit everything from electoral to health disinformation. The platforms have singled out these categories of content in particular because they have significant likelihood of causing real world harm, from voter suppression to undermining the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public health guidelines. The FBI found that the plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was, in part, organized in a Facebook group.

To date, the enforcement of these policies has been spotty at best. Twitter has labeled some of the president’s tweets as “potentially misleading” to readers about mail-in ballots. The platform hid a Trump tweet stating “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” for “glorifying violence,” and it recently hid another tweet equating Covid-19 to the flu, claiming that the president was “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information” when he wrote that “we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!” Facebook has taken similar actions, providing links to reliable voter and health information and removing posts that it deems violate its policies.

But these actions often take hours to put in place while this content racks up thousands of engagements and shares. In those hours, as recent research from Harvard shows, Trump is a one-man source of disinformation that travels quickly and broadly across Twitter and Facebook. And we know that the mainstream media often picks up on and amplifies Trump’s posts before platforms moderate them. Journalists report on platforms’ treatments of Trump’s tweets, making that and them the story, and giving life to false claims.

What if we never let Trump’s disinformation breathe to begin with, cutting it off from the social media and mainstream journalism oxygen it craves?

…why should this system be applied only to the posts of Trump and other political elites when Twitter and Facebook are rife with abuse from many sources? The answer, in short, is that when it comes to political and health disinformation, political elites matter the most. As decades of political science has taught us, people often take their cues from political leaders; they have outsized influence on public attitudes. Even more, such a high-profile test run of these systems on political elites in the US might help these companies figure out how to create a generalized post-delay system to ensure the integrity of their platforms’ policies.

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Trump reveals his climate weakness • HEATED

Very late to this (bookmarked it ages ago and then News Happened), but Emily Atkin poked at the one crucial question that came up in the first (and last? who knows) presidential debate:

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• [Moderator Chris] Wallace’s first question to Trump was, simply, “What do you believe about the science of climate change?” Trump admitted that humans contribute “to some extent.” Wallace then asked the necessary follow-up question that moderators don’t often do: “If you believe in the science of climate change, why have you rolled back [climate change regulations]?” Trump responded by saying energy prices would rise, and then rambled incoherently for a full minute about why cars should be able to pollute more.

• Through his climate answers, Biden revealed that he has a plan to address climate change, and that he really needs to get better at talking about it. When Wallace asked Biden about concerns that his climate plan will hurt the economy, for example, Biden responded that his plan would “create thousands and millions of jobs” before launching into a tirade about… building weatherization, for some reason?? Biden never made a forceful argument about how much not addressing climate change is hurting the economy, which is essential for voters to understand, particularly as wildfires and hurricanes rip through the country. This was an absolute softball that Biden should have been able to knock out of the park. He got on base, but that’s not enough to win.

• Climate change may actually be Trump’s greatest debate weakness. And here’s why: Trump just doesn’t know what to say. A huge reason last night’s debate was such a train wreck was because Trump could not stop interrupting every five seconds. But during the 11-minute climate portion, Trump was weirdly silent. He barely interrupted Biden or Wallace the entire time.

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Atkins writes a newsletter: you can sign up on the site. Occasional free posts, or if you pay then you can get the whole shebang. (Her most recent, on “petro-masculinity“, is worth your time too.
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Inside the Trump White House after his Covid-19 diagnosis • NY Mag

Olivia Nuzzi:

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Statistically, the coronavirus is more likely to cost Donald Trump the White House than his life, though the threat to the latter isn’t helping the former. A little more than three weeks before the election, potentially contagious and freaking everybody out, Trump faces what looks like the end of his presidency. “He’s mishandled the coronavirus, he’s never been popular, and he’s gonna lose badly. I think it’s pretty simple,” a senior Republican official said. “Of course he was going to say, ‘Oh look, I feel great! Look how badly I beat this puny little virus!’ Meanwhile, it touches every American’s life every day in multiple different ways, and he’s handled it badly and people don’t forget that.” Or, as ex–Trump adviser Sam Nunberg put it, “Everything has just completely gone to shit.”

The polls suggest not just that the president will lose to Joe Biden but that he might lose bigly, in a landslide.

…After [Hope Hicks] tested positive on Thursday afternoon, the White House failed to notify others who would soon test positive themselves. They learned about it when the world did, not with an official disclosure but with a leak to the media. “The president could’ve given it to her,” one of those people told me, in fairness, but “I would’ve done things different that day, had I known.”

Trump did know, but he didn’t change his plans. At 1pm on Thursday, he flew to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, for a fund-raiser with hundreds of his supporters, some of whom he spoke with indoors. Later that night, he tweeted about Hicks being sick. “Terrible!” he said. “The First Lady and I are waiting for our test results. In the meantime, we will begin our quarantining process.”

Reading the message, the person said, “I assumed he must’ve had a preliminary positive one.” The lack of transparency, this person added, is “symptomatic about how people I work with always keep the wrong things secret.” Suicidal in all senses, this is the Trumpian madness that threatens the president’s political and earthly future as it puts at risk everyone around him.

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Note: people are starting to use the L word – “landslide”.
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Telegram forced to close channels run by Belarus protestors • Decrypt

Scott Chipolina:

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Apple is requesting that Telegram shut down three channels used in Belarus to expose the identities of individuals belonging to the Belarusian authoritarian regime that may be oppressing civilians. 

Apple’s concern is that revealing the identities of law enforcement individuals may give rise to further violence. 

Telegram on the other hand, would prefer to keep these channels open but the company said that it feels it has no choice in the matter. These channels are a tool for Belarus’ citizens protesting the recently rigged presidential election, but, with a centralized entity like Apple calling the shots on its own App Store, there’s little the protesters can do about it. 

“I think this situation is not black and white and would rather leave the channels be, but typically Apple doesn’t offer much choice for apps like Telegram in such situations,” Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said in his Telegram channel.

The tension between Apple and Telegram is part of the wider issue surrounding Belarus’ 2020 election, which saw incumbent Alexander Lukashenko re-elected despite claims and evidence the election was rigged. The result has seen thousands of Belarusian citizens take to the streets to protest. 

This tension also highlights a problem with centralized app stores. “Unfortunately, I assume these channels will end up getting blocked on iOS, but remain available on other platforms,” Durov added. 

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I really don’t understand the dynamics here. Telegram can surely keep what channels it wants open, and while Apple can stop new downloads, it can’t affect what happens on old ones. And Android is definitely an option – which I would have thought would be popular in Belarus.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You’re looking at the most popular app for American teens. (Don’t tell Trump.) 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 10 links for you. Not part of a conspiracy to kidnap Facebook. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

TikTok passes Instagram as second-most popular social app for US teens • CNBC

Salvador Rodriguez:

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TikTok has surpassed Instagram as U.S. teenagers’ second-favorite social media app, according to a report published Tuesday. 

The short-video app is now favored among teens second only to Snap’s Snapchat, according to Piper Sandler. The report found that 34% of teens list Snapchat as their favorite social app followed with 29% picking TikTok. Trailing Snapchat and TikTok was Facebook’s Instagram, with only 25% of teens picking it as their favorite social app. TikTok placed No. 3 in the spring 2020 version of the Piper Sandler report. 

Usage was a different story, according to the report. In that regard, Instagram remains in first place with 84% engagement, followed by Snapchat at 80% and TikTok at 69%, up from 62% in the spring.

The report shows TikTok is continuing to gain market share among young U.S. users, which are a key demographic for social apps. These users are next a key demographic for advertisers, which are the main source of revenue for social apps. 

To circumvent the growing TikTok threat, Facebook in August released Reels, a copycat version of TikTok that lets Instagram users make short video clips of them lip syncing, dancing or doing skits. 

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Haven’t seen any evidence that Reels is capturing any interest, but maybe it’s too soon. TikTok’s algorithm, though, is clearly the first wave of an entirely new sort of app: it generates its network purely from what you’re interested in, not who you know.
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Facebook just forced its most powerful critics offline • Vice

David Gilbert:

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Facebook is using its vast legal muscle to silence one of its most prominent critics.

The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group established last month in response to the tech giant’s failure to get its actual Oversight Board up and running before the presidential election, was forced offline on Wednesday night after Facebook wrote to the internet service provider demanding the group’s website — realfacebookoversight.org — be taken offline.

The group is made up of dozens of prominent academics, activists, lawyers, and journalists whose goal is to hold Facebook accountable in the run-up to the election next month. Facebook’s own Oversight Board, which was announced 13 months ago, will not meet for the first time until later this month, and won’t consider any issues related to the election.

In a letter sent to one of the founders of the RFOB, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, the ISP SupportNation said the website was being taken offline after Facebook complained that the site was involved in “phishing.”

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There was quite a back-and-forth on Twitter between Carole Cadwalladr, who helped organise the RFOB, and Andy Stone, who does “communications” for Facebook, over this. “You thing that accuses us of fake things was caught in our thing to prevent fake things”, Stone tweeted at her. Text kills nuance, but the tone seemed pretty snide; it’s not a good look.
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‘It’s been so, so surreal’: critics of Sweden’s lax pandemic policies face fierce backlash • Science

Gretchen Vogel with a long, in-depth piece of reporting about the country that is seen either as a shining example or a complete screwup on Covid:

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[The Swedish public health authority] FoHM’s decision to keep schools open despite surging cases may also have added to the spread. A report from the agency itself, released in July, compared Sweden with Finland, which closed its schools between March and May, and concluded that “closing of schools had no measurable effect on the number of cases of COVID-19 in children.” But few Swedish children were tested in that period, even if they had COVID-19 symptoms. And the lack of contact tracing means there are no data about whether cases spread in schools or not. When new FoHM guidelines allowed symptomatic children to be tested in June, cases in children shot up—from fewer than 20 per week in late May to more than 100 in the second week of June. (FoHM reversed course in July and returned to recommending that children under 16 not be tested.)

Indirect data suggest children in Sweden were infected far more often than their Finnish counterparts. The FoHM report says 14 Swedish kids were admitted to intensive care with COVID-19, versus one in Finland, which has roughly half as many schoolchildren. In Sweden, at least 70 children have been diagnosed with multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a rare complication of COVID-19, versus fewer than five in Finland.

In the population as a whole, the impact of Sweden’s approach is unmistakable. More than 94,000 people have so far been diagnosed with COVID-19, and at least 5895 have died. The country has seen roughly 590 deaths per million—on par with 591 per million in the United States and 600 in Italy, but many times the 50 per million in Norway, 108 in Denmark, and 113 in Germany.

Another way to measure the pandemic’s impact is to look at “excess deaths,” the difference between the number of people who died this year and average deaths in earlier years. Those curves show Sweden did not suffer as many excess deaths as England and Wales—whose tolls were among Europe’s highest—but many more than Germany and its Nordic neighbors (see graphic, above). Immigrant communities were hit very hard. Between March and September, 111 people from Somalia and 247 from Syria died, compared with 5-year averages of 34 and 93, respectively.

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Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

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The Supreme Court’s eight justices on Wednesday seemed skeptical of Google’s argument that application programming interfaces (APIs) are not protected by copyright law. The high court was hearing oral arguments in Google’s decade-long legal battle with Oracle. Oracle argues that Google infringed its copyright in the Java programming language when it re-implemented Java APIs for use by Android app developers.

The stakes in the case are high for Google, which could owe Oracle billions of dollars in damages. More importantly, an Oracle win could reshape how copyright law treats APIs, giving incumbents the power to lock out competitors who want to build compatible software.

For decades prior to Oracle’s lawsuit, most people in the software industry assumed that APIs couldn’t be copyrighted. That meant a software company could re-implement the APIs of a competitor’s product in order to enable software designed to work with the competitor’s product to work with its own.

A win for Oracle would call that into question. That would not only generate extra work for copyright lawyers, it could lead to a world where software compatibility problems crop up more often in everyday life.

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Again and again, the oral argument part of a Supreme Court hearing tends to be a poor guide to the eventual decisions. It seems to me that the judges (who will have read up about the topic thoroughly in advance) are just checking the soundness of arguments they might come to rely on themselves later, so when they seem to be tearing an argument apart they’re actually just stress-testing it.

What I don’t know – have I missed something obvious? – is whether they then gather around a fire or a bottle and argue it out collectively in a single group, or whether there’s one-on-one lobbying, or what.

Also: this case has been going on forever.
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Facebook to defy new Turkish social media law • Financial Times

Laura Pitel and Hannah Murphy:

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Facebook has decided to defy a new law in Turkey requiring social media companies to establish a formal presence in the country, setting the stage for a showdown with the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan that could culminate in the platform being blocked.

The San Francisco-based company informed the Turkish government in recent days that it would not be complying with the legislation, which went into force last week, said two people familiar with the matter. 

The decision will be welcomed by human rights campaigners who had urged technology companies not to bow to requirements that they described as “draconian” and a fresh attempt by Mr Erdogan’s government to muzzle free speech.

But it opens Facebook up to penalties including escalating fines and a reduction of its internet bandwidth by as much as 90% — a move that would make the platform impossibly slow to use for the 83m people living in Turkey.

Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish academic and cyber rights campaigner said he was informed on Monday by a Facebook representative of the company’s decision. The social media group felt that the law was “a restrictive regime” that it did not want to be part of, he said. Facebook declined to comment.

Mr Erdogan, president, earlier this year declared that he wanted “immoral” social media platforms to be either “completely banned or controlled” after Twitter users posted harsh personal attacks against his daughter and son-in-law after the birth of their fourth child.

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Ah, so it’s just a bit of wild authoritarianism. But how do you tell the difference between that and perfectly reasonable content requests? It must be on a case-by-case basis, I guess. What happens if Turkey follows through and makes Facebook effectively inaccessible? Most likely people will hop onto VPNs. There’s a really powerful ratchet effect once Facebook and social media arrive: the public doesn’t like losing them.
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We hacked Apple for three months: here’s what we found • Sam Curry

Curry and four others were working as part of the Apple Bug Bounty program:

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During our engagement, we found a variety of vulnerabilities in core portions of their infrastructure that would’ve allowed an attacker to fully compromise both customer and employee applications, launch a worm capable of automatically taking over a victim’s iCloud account, retrieve source code for internal Apple projects, fully compromise an industrial control warehouse software used by Apple, and take over the sessions of Apple employees with the capability of accessing management tools and sensitive resources.

There were a total of 55 vulnerabilities discovered with 11 critical severity, 29 high severity, 13 medium severity, and 2 low severity reports. These severities were assessed by us for summarization purposes and are dependent on a mix of CVSS and our understanding of the business related impact.

As of October 6th, 2020, the vast majority of these findings have been fixed and credited. They were typically remediated within 1-2 business days (with some being fixed in as little as 4-6 hours).

…To be brief: Apple’s infrastructure is massive.

They own the entire 17.0.0.0/8 IP range, which includes 25,000 web servers with 10,000 of them under apple.com, another 7,000 unique domains, and to top it all off, their own TLD (dot apple). Our time was primarily spent on the 17.0.0.0/8 IP range, .apple.com, and .icloud.com since that was where the interesting functionality appeared to be.

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They seem to have had a lot of fun, though they don’t say how much money they collected from it. One of the most dramatic discoveries, via a flaw in the Pages app, gave access to iOS source code and to the Apple internal network.
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Facebook bans troll accounts linked to conservative group Turning Point USA • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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Facebook has removed a group of fake accounts tied to Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization caught coordinating a “troll farm”-style social media campaign last month. The company’s latest report on coordinated inauthentic behavior says it banned 200 Facebook accounts, 55 pages, and 76 Instagram accounts linked to Turning Point and a marketing firm called Rally Forge, which is now banned from Facebook.

Facebook says it began its investigation after The Washington Post reported on “some elements” of the campaign in September. The operation apparently started in 2018 around the US midterm elections, then reappeared in June 2020 as the presidential election heated up. As the Post described, it focused on leaving coordinated Facebook comments — including ones supporting President Donald Trump, criticizing rival Joe Biden, questioning mail-in voting, and supporting sport hunting in Kenya and Botswana.

Turning Point characterized its operation as coordinated “sincere political activism conducted by real people who passionately hold the beliefs they describe online, not an anonymous troll farm in Russia.” But Facebook describes the most recent accounts it removed as “‘thinly veiled personas’ whose names were slight variations of the names of the people behind them,” and it says their “sole activity on our platform was associated with this deceptive campaign.” It also says the group spent around $973,000 advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

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The phrase “conservative youth organisation” is always a worrying one, and usually understates the extremity of the “conservative” thinking involved.

Not hearing about similar left-wing groups being removed from Facebook or Twitter. Have I just missed them?
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Coronavirus killed three times as many people as flu and pneumonia combined, figures show • Sky News

Emily Mee:

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Coronavirus caused three times more deaths than pneumonia and flu combined in the first eight months of this year, according to new figures.

There were 48,168 deaths due to COVID-19, 13,619 due to pneumonia and 394 deaths due to influenza in England and Wales between January and August, said the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Out of all deaths during this period, COVID-19 accounted for 12.4%, whereas 0.1% were due to flu and 3.5% caused by pneumonia.

However, deaths caused by flu and pneumonia have been below the five-year average for every month between January and August this year.

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The BBC’s More Or Less programme did an excellent little segment on the claim by Trump (of course) that “actually, only 6% of people died of Covid [in the US]”. As they explained, what that means is that only 6% of those who died from Covid didn’t have any co-morbidities (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc). But they all had had Covid very soon before they died. Thus it was a cause of death, but the death certificate (in the UK as in the US) also lists contributing factors.
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Apple will extend free Apple TV+ trials for three months • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

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When Apple TV+ launched last fall, Apple bundled a free one-year subscription with the purchase of an Apple product, immediately boosting the number of people who could watch the streaming service. 

The first of those trial subscriptions were previously going to expire at the start of November, meaning that people on the one-year trial who had not cancelled were going to be charged $4.99 per month for the streaming service. 

Now subscribers whose trial expires before February will get three additional months of Apple TV+ for free. This means that someone who bought an iPhone on December 1 and activated Apple TV+ on the same day will have access to the service through March 1, when billing starts.

Apple has not revealed the number of Apple TV+ subscribers. The service has fewer TV shows and movies than rivals like Disney+, which surpassed 60 million subscribers in August after launching last November. Netflix has more than 190 million subscribers around the world, it said in July. But unlike those services, Apple TV+ doesn’t have a back catalog of reruns.

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Could be a sign that it doesn’t want people unsubscribing over Christmas, or that it has better stuff coming up at Christmas. Or that the cost of extending is essentially zero (which it is), so why not? And given that it has a ton of new products about to be released, the free ride can continue.
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IBM spins out infrastructure business in major shift towards cloud • Financial Times

Richard Waters and Miles Kruppa:

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The US computing giant said on Thursday that it planned to spin out its managed infrastructure services unit, which accounts for around a quarter of its revenue, into a freestanding company.

Big Blue’s share price jumped 8% on the news, as investors welcomed the spin-out of a business that has become a drag on IBM’s growth. A broad range of consulting and technology services accounted for nearly 60% of IBM’s revenue in the latest quarter, though these businesses have been shrinking steadily and faced relentless profit margin pressures. The company’s revenues have shrunk in 29 of the last 33 quarters.

“This is the end of IBM as we know it, as a single one-stop shop for enterprise technology,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research. He called the announcement “a trial balloon” to see whether Wall Street would welcome an unwinding of the entire services operation, and predicted further spin-offs to come.

IBM moved heavily into services after Lou Gerstner was parachuted in from outside the tech industry to save what was then a struggling mainframe business at the start of the PC era. He made services the linchpin of a turnround, appealing to customers who needed help stitching together their IT as PCs, servers and new business applications.

However, the rise of cloud computing has seen customers steadily reduce their spending on in-house technology, shifting more of their IT budgets to cloud companies such as Amazon and Microsoft.

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The phrase used to be that “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”. Long since past; that figure about shrinking revenue shows how many options companies now have for getting things done. Last year IBM bought RedHat – for $34bn! – and has just reported quarterly revenues of $17.6bn and a gross profit margin of 48%. (Apple’s is typically around 38%.) It’s lucrative, but competitive.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Think the hardest part of a USB3 connection is getting the plug right way up? Think again. CC-licensed photo by Kai Hendry 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 13 links for you. They’re on steroids! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The rise of a quiet Uighur counter-surveillance state • Rest of World

Peter Guest:

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Cut off from their loved ones, Uighurs in exile are testing the limitations of the firewall. In Japan, Muhammad’ali stays in touch with old school friends via WeChat and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. They communicate in Mandarin — to use Uighur would attract attention — and in code. They are all basketball fans, so they use ciphers based on teams and players to relay information about who is still free and who has been sent to a camp or transferred to a factory. This doesn’t guarantee safety, but they gamble that they can stay ahead of the censors. “We can guess some keywords are monitored by machines, not by people,” Muhammad’ali says. “So we try not to say these keywords and just find other signals.”

Muhammad’ali and his fellow exiles meet in WeChat and WhatsApp groups, where they share and pore over leaked videos, social posts, reports from state media, and propaganda broadcasts, scanning the backgrounds for inconsistencies and absences — anything they can use to determine what is really happening back home. For the most part, they are not activists — or at least they didn’t start out as such. But frustrated with stonewalling and state propaganda, they are doing whatever they can to find out what happened to their loved ones and to relay that information to journalists and human rights organizations. 

«

Easy to forget that the Uighurs aren’t limited to China, and that there’s a diaspora who want to talk to those inside it. Too easy to forget this injustice altogether.
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Congress gets ready to smash big tech monopolies • BIG by Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller has read the Congressional report on Big Tech so you don’t have to:

»

the subcommittee report is also a deeply political document, explicitly so. Cicilline attacks the way that these corporations finance think tanks and academics. “Through a combination of direct lobbying and funding think tanks and academics,” it wrote, “the dominant platforms have expanded their sphere of influence, further shaping how they are governed and regulated.” I got fired from my think tank after criticizing Google in 2017, so that section rings true to me. The platforms also engaged in routine attempts to deceive investigators, and the report is merciless about such attempts at deception. For instance, the committee asked Amazon for a list of its top ten competitors. The report authors noted that “Amazon identified 1,700 companies, including Eero (a company Amazon owns), a discount surgical supply distributor, and a beef jerky company.” The report has multiple examples of such dissembling, from each company.

…Basically, Cicilline wants to fix the problem we have with big tech, make sure it doesn’t recur by changing the laws that led to it, and make enforcement better by pressuring public officials and empowering ordinary citizens themselves to enforce anti-monopoly laws. So recommendations fall into four buckets: (1) a legislative break-up and restructuring of big tech platforms to restore competition online (2) a strengthening of laws against monopolies and mergers, (3) institutional reforms to fix and fund the Federal Trade Commission and DOJ Antitrust Division, and (4) restoring the ability of ordinary citizens to take monopolists to court on their own.

The premise of this report is that the tech sector is simply far too concentrated, and so Congress will have to affirmatively take steps to de-centralize power there. Cicilline recommends passing laws that would break up tech platforms, as well as imposing rules mandating that dominant platforms offer equal access to their facilities for rivals.

«

There’s an implicit suggestion that companies would be broken up – though it’s not specified, one could see that Facebook and Instagram (and WhatsApp?) could be split apart. An ex-Facebook engineer is quoted saying that would be pretty easy. Drama lies ahead: now this idea is out there, lots can happen.
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White House quietly told Veterans group it might have exposed them to Covid • Daily Beast

Spencer Ackerman, Asawin Suebsaeng, Erin Banco and Sam Stein:

»

On the same day President Trump acknowledged contracting the coronavirus, the White House quietly informed a veterans group that there was a COVID-19 risk stemming from a Sept. 27 event honoring the families of fallen US service members, the head of that charitable organization told The Daily Beast.

The White House warning, which came on [Friday] Oct. 2, is the earliest known outreach to visitors of the complex that there was a risk of coronavirus emerging from the grounds where the president, the first lady, and at least 17 of his aides, according to Politico, have now tested positive for the virus.

The Sept. 27 event to honor Gold Star families came the day after the White House hosted a celebration for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett that appears to have been an early source of the White House outbreak, though West Wing officials have quietly disputed that linkage. It is unclear to the head of the veterans charity—the Greatest Generations Foundation—which participant’s potential positive coronavirus test sparked the warning.

…Pictures from the Gold Star family event, which Trump attended, show minimal mask wearing and social distancing. It took place indoors, though attendees said they were tested prior to attending. A Republican close to the White House also told The Daily Beast that others present at the event received outreach from a White House office—though not the medical office—late last week urging them to get coronavirus tests. The source described a chaotic scene in the White House as it tries to manage the internal outbreak.

«

Indoors – the most dangerous place. The White House admitted that Hope Hicks was infected before it admitted that Trump was infected (I’m not saying “knew” for either, because there’s been so much lying about what was known). Trump spoke at the Veterans event, as the photos show.

Tentative conclusion: Trump was probably developing the disease at least on Sunday, and could have been shedding virus at that point, since it starts in the upper respiratory tract. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Quartz is put on the block just two years after sale • WSJ

Lukas I. Alpert and Benjamin Mullin:

»

Online business news site Quartz has been put up for sale just over two years after it was acquired by a Japanese financial intelligence and media company, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company, Uzabase agreed to purchase Quartz in mid-2018 in a cash-and-stock deal that could have been worth as much as $110m based on whether the site hit certain financial goals. Uzabase ultimately only paid about $86m.

The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has also pushed Uzabase to seek an exit from the business, some of the people said.

Many digital-media companies have been working to cut costs and preserve capital, and the market for raising funds is tight, so it may prove challenging to find a buyer at an attractive price, one of the people said.

«

Scrolling through qz.com, I’m not sure who it’s aiming at. What’s its USP? Why go there regularly? There seem to be a lot of sites like this.
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USB3: why it’s a bit harder than USB2 • kate’s lab notebook

Kate Temkin:

»

A few people on twitter have asked me to explain why the USB3 winds up being much harder to implement than USB2. The answer is more than will fit in a single tweet, so I thought I’d put a quick-but-rough answer, here. This is by no means comprehensive; consider it a longer tweet what a tweet would be given I had more than 240 characters and a proclivity to babble. (I do.)

A lot of the challenges come from the way we work around physical-layer limitations. Put poetically, physics gives us lots of little obstacles we have to work around in order to talk at 5 billion transfers per second (5GT/s).

«

This is extremely nerdy, but just scanning through it makes you realise that what looks simple – you just plug the cable into two sockets! – hides a colossal complexity that nevertheless happens reliably for almost all the systems you use.
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Facebook to ban QAnon-themed groups, pages and accounts in crackdown • The Guardian

Julia Carrie Wong:

»

Facebook will ban any groups, pages or Instagram accounts that “represent” QAnon, the company announced Tuesday, in a sharp escalation of its attempt to crack down on the antisemitic conspiracy movement that has thrived on its platform.

The policy will apply to groups, pages or Instagram accounts whose names or descriptions suggest that they are dedicated to the QAnon movement, a Facebook spokesperson explained. It will not apply to individual content, nor to individual Instagram users who post frequently about QAnon but do not explicitly identify themselves as representing the QAnon movement.

The new, broader ban represents the second update to Facebook’s policy against QAnon in less than two months, and signals that the company’s initial efforts were insufficient to curb the spread of a movement that has been identified as a potential domestic terror threat by the FBI.

Just two months ago, Facebook had no policy on QAnon, which is a baseless internet conspiracy theory whose followers believe, without evidence, that Donald Trump is waging a secret battle against an elite global cabal of child-traffickers.

«

Let’s see how precise it gets. This has the potential to be very leaky. Still a good move, though.
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trump censored • The World Is Yours*

Alex Hern reckons that Trump is going to lose the election, and that Facebook’s (top) leadership thinks the same, and that this explains the deletion of a Trump post and the widespread action against QAnon:

»

the timing is impossible to ignore. Facebook is a company which has bent over backwards to stay on the right side of the American Republican Party for the past four years, to the chagrin of its employees, and without really receiving much reciprocal love from the US Right itself, which continues to falsely claim that it is uniquely censored on social media.

It’s also led to the social network being completely out of sync with the rest of the world: if you position yourself as centrist in the nation with one of the most extreme ruling parties in the developed world, you position yourself as wildly out of touch in the rest of the world. In order to stay on the right side of the ruling regime in America, Facebook has needed to invent itself as a social network which sees no problem with handing fact checking responsibilities to a site such as the Daily Caller, and which thinks it is problematic if a list of respectable media outlets includes the New York Times but not Breitbart News.

I think Mark Zuckerberg made a calculated gamble, that staying on the right side of the Republican Party would protect Facebook from suffering at the hands of regulation it did not want. And I think the company is now starting to make a similar calculation: that it needs to begin severing those links.

«

The unprecedented deletion of Trump’s post, and the action against QAnon – which is a wildly pro-Trump delusion – definitely suggests that the weather inside Facebook is changing. Mark Zuckerberg can read polls as well as the rest of us.
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Meet the star witness: your smart speaker • WIRED

Sidney Fussell:

»

Earlier this month, Amazon said it had received more than 3,000 requests from police for user data in the first half of this year, and complied almost 2,000 times. That was a 72% increase in requests from the same period in 2016, when Amazon first disclosed the data, and a 24% jump in the past year alone.

Amazon doesn’t provide granular data on what police are seeking, but Douglas Orr, head of the criminal justice department at the University of North Georgia, says police now look for smart home data as routinely as data from smartphones. Data on a smartphone often points officers towards other devices, which they then probe as the investigation continues.

By amending a search warrant, police can “keep going to keep collecting data,” Orr says. “That usually leads to an Echo or at least some other device.”

As Orr explains, officers are getting more savvy about smart home devices, creating templates that simplify requesting data. Police departments often share these templates, he says, tailoring requests for the specifics of the case they’re investigating.

Google’s Nest unit reported increasing police demands for data from its smart speakers through 2018. Google then stopped reporting Nest data separately, including such requests in its broader corporate transparency report, which shows increased requests for Google user data.

«

Predictable enough: get enough of these in homes and of course police are going to issue warrants for absolutely everything they might have had.
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Asbestos could be a powerful weapon against climate change (you read that right) • MIT Technology Review

James Temple:

»

The vast surface area of certain types of fibrous asbestos, a class of carcinogenic compounds once heavily used in heat-resistant building materials, makes them particularly good at grabbing hold of the carbon dioxide molecules dissolved in rainwater or floating through the air.

That includes the most common form of asbestos, chrysotile, a serpentine mineral laced throughout the mountain (serpentine is California’s state rock). The reaction with carbon dioxide mainly produces magnesium carbonate minerals like magnesite, a stable material that could lock away the greenhouse gas for millennia.

Woodall and his advisor Jennifer Wilcox, a carbon removal researcher, are among a growing number of scientists exploring ways to accelerate these otherwise slow reactions in hopes of using mining waste to fight climate change. It’s a handy carbon-capturing trick that may also work with the calcium- and magnesium-rich by-products of nickel, copper, diamond, and platinum mining.

The initial hope is to offset the ample carbon emissions from mining itself using these minerals already extracted in the process. But the real hope is that this early work allows them to figure out how to effectively and affordably dig up minerals, potentially including asbestos, specifically for the purpose of drawing down vast amounts of greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

“Decarbonizing mines in the next decade is just helping us to build confidence and know-how to actually mine for the purpose of negative emissions,” says Gregory Dipple, a professor at the University of British Columbia and one of the leading researchers in this emerging field.

«

Negative emissions is the way to go. How amazing if asbestos (and other “tails” – the leftovers from mining – could somehow become a solution to carbon emissions.)
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Some former Triller employees are wary of monthly active-user count – Business Insider

Dan Whateley:

»

The short-form-video app Triller, a TikTok rival, touted massive user growth last year that some former employees said they believed was inflated.

When Triller announced a fundraise in October 2019, it said it had grown 500% organically year over year to 13 million monthly active users.

Six former Triller employees said that number of monthly active users was more than five times what they were seeing on some internal metrics. One provided a screenshot that showed closer to 2 million monthly active users.

In August, Triller threatened to sue a third-party app-analytics company, Apptopia, after it provided estimates of Triller’s app downloads that contradicted the company’s publicly reported numbers.
Triller CEO Mike Lu said the former employees were “disseminating inaccurate information” to Business Insider. “We can validate each and every one of our 239M plus of them,” he added.

«

Really? Validate 239 million users? That’s quite a claim.
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‘The coal industry is back,’ Trump proclaimed. It wasn’t • The New York Times

Eric Lipton (and lovely photos by Christie Hemm Klok):

»

“We’re going to put our miners back to work,” Mr. Trump promised soon after taking office.

He didn’t.

Despite Mr. Trump’s stocking his administration with coal-industry executives and lobbyists, taking big donations from the industry, rolling back environmental regulations and intervening directly in cases like the Arizona power plant and mine, coal’s decline has only accelerated in recent years.

And with the president now in the closing stages of his struggling re-election campaign, his failure to live up to his pledge challenges his claim to be a champion of working people and to restore what he portrayed four years ago as the United States’ lost industrial might.

The story of the complex in Arizona demonstrates the lengths the administration went to in helping a favored industry, the limits of its ability to counter powerful economic forces pushing in the other direction and ultimately Mr. Trump’s quiet retreat from his promises.

…Since Mr. Trump was inaugurated, 145 coal-burning units at 75 power plants have been idled, eliminating 15% of the nation’s coal-generated capacity, enough to power about 30 million homes.

That is the fastest decline in coal-fuel capacity in any single presidential term, far greater than the rate during either of President Barack Obama’s terms. An additional 73 power plants have announced their intention to close additional coal-burning units this decade, according to a tally by the Sierra Club.

An estimated 20% of the power generated in the United States this year is expected to come from coal, down from 31% in 2017.

In part because of the coronavirus-induced recession, total coal production is expected to drop this year to 511m tons, down from 775m tons in 2017. That 34% decline is the largest four-year drop in production since at least 1932.

«

Promises made, promises.. has he actually kept a single one of them?
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Tesla dissolves its PR department — a new first in the industry • Electrek

Fred Lambert:

»

Electrek can confirm that Tesla has dissolved its PR department — technically becoming the first automaker who doesn’t talk to the press.

It’s something that we have discussed on our podcast several times over the last few months, but now that reporters are publicly complaining about it, we thought we’d clear things up in an article.

Tesla hasn’t responded to a press inquiry in months. We have received the odd email here and there from former press people, but it almost seems to be in an unofficial capacity.

If you’re a reporter who isn’t getting a response from Tesla, don’t take it personally, because it’s due to the automaker having dissolved its PR team.

The move has been confirmed to Electrek at the highest level at Tesla with the source saying, “We no longer have a PR Team.”

Keely Sulprizio, the last person known to officially be in charge of PR/communications at Tesla, left the automaker in December of last year to join Impossible Foods. Following her departure, virtually every other member of Tesla’s PR team either left or moved to other positions at Tesla.

«

So really it’s just Elon Musk. Will he hire in an agency when there’s a new car to launch? And what about the times when there are investor calls – does investor relations pick up all the media queries? Should reporters buy a share so they can get an answer?
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Virtuix announces Omni One home VR treadmill • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

»

Virtual reality startup Virtuix is building a VR treadmill for your home. The Omni One is an elaborate full-body controller that lets you physically run, jump, and crouch in place. Following an earlier business- and arcade-focused device, it’s supposed to ship in mid-2021 for $1,995, and Virtuix is announcing the product with a crowdfunding investment campaign.

The crowdfunded Virtuix Omni started development in 2013. It’s not a traditional treadmill — it’s a low-friction platform that’s used with special low-friction shows or shoe covers and a harness. (You may remember the overall VR treadmill concept from Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One.) As an Omni One prototype video demonstrates, the device basically holds you in place while your feet slide across the platform, and that movement gets translated into a VR environment.

«

Crowdfunding, eh. Virtuix has already tried that once and struggled to meet its targets (it didn’t) so I’m going to suggest that this is going to prove harder to pull off than it thinks. Also, it’s VR: the market will be smaller, so the production run will be small, which makes the chance of error greater.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess what contact tracers calling potentially infected Americans keep being treated as? CC-licensed photo by heath_bar 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. No, you’re gasping for breath. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

House lawmakers condemn big tech’s ‘monopoly power’ • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang and David McCabe:

»

To amend the inequities, the lawmakers recommended restoring competition by restructuring many of the companies, emboldening the agencies that police market concentration and throwing up hurdles for the companies to acquire start-ups. They also proposed reforming antitrust laws, in the biggest potential shift since the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976 created stronger reviews of big mergers.

“The totality of the evidence produced during this investigation demonstrates the pressing need for legislative action and reform,” the report said. “These firms have too much power, and that power must be reined in and subject to appropriate oversight and enforcement.”

The House report is the most significant government effort to check the world’s largest tech companies since the government sued Microsoft for antitrust violations in the 1990s. It offers lawmakers a deeply researched road map for turning criticism of Silicon Valley’s influence into concrete actions.

The report is also expected to kick off other actions against the tech giants. The Justice Department has been working to file an antitrust complaint against Google, followed by separate suits against the internet search giant from state attorneys general. Antitrust investigations of Amazon, Apple and Facebook are also underway at the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and four dozen state attorneys general.

But the House antitrust subcommittee split along party lines on how to remedy and corral the power of the tech companies, pointing to an uphill battle for Congress to curtail them.

«

(Here’s the story on how and why the subcommittee split; here’s the full PDF of the report, though not searchable.)

This is almost sure to fall to the Democrats to do. They may well have the will to do it, since unlike the Republicans they’re not just enraged about whether posts get deleted on social media.
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Largest COVID-19 contact tracing study to date finds children key to spread, and evidence of superspreaders • Princeton University

»

A study of more than a half-million people in India who were exposed to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 suggests that the virus’ continued spread is driven by only a small percentage of those who become infected.

Furthermore, children and young adults were found to be potentially much more important to transmitting the virus — especially within households — than previous studies have identified, according to a paper by researchers from the United States and India published Sept. 30 in the journal Science.

Researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, worked with public health officials in the southeast Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to track the infection pathways and mortality rate of 575,071 individuals who were exposed to 84,965 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. It is the largest contact tracing study — which is the process of identifying people who came into contact with an infected person — conducted in the world for any disease.

Lead researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar in PEI, said that the paper is the first large study to capture the extraordinary extent to which SARS-CoV-2 hinges on “superspreading,” in which a small percentage of the infected population passes the virus on to more people. The researchers found that 71% of infected individuals did not infect any of their contacts, while a mere 8% of infected individuals accounted for 60% of new infections.

“Our study presents the largest empirical demonstration of superspreading that we are aware of in any infectious disease,” Laxminarayan said. “Superspreading events are the rule rather than the exception when one is looking at the spread of COVID-19, both in India and likely in all affected places.”

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That 8% of individuals accounting for 60% of infections is a hell of a number. The trouble is we don’t know who they are. But: lockdown works to forestall them.
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Facebook removes Trump post over false Covid-19 claim for first time • The Guardian

Julia Carrie Wong:

»

Facebook has removed a post from Donald Trump’s page for spreading false information about the coronavirus, a first for the social media company that has been harshly criticized for repeatedly allowing the president to break its content rules.

The post included video of Trump falsely asserting that children were “almost immune from Covid-19” during an appearance on Fox News. There is evidence to suggest that children who contract Covid-19 generally experience milder symptoms than adults do. However, they are not immune, and some children have become severely ill or died from the disease.

“This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from Covid-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful Covid misinformation,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

The Twitter account for Trump’s re-election campaign, @TeamTrump, also posted the video, which Twitter said violated its rules. “The account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again,” a company spokesperson said of @TeamTrump.

«

Twitter also locked Trump’s account for tweeting a claim that flu kills more than 100,000 people a year (did he just mean the US? Miles wrong if so) and that “in many populations less lethal” (than the flu? That’s the obvious implication). Only when the tweet was removed was the account unlocked. Twitter also locked the accounts of journalists who had screenshotted the claim until they deleted it.

Notable muscle-flexing by both Twitter and Facebook.
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Nvidia says its AI can fix some of the biggest problems in video calls • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

Nvidia has announced a new videoconferencing platform for developers named Nvidia Maxine that it claims can fix some of the most common problems in video calls.

Maxine will process calls in the cloud using Nvidia’s GPUs and boost call quality in a number of ways with the help of artificial intelligence. Using AI, Maxine can realign callers’ faces and gazes so that they’re always looking directly at their camera, reduce the bandwidth requirement for video “down to one-tenth of the requirements of the H.264 streaming video compression standard” by only transmitting “key facial points,” and upscale the resolution of videos. Other features available in Maxine include face re-lighting, real-time translation and transcription, and animated avatars.

Not all of these features are new of course. Video compression and real-time transcription are common enough, and Microsoft and Apple have introduced gaze-alignment in the Surface Pro X and FaceTime to ensure people keep eye contact during video calls (though Nvidia’s face-alignment features looks like a much more extreme version of this).

But Nvidia is no doubt hoping its clout in cloud computing and its impressive AI R&D work will help it rise above its competitors. The real test, though, will be to see if any established videoconferencing companies actually adopt Nvidia’s technology.

«

All very desirable, especially the reduction in bandwidth requirement. But where is Nvidia going to find the leverage to persuade companies to adopt it? If this all happens on its cloud platform, who’s going to trust both that it’s secure, and that it can scale when demand suddenly spikes?
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Spam calls are hindering efforts to contact trace and track Covid-19 • CNN

Faith Karimi, CNN:

»

many people wary of spam calls and phishing scams are not answering calls from unknown numbers, undermining efforts by contact tracers to reach people exposed to Covid-19. And some states such as Louisiana are sending letters to those people who don’t answer – not the most effective way when time is of the essence.

Without a federal contact tracing program, health departments have set up a patchwork of procedures. Some have worked with phone companies to ensure the name of the health department shows up on caller ID. For example, in Washington, DC, it shows up as DC Covid 19 Team.

Still, others appear as unknown numbers and are getting mistaken for spam calls. And even when they show up with the specific departments, some are still going unanswered.

“Hello? Yes, it’s you we’re looking for,” Mayor Muriel Bowser tweeted, echoing the Lionel Richie song. “Contact tracing is a critical tool in getting our city back on its feet. Answer the call.”

«

When a failure to police spammers comes back and bites the people who are the target of the spammers, that’s not irony. It’s some sort of cosmic joke. There seems to be a lot of that going on.
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Apple’s iPhone 12 lineup will be announced on October 13th • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

The rumored iPhone 12 lineup is expected to have a new design with squared-off edges (perhaps similar to the iPad Pro) and support for 5G networks. It’s also supposed to come in four different models, including a new 5.4-inch size (which would be smaller than the iPhone 11 Pro) and a 6.7-inch size (which would be the largest iPhone ever). But if you were hoping that the new iPhones would have buttery-smooth 120Hz refresh rates, well, you might have to wait for another year. If you want to know more about what’s rumored for the new iPhones, we’ve got a full roundup of everything we think we know right here.

Apple is rumored to have a number of other products in the works, including new over-ear headphones, a smaller and more affordable HomePod, and a competitor to Tile’s location tracking tags that are apparently called AirTags.

«

Notably, Apple has taken all the third-party speakers and headphones off its site and from its shops. Quite an aggressive move, particularly against Sonos.
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Apple’s iPhone Covid-19 delay ripples through tech supply chain • Bloomberg

Tim Culpan:

»

“Weakening demand for premium smartphone lenses and order cuts from Huawei are the two major factors weighing on product prices and lens shipments,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Charles Shum wrote this week of Largan. “Huawei, Xiaomi and other smartphone makers are expected to focus on selling more mid- and low-end models to maintain sales volume during the pandemic crisis.”

…With the iPhone to be revealed next week, and the sales launch likely to be absent the ritual queues outside Apple retail stores, we won’t know how well it’s doing until press releases (to be glowing, of course) and news reports (fawning, perhaps) roll in during subsequent weeks. Market researchers may be able to give us hints by late October.

One of the comforting aspects of a September iPhone release was how it allowed revenue at suppliers to be broken into two distinct phases: ramp-up, reveal, and release in the third quarter; followed by momentum and holiday-season demand in the fourth. This year, it will be crammed into just one period.

The first weeks of November and December will be critical for the analysts, traders and investors who parse supply-chain data to get a handle on the world’s biggest tech company. Well before firms report quarterly revenue, Taiwanese companies are required to announce monthly sales. 

If October numbers, to be reported by Nov. 10, don’t show massive spikes, then expect an overreaction in tech stocks.

«

Apple’s financial quarter ended with September, so it’s under less pressure to push out big numbers. Given the circumstances, it would never be able to match up to earlier years, so it may well not bother.

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Security flaw left ‘smart’ chastity sex toy users at risk of permanent lock-in • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

»

as security researchers recently found out, the consequences of having a major security flaw in one popular sex toy could have been catastrophic for tens of thousands of users.

UK-based security firm Pen Test Partners said the flaw in the Qiui Cellmate internet-connected chastity lock, billed as the “world’s first app controlled chastity device,” could have allowed anyone to remotely and permanently lock in the user’s penis.

The Cellmate chastity lock works by allowing a trusted partner to remotely lock and unlock the chamber over Bluetooth using a mobile app. That app communicates with the lock using an API. But that API was left open and without a password, allowing anyone to take complete control of any user’s device.

Because the chamber was designed to lock with a metal ring underneath the user’s penis, the researchers said it may require the intervention of a heavy-duty bolt cutter or an angle grinder to free the user.

«

I do wonder a couple of things. First, wouldn’t they have found the idea that *anyone* could do it vaguely… exciting? Isn’t that sort of the point of these things in the first place? Second, wouldn’t the threat of bolt cutters and the, um, high stakes generally make this more of a feature than a bug? Even though it very definitely is a bug.

Oh, reading on:

»

The unsecured API also allowed access to the private messages and the precise location from the user’s app.

«

Hmm, possibly less good. Also: first time “permanent lock-in” has been used and not applied to a technology platform.
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John McAfee arrested, indicted on tax evasion charges, sued for fraud • Ars Technica

Kate Cox:

»

Noted cybersecurity eccentric John McAfee is under arrest in Spain awaiting extradition to the United States after being indicted on federal tax evasion charges.

The Department of Justice unsealed the indictment on Monday following McAfee’s arrest by Spanish authorities at Barcelona’s airport over the weekend.

The filing alleges that McAfee deliberately not only avoided paying federal taxes from tax years 2014 through 2018 but also tried to hide considerable assets from the IRS. He allegedly hid those assets—including a yacht, a vehicle, real estate, bank accounts, and cryptocurrency—by purchasing and titling them under “the name of a nominee.”

McAffee in the past has effectively dared the IRS to come get him. In 2019, he went on a Twitter screed calling taxes “illegal” and claiming he had not filed a federal tax return in eight years. “I am a prime target for the IRS,” he concluded. “Here I am.”

Neither the DOJ’s press release nor the indictment specify how much McAfee made or owed, saying only he “earned millions” from “promoting cryptocurrencies, consulting work, speaking engagements, and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary.” Another regulator, however, alleges that at least $23m of that income came from committing fraud.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against McAfee on Monday, alleging that he fraudulently promoted multiple initial coin offerings. According to the SEC, McAfee and his bodyguard, Jimmy Watson Jr., promoted ICOs on Twitter “pretending to be impartial and independent even though he was paid more than $23m in digital assets” to make those promotions.

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I do like “cybersecurity eccentric”. It’s pretty much the perfect descriptor. I guess that “cryptocurrency eccentric” would be tautologous.
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Partisan differences in physical distancing predict infections and mortality during the Coronavirus pandemic • PsyArXiv

A group from Yale and New York universities:

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Few things bind disparate groups together like a common challenge. Yet numerous polls suggest that the current COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. is subject to a partisan divide.

Using the geotracking data of 15 million smartphones per day, we show that counties that voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016 exhibited 14% less physical distancing between March and May, 2020. Partisanship was a stronger predictor of physical distancing than numerous other factors, including counties’ median income, COVID-19 cases, and racial and age make-up.

Contrary to our predictions, this finding strengthened over time and remained when stay-at-home orders were active. Additionally, counties’ consumption of conservative media (Fox News) predicted reduced physical distancing.

Finally, reduced physical distancing in pro-Trump counties was associated with subsequently higher COVID-19 infection and fatality growth rates. Taken together, these data suggest that U.S. responses towards COVID-19 are subject to a deep partisan divide.

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The full paper is going to be published in Nature Human Behaviour. The change in distancing was measured through reduction in movement and use of nonessential services (barbers, restaurants, clothing stores).

It’s not quite “Vote Trump and die”. The question is, just what are they correlating?
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GOP elites thought they could buy exemption from a pandemic. Guess what? • NY Mag

Eric Levitz:

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I can’t look inside Mike Lee’s mind and wouldn’t have the stomach to peer into Bill Barr’s even if I could. But I have a theory (one that I first saw articulated by the policy researcher Will Stancil): Elite Republicans have trouble accepting that they cannot purchase a reprieve from this pandemic — in part because a foundational premise of the elite Republican worldview is that the wealthy can always buy immunity from whatever befalls the herd.

This notion isn’t necessarily conscious. Foundational ideas rarely are (it’s probably been a while since you subjected the premise, “the grass is green” to conscious scrutiny). But the conservative movement’s theory of government is not compatible with the concept of human interdependence. Although the movement is eager to circumscribe sexual freedom in the name of the collective good, it demands that (moneyed) individuals enjoy a nigh-absolute degree of liberty in the economic realm. And justifying that laissez-faire philosophy requires ignoring the myriad ways that individual assertions of economic liberty can impinge on the freedom of collectives. For example, it is hard to deride restrictions on the freedom of coal plants to spew sulfur dioxide unless one ignores that such plants share a sky with the communities in their vicinity. Otherwise, one would need to explain why a coal magnate’s right to maximize profits takes precedence over the right of children in Thompsons, Texas, to breathe air that won’t shave years off their life expectancy.

…On the White House lawn, Donald Trump and Co. were safe from the particulates they’d fought to keep in the air above East Texas and the neurotoxins they sought to keep in the lungs of farmworkers. They were safe from the police violence they’d worked to abet and the hunger they’d declined to alleviate; safe from the gangs they’d delivered Central American migrants back to, and the shrill cries of the families they’d helped separate. They were at no risk of having to explain themselves to any of the people whose deprivation their “liberty” demanded.

But no bouncer could stop COVID-19 at the gate.

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I overuse the word “excoriating”, but this one really does deserve it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The US CDC is finally acknowledging that coronavirus spreads by a method more like cigarette smoke than spitting. CC-licensed photo by Shannon Holman on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. A little oxygen aperitif for monsieur? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

China pushes ‘clean plate’ push amid food supply squeeze • The Washington Post

Eva Dou:

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On the surface, China’s campaign to encourage mealtime thrift has been a cheerful affair: with soldiers, factory workers and schoolchildren shown polishing off their plates clean of food.

But behind the drive is a harsh reality. China does not have enough fresh food to go around — and neither does much of the world.

The pandemic and extreme weather have disrupted agricultural supply chains, leaving food prices sharply higher in countries as diverse as Yemen, Sudan, Mexico and South Korea. The United Nations warned in June that the world is on the brink of its worst food crisis in 50 years.

“It’s scary and it’s overwhelming,” Arif Husain, chief economist of the United Nations World Food Program, said in an interview. “I don’t think we have seen anything like this ever.”

In China, the two foods in the tightest spots are pork and corn, with the nation’s pigs hit hard by African swine fever and much of the year’s corn crop ruined by floods. But fresh foods of all stripes are in short supply, too, due to the coronavirus pandemic and flooding — from eggs, to seafood, to leafy green vegetables.

Beijing has declared it is not in a food crisis, and says it has enough reserve wheat to help feed its people for a year. Still, China’s leadership has watched uneasily as pork prices soared 135% in February, and floods washed away vegetable crops.

And for China’s leadership, there is a worrisome legacy. The country has a long history of food shortages sparking political unrest.

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This is a big, big story that of course is being overlooked because of *waves hands at all this*. If China is short of food, everyone’s going to have a problem pretty soon. Oh, and there’s Brexit on the way too.
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Excel: why using Microsoft’s tool caused Covid-19 results to be lost • BBC News

Leo Kelion:

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The issue was caused by the way [Public Health England, or PHE] brought together logs produced by commercial firms paid to analyse swab tests of the public, to discover who has the virus.

They filed their results in the form of text-based lists – known as CSV files – without issue. PHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates so that it could then be uploaded to a central system and made available to the NHS Test and Trace team, as well as other government computer dashboards.

The problem is that PHE’s own developers picked an old file format to do this – known as XLS.
As a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of.

And since each test result created several rows of data, in practice it meant that each template was limited to about 1,400 cases. When that total was reached, further cases were simply left off.

For context, Excel’s XLS file format dates back to 1987. It was superseded by XLSX in 2007. Had this been used, it would have handled 16 times the number of cases. At the very least, that would have prevented the error from happening until testing levels were significantly higher than they are today.

But one expert suggested that even a high-school computing student would know that better alternatives exist.

“Excel was always meant for people mucking around with a bunch of data for their small company to see what it looked like,” commented Prof Jon Crowcroft from the University of Cambridge. “And then when you need to do something more serious, you build something bespoke that works – there’s dozens of other things you could do. But you wouldn’t use XLS. Nobody would start with that.”

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I’d bet that XLS was used because that was the lowest common denominator that was assured to work across the computers in use in the civil service. Ironic that if they’d been less Microsoft-oriented and more “make it work on every platform”, they’d have stuck with CSV, which is like a raw database, and not had this problem.
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Algorithm discovers how six simple molecules could evolve into life’s building blocks • Chemistry World

Patrick Hughes:

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Despite hundreds of demonstrations that various organic reactions can take place under the conditions on early Earth, the scientific community still only has a piecemeal understanding of how the building blocks of life emerged. That’s because the number of possible combinations of these reactions is so large that the number of molecules generated quickly jumps into the tens of thousands. While synthesising and analysing so many compounds is difficult, it could in principle be sorted using a computer.

Now, researchers have done just that. A team led by Bartosz Grzybowski and Sara Szymkuć from the Polish Academy of Sciences encoded all 500 known prebiotic reactions and a feedstock of six precursors – water, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen and methane – into open-use platform Allchemy. The algorithm then used encoded mechanistic chemistry rules to produce a map of their combinations.

Running the program for seven generations, each time combining the generated molecules with what came before, the researchers ended up with almost 35,000 compounds including 50 biotic ones. The program was able to find many prebiotic syntheses previously described in the literature, for example 10 pathways leading to the DNA component adenine. But it also discovered 24 entirely new pathways to biotic compounds – more than 20 of which the team experimentally validated.

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America after Trump • Medium

Tim Wu:

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whatever the electoral results, nearly half the country will have voted Republican, and in some States, by overwhelming majorities. The question will be, with the tables turned, when is it worth pushing parts country that want genuinely different things into following a national lead?

To be sure, I strongly believe there are an enormous number of areas — largely economic matters — where majorities, indeed supermajorities of the entire population want stuff that is the Democratic party’s agenda. Take the pricing practices of the pharmaceutical industry: it isn’t as if the population of Kentucky thinks there’s something great about charging whatever you can get away with to sick and dying patients.There are lots of areas where the whole country is unified in its desire for change. Higher taxes for the ultra-wealthy. A restoration of the balance between corporate power and the rights of employees. Paid parental leave. The list goes on.

…returning some semblance of unity and national purpose will definitely depend on picking the right battles in Washington D.C. And those, to my mind, are usually those that involve the excesses of private power that we all suffer under, the inequality of wealth and income that isn’t restricted to one part of the country or another.

In many of the areas I mentioned, the real dynamic is not really left versus right, but actually the People versus Congress. In other words, there are things that everyone wants done, but the institutions of government, most clearly Congress, just won’t act.

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This is so true. The US legislature has been sclerotic for years, because it has ceased to try to improve the lives of its people – since the passage of the ACA.
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CDC acknowledges Covid-19 can spread via tiny air particles • WSJ

Caitlin McCabe and Betsy McKay:

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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said tiny particles that linger in the air can spread the coronavirus, revising its guidelines on the matter just a few weeks after the health agency had acknowledged a role for the particles and then abruptly removed it.

The guidelines on how the coronavirus spreads were initially updated last month to acknowledge a role, and possibly the primary one, played by tiny aerosol particles in spreading the virus. But the agency removed the changes only days later, saying a draft version of the proposed changes had been posted in error.

In its latest revisions to the guidelines Monday, the CDC acknowledged a role for the tiny airborne particles, though the latest wording says they aren’t the main way the virus spreads.

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So close, yet whiffed at the last minute. Contrast the letter in Science magazine on the same day from a group of American scientists:

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There is overwhelming evidence that inhalation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) represents a major transmission route for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). There is an urgent need to harmonize discussions about modes of virus transmission across disciplines to ensure the most effective control strategies and provide clear and consistent guidance to the public. To do so, we must clarify the terminology to distinguish between aerosols and droplets using a size threshold of 100 μm, not the historical 5 μm. This size more effectively separates their aerodynamic behavior, ability to be inhaled, and efficacy of interventions.

Viruses in droplets (larger than 100 μm) typically fall to the ground in seconds within 2m of the source and can be sprayed like tiny cannonballs onto nearby individuals. Because of their limited travel range, physical distancing reduces exposure to these droplets. Viruses in aerosols (smaller than 100 μm) can remain suspended in air for many seconds to hours, like smoke, and be inhaled. They are highly concentrated near an infected person, so they can infect people most easily in close proximity. But aerosols containing infectious virus can also travel more than 2 m and accumulate in poorly ventilated indoor air, leading to superspreading events.

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There’s so much denial going on about how aerosols are the principal cause of spread. It’s quite weird. Think of coronavirus as infectious smoke, with some heavy smokers and lots of very light smokers, and you’re there. The problem: you can’t tell who the heavy smokers are.
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The Ulez countdown: Londoners have a year to ditch old polluting cars • The Guardian

Miles Brignall:

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Hundreds of thousands of Londoners – and many more who regularly drive into the capital – have a year to get rid of vehicles that do not adhere to new emissions standards to be rolled out across the capital or face paying £12.50 a day every time they get behind the wheel.

On 25 October 2021, London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) is being expanded from its current limit – within the congestion charge zone in central London – to include most of the capital.

This will mean that the original area will be 18 times bigger and include all the streets inside the North and South Circular Roads.

It’s been described as one of the most radical anti-pollution policies in the world. Millions of people will find themselves in the low-emissions area, and many will find that their existing car simply isn’t worth keeping.

Anyone driving a petrol car that does not meet Euro 4 standards – typically any car sold before 2006 – will have to pay the daily charge.

But the bigger shock is that diesel cars that do not hit the Euro 6 standard – which is most cars bought before September 2015 – will also not comply. In both cases, owners will have to pay the £12.50 a day, even if they drive just a mile down the road.

The move, which environmental groups say is years overdue and should lead to a dramatic improvement to London’s air quality, will leave the owners of some six-year-old cars, which could have just 24,000 miles on the clock, having to sell at a significant loss.

The AA has warned that up to 350,000 London motorists will be affected, with a further 160,000 hit if and when similar schemes in Birmingham, Coventry, Edinburgh and Glasgow get the go ahead.

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There was a time when diesel vehicles were being pushed really hard by the government: the fuel was cheaper, there were subsidies for using them as company cars. Now they’re pretty much reviled for their role in generating particulate emissions.
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Google says ‘beauty’ filters are bad for your mental health, Pixel cameras won’t use them by default • Android Police

Corbin Davenport:

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Most smartphones have offered some type of ‘beauty’ filter for years, which smooth out pimples, freckles, wrinkles, and other details in your face. There are a few studies that show such functionality can have a negative effect on mental health, and as a result, Google is now turning them off by default on its own phones and encouraging other OEMs to do the same.

“We set out to better understand the effect filtered selfies might have on people’s wellbeing,” Google said in a blog post, “especially when filters are on by default. We conducted multiple studies and spoke with child and mental health experts from around the world, and found that when you’re not aware that a camera or photo app has applied a filter, the photos can negatively impact mental wellbeing. These default filters can quietly set a beauty standard that some people compare themselves against.”

Google has created documentation for best practices when implementing face filters, recommending that they be off by default.

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These are enormously popular in South Korea, in particular, and Japan and China. Not sure how many Pixels sell there. Quite the gesture, of course. A real strategy credit.
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Floodgates in Venice work in first major test • The New York Times

Elisabetta Povoledo:

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After decades of bureaucratic delays, corruption and resistance from environmental groups, sea walls designed to defend Venice from “acqua alta,” or high water, went up on Saturday, testing their ability to battle the city’s increasingly menacing floods.

By 10 a.m., all 78 floodgates barricading three inlets to the Venetian lagoon had been raised, and even when the tide reached as high as four feet, water levels inside the lagoon remained steady, officials said.

“There wasn’t even a puddle in St. Mark’s Square,” said Alvise Papa, the director of the Venice department that monitors high tides.

Had the flood barriers not been raised, about half the city’s streets would have been under water, and visitors to St. Mark’s Square — which floods when the tide nears three feet — would have been wading in a foot and a half of water, he said.
“Everything dry here. Pride and joy,” tweeted Luigi Brugnaro, Venice’s newly re-elected mayor.

Designed some four decades ago to help save Venice from flooding, the mobile barrier system was delayed by cost overruns, corruption, and opposition from environmental and conservation groups. The cost of the system tripled from initial estimates, and a 2014 bribery scandal led to the arrest of the then-mayor, Giorgio Orsoni, and dozens of others, including politicians and businessmen involved in the project.

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Yes, it’s the rest of Infrastructure Week! (Thanks Gregory.) Note that the impressive work on infrastructure (out of necessity) has recently from Italy: Venice floodgates, replacement of the Ponte Morandi, and stabilised the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
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Why the future of Delta and American Airlines may depend on frequent flyer miles • Marker

Byrne Hobart:

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To remain solvent during the pandemic, airlines have raised cash by putting up for collateral typical aviation assets, including aircraft and landing slots or the rights to use a particular flight route (for example, Delta could borrow against a given route and, if it defaulted, the lender could sell that route to United). But perhaps more interesting, airlines have also collateralized their loyalty programs, popularized by frequent flyer miles and travel points accumulated with credit card purchases. A recent analysis of these loyalty and rewards programs by the Financial Times reveals significant data about just how big and profitable those programs are as a stand-alone business — and how dependent major airlines have become on them as a core revenue generator.

The Financial Times pegs the value of Delta’s loyalty program at a whopping $26bn, American Airlines at $24bn, and United at $20bn. All of these valuations are comfortably above the market capitalization of the airlines themselves — Delta is worth $19bn, American $6bn, and United $10bn. In other words, if you take away the loyalty program, Delta’s real-world airline operation — with hundreds of planes, a world-beating maintenance operation, landing rights, brand recognition, and experienced executives — is worth roughly negative $7bn. But economics of the loyalty program don’t work without a robust airline operation.

…The airline business was perfectly optimized for the economics of 2019, offering a mix of cheap-but-uncomfortable seats, lucrative last-minute business-class tickets, and, of course, a durable fintech business. Today, the fintech business is the only part of the airlines that investors are excited about, but if airlines dramatically scale back their flights and routes, those loyalty programs could become worthless, too.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

An Australian internet pioneer would like to apologise for introducing it there. CC-licensed photo by James Cridland 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. Leaving today? Nice idea. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The end of the American internet • Benedict Evans

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[TikTok] is the first time that Americans have really had to deal with their teenagers using a form of mass media that isn’t created in their country by people who mostly share their values. It’s from somewhere else. That’s compounded by the fact that the ‘somewhere else’ is China, with all of the political and geopolitical issues that come with that, but I’d suggest that the core, structural issue is that it’s foreign. This is, of course, a problem that the rest of the world has been wrestling with since 1994, but it comes as something of a shock in Washington DC. There’s an old joke that war is how God teaches Americans geography – now it’s regulation.

There are many questions that flow out of this. One, for example, is how far and how many Chinese consumer internet companies will spread globally as opposed to being constrained by their domestic environment (this would be the ‘Galapagos Effect’ often suggested of Japanese tech. Tiktok worked, but WeChat failed). Another is how many ‘unicorns’ come from Europe – how fast does its population, economic, scientific and educational base produce a proportionate number of big tech companies (or if not, why not?). Yet another is the ‘Is Silicon Valley Over?’ debate, which goes back decades – when my old colleague Marc Andreessen arrived there in the early 1990s, he thought the whole thing was over and he’d missed it.

You can argue about the details of these all day, but it does seem clear that we should just presume a global diffusion of software creation and internet company creation. It doesn’t really matter if Silicon Valley ends up as 25% or 75% of the next 100 important companies – America doesn’t have a monopoly on the agenda any more.

Hence, there are all sorts of issues with the ways that the US government has addressed Tiktok in 2020, but the most fundamental, I think, is that it has acted as though this is a one-off, rather than understanding that this is the new normal – there will be hundreds more of these.

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As he also says, Europe has had to deal with this for ages. It’s thus is well ahead in knowing how to deal with it: through regulation and sensible antitrust laws based around encouraging competition.
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The gold rush for the exits. It’s the end of California as we know it • 500ish

M.G. Siegler:

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We live in a state that offers fantastic career and life opportunities. But the pandemic has negated many of those opportunities. They will be back, but it has also highlighted that many of those same opportunities are available elsewhere or remotely. At the same time, when not avoiding a virus, we have to avoid poisonous smoke or deadly fire on an ever-increasing basis. So when the pandemic is over and we can go out and about as we once did — we still probably won’t be able to at all times. And yet we pay a premium in terms of rent and mortgages and taxes to live here. Taxes which have yet to solve some of the very real and very sad issues within our cities.

I mean, I won’t go so far as to say it’s becoming a no-brainer to leave San Francisco or the Bay Area or California in general. But I won’t not go there either given a long enough time horizon.

If I had to predict what will happen, it’s this: the pandemic will be under control at some point next year. Around the same time, there will be a full-on backlash against work from home, and people will be ready and willing to go back to the office. And it will seem like a bounce back — but it will be more of a dead cat kind.

Many who moved and/or were hired remotely will stay working in that regard. New companies will start this way. And a hybrid model will become the norm. This will slowly but surely ease the strain on Silicon Valley. It will still be the “tech capital” of the world, but it will stop growing at such a rapid clip. Other hubs will become far stronger as a result. This is a natural and good thing and was already happening, but all of the above will accelerate it.

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If Silicon Valley ceases to be the place where proto-companies spawn and die and regenerate, that will be a big, big change.
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FAQs on protecting yourself from aerosol transmission of Covid-19 (Google Doc)

A ten-strong team of scientists and doctors has written this guide trying to point out that the idea that droplets (big infected drops, ie from a cough or sneeze) or fomites (infected drops on a surface) are the principal modes of transmission of Covid-19 just doesn’t add up:

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Q 1.3. But if COVID-19 was transmitted through aerosols, wouldn’t it be highly transmissible like measles, and have a very high R0 and long range transmission?

In a word, no. This is a myth. Here some people are confusing an artifact of history with a law of nature (see also the next question which explains the history in more detail). There is no reason that nature can only produce highly transmissible aerosol-transmitted diseases. It was the entrenched resistance against aerosol transmission initiated in 1910 by Chapin’s book on The sources and modes of infection that led to only highly transmissible viral diseases being accepted as being transmitted through aerosols, because only for those the evidence was too obvious to be denied (plus tuberculosis, which is less transmissible, due to some amazing experiments). Other diseases such as the flu, SARS, or MERS also have an aerosol transmission component, but the lack of acceptance of that fact has deprived the medical community of accepted examples of less transmissible aerosol diseases.

Also note that Rt for SARS-CoV-2 is very high for superspreading events, which can only be explained by aerosols. This is easily explained by aerosol transmission, depending on whether infected people participate in situations conducive to superspreading, and with variable emission of viable viruses in time and among people. This leads to a very skewed distribution of R, with many low values, and some very high values.

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As they point out, most people don’t know how they got infected; yet you’d remember if someone ill-looking sneezed on you and landed a direct hit.

The FAQ isn’t short, but is a fascinating read which goes into the history of why medical authorities are so biased in favour of the droplet theory against the aerosol theory. The trouble with such implicit biases is that people die as a result. It’s bad science.
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Out of retirement: the care home seniors chasing global cycling glory • The Guardian

Amelia Hill:

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The Road Worlds for Seniors competition, now in its third year, aims to reduce immobility of older people in care home settings, especially among those with dementia.

Immobility is a serious issue among care home residents. In just one week, immobile older people can lose 10-12% of their muscle mass and reduce their circulatory volume – which can cause internal organs to stop working – by 25%.

Reversing the damage is not straightforward: for every 10 days of bed rest in hospital, the equivalent of 10 years of muscle ageing occurs in people over 80 years old. That muscle can only be rebuilt at a rate of 6% a week. If older people are immobile for just 3 to 5 weeks, they can lose the ability to stand. The best way to slow the loss of muscle mass and function is resistance training.

Which is where Motitech, a Norwegian startup launched in 2013 comes in. Founded by Jon Ingar Kjenes, it has developed specially-adapted exercise bikes that enable users to revisit familiar places from their childhoods and other important points in their lives, through a video projection that can play over 2,000 videos from 400 countries while they pedal.

Kjenes happily admits it’s a simple idea but homes report immediate and transformative benefits among residents: less anxiety, frustration and confusion. Better sleeping and eating patterns. Less need for painkillers and other medicines. And crucially, more activity.

Kjenes tells the tale of an elderly dementia sufferer with a double hip fracture. “When she came back from rehab, she was so aggressive and affected that doctors said she would never walk again,” he says. “But after six months of using these machines, she was able to walk unaided.”

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This is a really delightful story. Technology for good! For the elderly! The sort of thing that you so rarely (or comparatively rarely) hear about.
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Battery-free, energy-harvesting perpetual machines: the weird future of computing • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

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battery or no, a key concern is what happens to a sensor’s data when it runs out of power.

To address this problem, the Game Boy research team upended a fundamental rule of computers: If you turn it off, you lose unsaved work. Their system, by contrast, can lose power completely, even many times a second, and the instant it gets enough power again—say, from a player impatiently mashing buttons—it picks up right where it left off.

Known as “intermittent computing,” this system relies on a still-exotic kind of memory chip. Almost every computer in history has had two separate forms of memory: volatile RAM and more permanent, but harder to access nonvolatile storage, which includes anything from punch cards and magnetic tape to hard drives and flash memory. But these researchers are using a new type of RAM—ferroelectric RAM or F-RAM—that erases the distinction. It’s as quickly and easily accessible as typical RAM, but as persistent as any permanent storage medium. It also takes only a minuscule amount of electricity to make it work, and it doesn’t degrade over time, like flash memory does.

Jasper de Winkel, a Ph.D. candidate at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and the technical lead on the batteryless Game Boy project, married this power-sipping, nonvolatile memory to a power-sipping processor from Ambiq, a 10-year-old Austin-based company that specializes in processors for smartwatches, industrial sensors and other ultralow power devices.

The total package—including the memory, processor and display—draws on average 11.5 milliwatts of power. This makes it, according to the researcher’s calculations, about 20 times more power efficient than the original Game Boy from 1989. By comparison, a typical smartphone draws 1 to 3 watts of power from its battery when in use, or around a hundred times more power.

It’s this combination of traits—never needing to reboot, using very little power, and harvesting energy from the environment—that yields a system that could be a “perpetual” computer, says Dr. Hester.

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The idea that you don’t care whether the power’s on or off is a great way of completely reshaping your thinking about computing.
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Digital pioneer Geoff Huston apologises for bringing the internet to Australia • ZDNet

Stilgherrian :

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Geoff Huston is an Internet Hall of Fame global connector, an honour which acknowledges his “critical role” in bringing the internet to Australia in the 1990s.

“While the Internet was still in its infancy in the US, he was able to complete the construction of a new and rapidly growing network within a few months,” the organisation wrote.

On Thursday, Huston apologised for that. “The internet is now busted, and to be perfectly frank, it’s totally unclear how we can fix it. We can’t make it better,” said Huston, now chief scientist with the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC). “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” he said.

“I actually want to apologise for my small part in this mess we find ourselves in, because it all turned out so horrendously badly.”

Huston is well-known in Australian internet technical circles for his cheerfully pessimistic presentations.

…”None of us envisioned that perversion of our nobly motivated ambition into the sewage of Twitter, the deluge of waste products from the Facebook factory,” he said.

“We only choose to listen to what we agree with these days. The internet’s a gigantic vanity-reinforcing distorted TikTok selfie. And for my part in all this, I am sorry.”

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He’s certainly got a style about him.
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2008: predicting where Google will be 10 years from now • The Guardian

Back in September 2008, when Google was about to turn ten years old, I wrote a piece trying to forecast how things would look in a decade. Amazingly, not all of it is wrong:

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Larry Page and Sergey Brin have had their differences; I suspect that Battelle is right that one of them will leave within the next decade, and how Google reacts to that will be key to its future.

The other two things that will be a problem are that China will resist Google, because its authoritarian government cannot contemplate the openness of information the search engine represents. China, already the largest internet nation, will be stubbornly closed to Google’s best endeavours.

The other is that there is going to be one hell of an antitrust case coming. Google’s in so many places at so many times, and so dominant particularly in search, that it cannot avoid this: it’ll move into some new market, and someone will raise a huge stink about how it is using its power in search to take over a new market. (A reminder: having a monopoly isn’t illegal. Using that monopoly to force others out of other markets is.)

As Microsoft discovered, fighting an antitrust case takes the creative wind out of your sails; it becomes all you can do to row to shore. The Microsoft of 10 years ago was cocky, confident; today it’s vast, but uncertain, overwhelmed by its bureaucracy. That could be Google’s fate – even as in 10 years we use its tools all the time, and a significant number of people use phones and computers based around its products, it will be becoming sclerotic.

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Google subsequently went into China, and then rapidly exited. The antitrust cases, well, those are happening too – the US keeps saying it’s just about to. And then doesn’t. See also the prediction about Android: this article was published a month before the first such phone came out.
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White House spreads COVID-19 and lies about Trump’s health • NY Mag

Olivia Nuzzi and Ben Jacobs:

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[Alleged medic – or at least, person who plays one on TV – Sean] Conley attempted to clean up part of his mess. In a statement released through the White House press office, he insisted he misspoke when he said the president had been diagnosed “72 hours ago” and had actually meant to say “day three.” He also said he misspoke about when the experimental therapy was administered to the president: on “day two,” not “48 hours ago,” as Dr. Brian Garibaldi, a well-respected pulmonologist at Johns Hopkins hospital, had stated. Garibaldi and Johns Hopkins declined to comment.

But Panagis Galiastatos, a pulmonary and critical-care physician at Johns Hopkins, told Intelligencer that by taking remdesivir, Trump’s doctors had committed to the fact that the president is suffering from a “moderate” or “severe” case of COVID-19. Galiastatos defined moderate as requiring hospitalization and severe as close to being committed to an intensive-care unit.

Galiastatos, who said he cared for more than 100 COVID patients in the Johns Hopkins ICU, said that his suspicion was that Trump “probably had COVID-19 around Wednesday” and that when you develop symptoms, you are “probably contagious several days before.” If this is correct, it would mean Trump could have spread the virus during Tuesday’s presidential debate, when he stood 12 feet and eight inches from Joe Biden and shouted in his direction for 90 minutes. (The Biden campaign said on Friday that Biden tested negative.)

This is the type of information the public should be learning from the president’s medical team, but it’s becoming clear that those officials cannot be trusted to be any more truthful about Trump’s condition than this White House has been about anything else.

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I agree with Galiastatos – the superspreader event was the Rose Garden ceremony the Saturday before, when the GOP came to dance on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s grave and anoint a successor judge. At which point, the gods laughed.
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Facebook is still showing ads about election fraud to millions of users • Vice

David Gilbert:

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Facebook announced a new rule on Wednesday that banned any ads that sought to delegitimize the outcome of the presidential election.

But an investigation has found at least 80 ads that do just that, run almost exclusively by right-wing groups or individuals, were active on the site as of Thursday evening. The ads have already garnered more than 2 million impressions, with the potential to reach many more American voters.

The investigation was conducted by Media Matters for America, a nonprofit that tracks conservative media output. The ads were still live on Friday morning when VICE News checked Facebook’s ad library.

…The ads [which all come from rightwing individuals or groups] are a mix of fearmongering about widespread voter fraud — of which there is little evidence — and allegations that voting by mail is fraudulent — another claim with scant evidence.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this week, Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, announced that the company would no longer allow “ads with content that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of an election.”

As examples of what types of ad the new rule would prohibit, Leathern said “calling a method of voting inherently fraudulent or corrupt, or using isolated incidents of voter fraud to delegitimize the result of an election.”

The ads currently live on Facebook’s site do both of these things. “This report underlines that we can’t trust Facebook on ads,” Damian Collins, a UK lawmaker who has held multiple hearings on disinformation, told VICE News.

“Even when they change their policy to make it more responsible, they are caught out failing to deliver on it. This is why Facebook needs an oversight board with the power to investigate and challenge the company when it fails to properly implement its own policies.”

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I’ll say it again: Facebook can’t control Facebook. Until people really internalise this, the problems are going to get worse and worse.
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Journalists, beware: This White House can’t be trusted to be truthful about Trump’s health • The Washington Post

Margaret Sullivan:

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In this latest crisis, the predictable cycle of dangerous obfuscation has already begun. It was only after Bloomberg News reported that Trump aide Hope Hicks had tested positive for coronavirus that the White House acknowledged it.

Would we even know about Trump’s diagnosis if it weren’t for that? Maybe not. What about those he has come in contact with in recent days? Would they know they were endangered? The indications aren’t good. Yamiche Alcindor, the PBS White House correspondent, reported Friday that there was “no contact from the Trump campaign or the White House to alert the Biden campaign of possible exposure.” The campaign learned of the situation from news reports.

And when it comes to Trump’s health, he and his minions have a history of dubious statements. His former personal physician, Harold Bornstein, confessed that Trump dictated the doctor’s glowing 2015 letter that “his physical strength and stamina are extraordinary,” and that, if elected, Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” More recently, his trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last November remains all too mysterious; reasonable questions were never satisfactorily answered.

…The stakes are higher than ever, and the demand for proof should be, too.

Otherwise, Americans will reasonably come to an unavoidable conclusion: If the statement is from the president’s tweet, or from the press secretary’s mouth, there’s no reason to think it’s true.

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It’s not as if the precedent from the UK or Brazil is a good one. Boris Johnson’s worsening condition was hidden even from his Cabinet colleagues, who assured people he was fine just as he was about to head into the intensive care unit. The blizzard of lies around Trump’s health is going to be epic – and on Friday, began with the question: precisely when did he test positive? He seemed to be showing symptoms a couple of days before.
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Pyto: Python 3 on the App Store

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Pyto is a Python 3.8 IDE for iPhone and iPad. Run code directly on your device and offline. You can run scripts from Shortcuts and code your own home screen widgets.

Features:

– Python 3.8 with all standard libraries
– Full Python REPL
– Code user interfaces
– Smart code completion
– Use pip to install pure Python modules from PyPI
– Access scripts from everywhere
– Preview images and plots on console
– Multiple windows for iPadOS 13+
– Run scripts and code from Siri Shortcuts
– Code your own home screen widgets
– Interact with other apps thanks to x-callback urls

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If you’re looking for Python on your iPad… (which can then make your iPhone do things..) Quite similar to Pythonista, but possibly with more Python libraries. Home screen widgets, eh? What a hit they’ve been.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified