The old fossils are on the way out. No, not just them, but also the coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar. CC-licensed photo by Molesworth II 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Up in smoke. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google: AI potentially breaking reality is a feature not a bug • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Generative AI could “distort collective understanding of socio-political reality or scientific consensus,” and in many cases is already doing that, according to a new research paper from Google, one of the biggest companies in the world building, deploying, and promoting generative AI.

The paper, “Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data,” was co-authored by researchers at Google’s artificial intelligence research laboratory DeepMind, its security think tank Jigsaw, and its charitable arm Google.org, and aims to classify the different ways generative AI tools are being misused by analyzing about 200 incidents of misuse as reported in the media and research papers between January 2023 and March 2024.

Unlike self-serving warnings from Open AI CEO Sam Altman or Elon Musk about the “existential risk” artificial general intelligence poses to humanity, Google’s research focuses on real harm that generative AI is currently causing and could get worse in the future. Namely, that generative AI makes it very easy for anyone to flood the internet with generated text, audio, images, and videos.  

Much like another Google research paper about the dangers of generative AI I covered recently, Google’s methodology here likely undercounts instances of AI-generated harm. But the most interesting observation in the paper is that the vast majority of these harms and how they “undermine public trust,” as the researchers say, are often “neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools’ content policies or terms of service.” In other words, that type of content is a feature, not a bug. 

…This observation lines up with the reporting we’ve done at 404 Media for the past year and prior. People who are using AI to impersonate others, sockpuppet, scale and amplify bad content, or create nonconsensual intimate images (NCII), are mostly not hacking or manipulating the generative AI tools they’re using. They’re using them as intended.

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Kenya protesters us AI in anti-government battle • Semafor

Martin Siele:

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Kenya’s government has raised concerns about risks associated with use of artificial intelligence (AI) as youth-led, anti-government protests continue across the nation. Protesters have deployed creative uses of AI and digital tools to take on the political establishment over the past few weeks as part of the nationwide demonstrations, which were triggered by the now-scrapped Finance Bill 2024 containing a raft of unpopular tax hikes.

Among widely shared AI tools created in support of the protests include the Corrupt Politicians GPT, a chatbot which reveals corruption cases involving Kenyan politicians. Another is the Finance Bill GPT, which helps break down the controversial bill and its potential impact on prices The chatbot also shares lawmakers’ phone numbers for their constituents to share their concerns.

Protesters also contributed to and shared databases of businesses owned by politicians, which have faced boycotts and attacks, and created another chatbot featuring their contributions to parliamentary debates.

The mostly Gen Z and millennial protesters, who are now pushing for the president’s resignation, began organizing against the Finance Bill on TikTok and X before taking to the streets. They continue to use the social media apps’ features, including spaces and live-streams, to coordinate protests and mobilize.

The protesters have also used these platforms to crowdfund medical bill payments and funeral costs for injured and killed protesters. At least 39 people have been killed in the protests since mid-June, according to a government-funded human rights organization. An online fundraiser managed by activist and journalist Hanifa Farsafi, one of the protest’s key figures, had raised 29.8 million Kenyan shillings ($231,906) from over 34,000 people as of Wednesday evening.

«

So it’s actually a very modern and targeted use of ChatGPT to create something trained on a very specific set of data to give accurate answers: when chatbots work on a small knowledge set (but not language set) they are very informative.

Though one has to wonder how much time people are spending quizzing chatbots about this sort of thing. I suspect a small group of people will, and then screenshots will get shared far and wide.
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Leak confirms Apple’s work on ‘home accessory’ • MacRumors

Aaron Perris:

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Code discovered on Apple’s backend by MacRumors confirms Apple is indeed working on a long-rumored home accessory in addition to the HomePod and Apple TV.

The code references a device with the identifier “HomeAccessory17,1,” which is a new identifier category. The name is similar to the HomePod ‘s “AudioAccessory” identifier.

Interestingly, the 17,1 in the identifier name suggests that this device may receive Apple’s upcoming A18 chip, which will be used in all four iPhone 16 models later this year. With the A18 chip, the HomeAccessory device would have the power for Apple Intelligence.

The code also indicates that this “home accessory” will be running a software variant of tvOS, much like the HomePod . Earlier this year, MacRumors found evidence of Apple’s work on homeOS, which could be the firmware running on this device.

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One has to wonder about how much backing this will actually get. Apple, weirdly, just can’t imagine the home beyond computers; the Apple TV has never had much pizazz, and the HomePod line came too late compared to other home “assistants” and didn’t get much support either. Arguably, nobody has figured out “what do you need in the home?” For me, it’s smart (programmable) lights and a programmable thermostat, but beyond that, not much else.
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The conspiracy of silence to protect Joe Biden • NY Mag

Olivia Nuzzi:

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Under vines of white moonflowers on the governor’s patio, I watched as the president neared the end of his ten-minute speech [to reassure donors after his calamitous debate performance]. If a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth, he was still making them. The truth he told now was this: “I’ve got a helluva lot of plans for the next four years — God willing, as my father used to say.”

In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?

Uniformly, these people were of a similar social strata. They lived and socialized in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. They did not wish to come forward with their stories. They did not want to blow a whistle. They wished that they could whistle past what they knew and emerge in November victorious and relieved, having helped avoid another four years of Trump. What would happen after that? They couldn’t think that far ahead. Their worries were more immediate.

When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.

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Of course Nuzzi is being monstered for this piece, by people asking both “why didn’t you write this in January?” and “why are you writing this now?” The former, she explains, is because she needed to firm up the findings; the latter, well, it’s like comedy. All about the timing.
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So it’s bye bye to the ERG, Spud-u-hate, five families and the 1922 Committee • The Times

Matt Chorley:

»

After the humiliation will come something much worse: irrelevance. It is impossible to overstate just how totally irrelevant the Conservatives are about to become. There is no easy way to say this, but nobody will be filling in their wall charts with the runners and riders for the Tory leadership. The tight timetabling for elections to the 1922 Committee matters not. Senior Tory sources will be left to scream into the void.

The alphabet spaghetti leftovers will be scraped into the bin: ERG, CCHQ, IEA, IDS. Bye bye to the banging of tables. Farewell to the star chambers. Arrivederci to the Five Families [of right-wing Tories] — they will struggle to muster one.

Nobody will care who Penny Mordaunt has unfollowed on Twitter. Or about the sandwiches at Tom Tugendhat’s launch. Or what Latin phrase Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has had mowed into his front lawn. Or anything that is said in all those WhatsApp groups. Step away from Nadine Dorries’s column, Lee Anderson’s GB News show, Dominic Cummings’s Substack. Think how much free time you’ll now have.

We will all have to adjust. Just at the moment when someone (not me) has added Andrew Bridgen to my Wikipedia page in a section marked “feuds”, it’s all over. Spud-u-hate, like the rest of them, has had his chips.

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Ah, the Five Families, more accurately described by James O’Brien as “the Gammonbinos”. These will all be lost, like tears in the rain, and we won’t care any more.
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British Airways owner IAG warns airfares must rise to fund carbon cuts • FT

Philip Georgiadis:

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Airlines in Europe will be forced to raise prices to fund the cost of cutting carbon emissions, the boss of British Airways owner IAG said.

Luis Gallego told the Financial Times that switching to cleaner, more expensive sustainable fuel would “have a big impact” on the industry and put some people off flying.

“Flying is going to be more expensive. That is an issue, we are trying to improve efficiency to mitigate that, but it will have an impact on demand,” he said.

He added that European airlines could become less competitive because of the bloc’s tough net zero targets, which include a requirement for 6% of jet fuel to be from sustainable sources by 2030.

“We agree with decarbonisation . . . but I think we need to do it in a consistent way worldwide not to jeopardise European aviation,” Gallego said.

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is made from a range of non-fossil fuel sources, from waste cooking oil to crops, and can emit 70% less carbon dioxide than traditional jet fuel.

But very little of it is being produced — less than 1% of total aviation fuel consumption last year was from sustainable sources — meaning it is far more expensive than jet fuel.

IAG itself used 12% of the world’s SAF last year across its five airlines, which include British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus.

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So IAG used 12% of 1%? It’s not a lot, is it. This feels like something that’s more of an ambition than a target, but it’s a great way to push up airline prices and blame someone else.
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The EU got more than 50% of its electricity from renewables in first half of 2024 • The Progress Playbook

Nick Hedley:

»

Renewables accounted for 50.4% of the European Union’s electricity generation in the first six months of 2024, data from industry association Eurelectric shows.

That’s a sharp increase from calendar year 2023, when renewables comprised 44.7% of the bloc’s mix, according to Eurostat.

“The pace of change is impressive,” Eurelectric secretary general Kristian Ruby said in a statement.

When including nuclear, 74% of the EU’s power came from low-carbon sources in the first half — up from 68% in 2023.

Yes, but: The association said demand continues to decline, reflecting sluggish economic growth, warmer temperatures, energy savings, and industry relocating abroad.

This trend must be reversed “to provide the necessary investment signals for clean generation,” Ruby said.

With this in mind, Eurelectric wants the new European Commission to propose an Electrification Action Plan that seeks to boost the share of electricity in final energy consumption to 35% by 2030. This would entail a faster shift to electric vehicles, heat pumps, and industrial decarbonisation technologies, among other things.

«

Impressive.
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The UK’s last coal fired power plant takes final delivery of old fossils • RenewEconomy

Joshua Hill:

»

The last coal-fired power station in the UK, the 2GW Ratcliffe-on-Soar facility in the East Midlands, is entering its final days and has received its last load of coal ahead of its planned closure on September 30.

The Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station is operated by German multinational energy company Uniper began operations in 1967 and claims to produce enough electricity to make more than one billion cups of tea a day, or more then 21 trillion overall – a truly British analogy.

“The last coal delivery will be a significant moment and one that heralds the end of the story for the power station,” said Mike Lockett, Uniper UK country chair.

“However, it’s not the end for the site, as we look towards a future where it could become a zero-carbon technology and energy hub for the East Midlands.”

Uniper is looking at various options for the Ratcliffe site, including green hydrogen production and green manufacturing. Uniper aims to be completely carbon-neutral by 2040.

In May, just 0.4% of the UK’s power supply came from coal, with wind and solar providing 27% and nuclear 17%. Fossil gas and imports accounted for most of the rest. A decade ago, it provided 40% of the power supply, according to Ember.

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They’re burning Tory party members? Oh, a different sort of old fossil. Amazing transformation of energy supply, though. The Labour Party’s 2008 Climate Change Act actually worked.
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Fourth US dairy worker tests positive for H5N1 bird flu • Daily Telegraph via MSN News

Maeve Cullinan:

»

A fourth dairy worker has tested positive for H5N1 bird flu in the US, as the virus continues to infect herds of cattle across the country.

The unnamed farm worker from Colorado had close contact with sick cows and suffered a mild illness reporting only conjunctivitis-like symptoms, according to state health officials.

H5N1 – which has killed millions of animals since it began re-circulating in 2020 – has so far spread to 139 cattle herds in 12 US states, 27 of which are in Colorado. 

Just this week the U.S. government announced a $176 million investment in Moderna to advance the development of its mRNA bird flu vaccine in a bid to prepare for an H5N1 pandemic as scientists become increasingly concerned that the virus will mutate and gain the ability to spread among people.

H5N1 can be lethal, with a death rate of around 50% since it was first detected in humans in the late 1990s – although all four of the recent human cases in the US have been extremely mild. 

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Just a watching brief! Though I’m sure Sir Keir Starmer will sort this out.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s not unseemly haste, but the removals van will be in Downing Street by Friday. CC-licensed photo by Andy Thornley 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Boxed in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Japan wins two-year “war on floppy disks,” kills regulations requiring old tech • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

About two years after the country’s digital minister publicly declared a “war on floppy discs,” Japan reportedly stopped using floppy disks in governmental systems as of June 28.

Per a Reuters report on Wednesday, Japan’s government “eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems.” The report notes that by mid-June, Japan’s Digital Agency (a body set up during the COVID-19 pandemic and aimed at updating government technology) had “scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling.” That suggests that there’s up to one government use that could still turn to floppy disks, though more details weren’t available.

Digital Minister Taro Kono, the politician behind the modernization of the Japanese government’s tech, has made his distaste for floppy disks and other old office tech, like fax machines, quite public. Kono, who’s reportedly considering a second presidential run, told Reuters in a statement today: We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!

Although Kono only announced plans to eradicate floppy disks from the government two years ago, it’s been 20 years since floppy disks were in their prime and 53 years since they debuted. It was only in January 2024 that the Japanese government stopped requiring physical media, like floppy disks and CD-ROMs, for 1,900 types of submissions to the government, such as business filings and submission forms for citizens.

The timeline may be surprising, considering that the last company to make floppy disks, Sony, stopped doing so in 2011. As a storage medium, of course, floppies can’t compete with today’s options since most floppies max out at 1.44MB (2.88MB floppies were also available). And you’ll be hard-pressed to find a modern system that can still read the disks. There are also basic concerns around the old storage format, such as Tokyo police reportedly losing a pair of floppy disks with information on dozens of public housing applicants in 2021.

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At last their long national nightmare is over. Wonder how it will affect “the last person standing” in the floppy disk business (last seen September 2022).
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China is building a mammoth 8GW solar farm • Electrek

Michelle Lewis:

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State-owned power company China Three Gorges Renewables Group will build an 8 GW solar farm as part of a nearly $11bn integrated energy project.

To put the sheer size of the 8 GW solar farm in perspective, the three largest solar farms in the world by capacity are China’s Ningxia Tenggeli and Golmud Wutumeiren solar farms, with a capacity of 3MW each, and a 3.5GW solar farm outside Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. 

In addition to the massive solar farm, the $10.99bn project will also consist of 4GW of wind, 5GWh of energy storage capacity, 200 MW of solar thermal, and (disappointingly) 4 GW of coal-fired power. It will be sited in Ordos, in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region, the Shanghai-listed company said in a stock filing.

China Three Gorges says that the enormous integrated energy site’s power will be dispatched to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei cluster in northern China via an ultra-high voltage power transmission line.

The project will break ground in September and is expected to come online by June 2027.

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Three and a half years for that amount of capacity. Not feasible with nuclear, of course; only with renewables that can be built in parallel. (Though the coal-fire station is big for such rapid deployment.) One can only hope that the coal capacity will not be needed once the rest comes online.
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US approves new offshore wind project bringing total to 13GW • Energy Watch

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The US Department of the Interior approved another offshore wind project on Tuesday, bringing the total approved offshore wind capacity to over 13 gigawatts (GW).

On Tuesday, the ninth project was given the green light by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the Department of the Interior.

”The Biden-Harris Administration is building momentum every day for a clean energy future. Today’s milestone is another step toward our ambitious goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore energy by 2030,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.

The new offshore wind farm is the Atlantic Shores South Wind project, which consists of two offshore wind farms – 1 and 2 – and associated export cables that are expected to generate up to 2,800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power close to one million homes with renewable energy.

«

Impressive, very nice. For comparison, the UK’s installed wind capacity in 2023 was 30GW: 15GW onshore, 15GW offshore. The aim is to get to 50GW offshore by 2030.
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AI trains on kids’ photos even when parents use strict privacy settings • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked in LAION-5B, a popular AI dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. Now, she has released a second report, flagging 190 photos of children from all of Australia’s states and territories, including indigenous children who may be particularly vulnerable to harms.

These photos are linked in the dataset “without the knowledge or consent of the children or their families.” They span the entirety of childhood, making it possible for AI image generators to generate realistic deepfakes of real Australian children, Han’s report said. Perhaps even more concerning, the URLs in the dataset sometimes reveal identifying information about children, including their names and locations where photos were shot, making it easy to track down children whose images might not otherwise be discoverable online.

That puts children in danger of privacy and safety risks, Han said, and some parents thinking they’ve protected their kids’ privacy online may not realize that these risks exist.

From a single link to one photo that showed “two boys, ages 3 and 4, grinning from ear to ear as they hold paintbrushes in front of a colorful mural,” Han could trace “both children’s full names and ages, and the name of the preschool they attend in Perth, in Western Australia.” And perhaps most disturbingly, “information about these children does not appear to exist anywhere else on the Internet”—suggesting that families were particularly cautious in shielding these boys’ identities online.

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Worrying that those photos are held in the database. Though that’s very impressive detective work in its own right to figure out where they came from originally.
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Meta’s Threads hits 175 million users one year after launch • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

A year and a half ago, Threads was but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

Now, the rival to Elon Musk’s X has reached more than 175 million monthly active users, the Meta CEO announced on Wednesday.

His announcement comes as Threads is about to hit its one-year anniversary. Back when it arrived in the App Store on July 5th, 2023, Musk was taking a wrecking ball to the service formerly called Twitter and goading Zuckerberg into a literal cage match that never happened. A year later, Threads is still growing at a steady clip — albeit not as quickly as its huge launch — while Musk hasn’t shared comparable metrics for X since he took over.

…It’s telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn’t shared daily user numbers yet. That omission suggests Threads is still getting a lot of flyby traffic from people who have yet to become regular users.

I’ve heard from Meta employees in recent months that much of the app’s growth is still coming from it being promoted inside Instagram. Both apps share the same account system, which isn’t expected to change.

Even still, 175 million monthly users for a one-year app is nothing to turn your nose up at, especially given Meta’s spotty track record of launching standalone app experiments over the years. Zuckerberg has been open to me and others that he thinks Threads has a real shot at being the company’s next billion-user app.

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Cloudflare offers 1-click block against web-scraping AI bots • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

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Cloudflare on Wednesday offered web hosting customers a way to block AI bots from scraping website content and using the data without permission to train machine learning models.

It did so based on customer loathing of AI bots and, “to help preserve a safe internet for content creators,” it said in a statement.

“We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots.”

There’s already a somewhat effective method to block bots that’s widely available to website owners, the robots.txt file. When placed in a website’s root directory, automated web crawlers are expected to notice and comply with directives in the file that tell them to stay out.

Given the widespread belief that generative AI is based on theft, and the many lawsuits attempting to hold AI companies accountable, firms trafficking in laundered content have graciously allowed web publishers to opt-out of the pilfering.

…The internet is “now flooded with these AI bots,” Cloudflare said, which visit about 39% of the top one million web properties served by Cloudflare.

The problem is that robots.txt, like the Do Not Track header implemented in browsers fifteen years ago to declare a preference for privacy, can be ignored, generally without consequences.

And recent reports suggest AI bots do just that. Amazon last week said it was looking into evidence that bots working on behalf of AI search outfit Perplexity, an AWS client, had crawled websites, including news sites, and reproduced their content without suitable credit or permission.

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How handovers work: John Major’s final hours in No.10 • The House Magazine

Robert Hutton:

»

For the first time since 1997, Britain is approaching an election where no one doubts that power is about to change hands. And by happy coincidence, last Christmas saw the release of a memo spelling out how Downing Street prepared for the moment last time around.

A feature of our democracy is the brutal swiftness with which a defeated leader is removed: John Major was on his way to resign to the Queen within hours of losing the election. But he wasn’t just leaving his office: he was leaving his home. Few of us could pack for a holiday in the time in which he and his wife Norma were supposed to empty their Downing Street flat.

“This was obviously delicate,” Major’s principal private secretary Alex Allan recalled in a 2000 note to Jeremy Heywood explaining how the couple had made sure they were ready, now available at the National Archives in Kew. He said he had sat down with them to discuss what would happen, after which Norma “discreetly moved quite a lot of clothes etc out of Downing Street during the weeks running up to the election”. She took the view, he said, that “if they had won, bringing clothes and other possessions back would have been a pleasure!”

He also secured a room in the Cabinet Office for them to store larger items so that they could be moved after the election: “They were (understandably) keen to avoid having a removal van seen in or near Downing Street.” This plan was thwarted on polling day “when I got a panicked call from the press office to say that there was a removal van in Downing Street.” It turned out that another group of civil servants had decided it would be a nice quiet day to shift furniture in Whitehall.

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Best-laid plans, and all that. Friday morning should be fun.
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US pays Moderna $176m to develop bird-flu vaccine • BBC News

Michelle Roberts:

»

The US government has given Moderna $176m (£139m) to develop a messenger-ribonucleic-acid-based (mRNA) pandemic influenza vaccine that would work against bird flu.

It says it wants to be “better prepared” for public-health crises, having learned lessons from Covid.

Bird flu is not a big threat to people, despite outbreaks in poultry and cattle. But experts want a working vaccine that could be quickly rolled out, in case the virus mutates and becomes a problem.

Vaccines using mRNA technology – which the Moderna’s Covid jab is also based on – can be produced more quickly. And the US government says adding this technology to its pandemic-flu toolkit enhances its ability to be “nimble and quick” against bird flu.

The $176m, from the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, will be used to complete late-stage development and testing of Moderna’s vaccine against H5N1 avian influenza.

This strain has been around for years in birds – but some other animals, including cattle, have become infected in recent outbreaks. Some believe the virus might one day change and start spreading easily among humans, with potentially serious consequences.

So far, there is no sign of this.

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Watching brief, totally just a watching brief. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Election 2024 Results and Predictions: Introduction • Jon Skeet

»

This site is intended to be interesting during election night (July 4th-5th 2024) and potentially shortly afterwards, for those wishing to get an at-a-glance view of the state of play as the night goes on, and also to compare reality with the various predictions over the course of the campaign. The “2019 notional results” are the 2019 election results, redistributed to the new constituency boundaries for 2024 as calculated by Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings, as listed on Wikipedia. A very few aspects of the site are down to the judgement of the author (Jon Skeet) – I’m not a political analyst by any stretch of the imagination:

Which candidates are “notable” (i.e. ones where I believe many people are likely to be interested in the result) – mostly cabinet and shadow cabinet members, and party leaders.

How to rank “contentious” constituencies and “surprising” results.

How to bucket predictions with only majorities or probabilities into “tossup / lean / likely / safe”.

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Multiple views including a live view which will auto-refresh through the night and into the morning. Enjoy!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Does the relative scarcity of lefthanded people stem from a sort of social pressure? New research offers clues. CC-licensed photo by Alex Lewis 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Dexter and Sinister. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

TechScape: here’s four ways a new Labour government could use tech to boost Britain • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

In March 2006, back when the Guardian technology section was a physical supplement in Thursday’s newspaper, we ran a campaign to “free our data”. We wrote about government-owned and approved agencies such as the Ordnance Survey, the UK Hydrographic Office and the Highways Agency collecting data on our behalf. We asked: “Why can’t we get at that data as easily as we can Google Maps?”

The campaign was, over the years that followed, a mixed success. Across the public sector, a new norm was created that government data should generally be made available to the public when possible. It almost certainly influenced the direction of the gov.uk project, putting open data at the heart of the state’s digital footprint, and a glance at the top-level data.gov.uk website shows how much work has been done to that end.

Someone born on the day of that campaign’s launch will be voting for the first time on Thursday. Yet some of the most valuable pieces of our digital infrastructure are still locked up, behind restrictive terms or expensive paywalls.

The Postcode Address File (PAF) is one example. It holds 1.8m postcodes and almost 30m postal addresses, and is the ground truth for how we navigate the country. It was privatised along with Royal Mail, but remains tightly controlled by the state, with access charges regulated by Ofcom and a unique license for the public sector to use it at a flat cost.

Freeing our data is the right thing to do, but successive governments have viewed it as expensive: giving up a valuable revenue stream, in the name of abstract concepts. But a Labour party looking for growth and state renewal over the next few years should recognise that if a government dataset is valuable enough to be worth charging for, it’s even more valuable if it can be built on, improved and reused.

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The sale of the PAF was a disgrace – but as the article points out, there are lots of big potential wins which can spark growth through making more data available on non-restrictive licences. Free Our Data lives! And it’s old enough to buy drinks!
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Google Search ranks AI spam above original reporting in news results • WIRED

Reece Rogers:

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As reported by 404 Media in January, AI-powered articles appeared multiple times for basic queries at the beginning of the year in Google News results. Two months later, Google announced significant changes to its algorithm and new spam policies, as an attempt to improve the search results. And by the end of April, Google shared that the major adjustments to remove unhelpful results from its search engine ranking system were finished. “As of April 19, we’ve completed the rollout of these changes. You’ll now see 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results versus the 40% improvement we expected across this work,” wrote Elizabeth Tucker, a director of product management at Google, in a blog post.

Despite the changes, spammy content created with the help of AI remains an ongoing, prevalent issue for Google News.

“This is a really rampant problem on Google right now, and it’s hard to answer specifically why it’s happening,” says Lily Ray, senior director of search engine optimization at the marketing agency Amsive. “We’ve had some clients say, ‘Hey, they took our article and rehashed it with AI. It looks exactly like what we wrote in our original content but just kind of like a mumbo-jumbo, AI-rewritten version of it.’”

At first glance, it was clear to me that some of the images for Syrus’ blogs were AI generated based on the illustrations’ droopy eyes and other deformed physical features—telltale signs of AI trying to represent the human body.

Now, was the text of our article rewritten using AI? I reached out to the person behind the blog to learn more about how they made it and received confirmation via email that an Italian marketing agency created the blog. They claim to have used an AI tool as part of the writing process. “Regarding your concerns about plagiarism, we can assure you that our content creation process involves AI tools that analyze and synthesize information from various sources while always respecting intellectual property,” writes someone using the name Daniele Syrus over email.

«

Google News has had a longstanding problem with recency bias: a more recent but purely rewritten article will rank higher than the original, despite adding nothing to it. Now AI is making it worse.
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Cleanview: see the energy transition in real time

Michael Thomas built this site, which tracks energy installs across the US and provides lots of interesting data:

»

Cleanview crunches millions of data points and tracks thousands of projects each month so you don’t have to.

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Wind, solar, battery, plus all the other energy installations. It’s a fascinating resource for tracking how things are changing – because they are changing: just look, for example, at battery installation in California.
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AI Overview study for 8,000 keywords in Google Search • Advanced Web Ranking

Philip Petrescu with the TL;DR on the new AI stuff when you do a Google query:

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• The average AI Overview is 169 words and 912 pixels long
• Only 12.4% of the analyzed keywords display an AI Overview
• A Featured Snippet is showing on 17.6% of the analyzed keywords
• On average, AI Overviews appear alongside Featured Snippets in 7.4% of cases. For the Health niche, they show up together the most often (34.9% of queries)
• AI Overviews contain 7.2 links on average when expanded
• 33.4% of AI Overview links rank in that query’s top 10 organic results
• 46.5% of the URLs included in AI Overviews rank outside the top 50 organic results
• Five-word queries trigger an AI Overview most frequently
• Keywords from the Health and Safety niches are more likely to trigger AI Overviews
• No AI Overviews show up for brand related queries
• Navigational intent keywords are less likely to display AI Overviews
• Google Ads are displayed in 28.3% keywords that trigger AI Overviews
• From all the keywords that trigger AI Overviews, Ads at the top of the SERP appear for 8.7% of keywords. Ads at the bottom are displayed for 19.5% of these keywords
• Shopping Ads are almost never seen together with AI Overviews and when they are, they always appear below the AI Overview.

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There’s much more if you want the in-depth version. One other point from lower down: “Do AI Overviews impact the visibility of the first organic result?”

And the answer is: yes, they do. Significantly.
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Google emissions jump nearly 50% over five years as AI use surges • FT

Camilla Hodgson and Stephen Morris:

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Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48% in the past five years due to the expansion of its data centres that underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to “net zero” by 2030 in doubt.

The Silicon Valley company’s pollution amounted to 14.3mn tonnes of carbon equivalent in 2023, a 48% increase from its 2019 baseline and a 13% rise since last year, Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday.

Google said the jump highlighted “the challenge of reducing emissions” at the same time as it invests in the build-out of large language models and their associated applications and infrastructure, admitting that “the future environmental impact of AI” was “complex and difficult to predict”.

Chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt said the company remained committed to the 2030 target but stressed the “extremely ambitious” nature of the goal.

“We do still expect our emissions to continue to rise before dropping towards our goal,” said Brandt.

She added that Google was “working very hard” on reducing its emissions, including by signing deals for clean energy. There was also a “tremendous opportunity for climate solutions that are enabled by AI”, said Brandt.

«

Wait, though – Google didn’t start introducing its AI search until earlier this year, surely? If this is what happens when it’s just gearing up for wide use of AI, which we know consumes far more energy than normal search, it’s a really troubling sign.
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Northvolt: the battery company seeking to make batteries with salt • Climate Home News

Martin Gelin and Meli Petersson Ellafi:

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In recent years, concerns have grown over the social and environmental harms of extracting and refining battery minerals. Reserves of lithium, nickel and cobalt are concentrated in a handful of countries, making them prone to geopolitical and trade disruptions, and subject to intense competition. Meanwhile, China dominates the lithium-ion battery supply chain, controlling 70% of global lithium refining capacity.

Sodium-based batteries offer a solution to the electric battery supply chain challenges, particularly for Western countries seeking to reduce their dependence on China for cleantech.

According to 2023 analysis by BloombergNEF, sodium batteries could displace 272,000 tonnes of lithium demand by 2035, equivalent to about 7% of the overall market projected for that year.

“The real value of sodium-ion batteries is the potential to build a European supply chain,” said Iola Hughes, research manager at London-based battery consultancy Rho Motion. “In the US and the EU, there is growing pressure to decouple from China and to build domestic supply, and sodium-ion batteries could have strong potential in that transition.”

In January, the European Investment Bank backed the company with over $1bn in financing, citing Northvolt’s ability to create the first fully integrated circular lithium-ion battery production facility outside Asia.
At the time, EU Commission Vice President Maroš Šefčovič, in charge of the European Green Deal, said the battery industry was of “strategic importance and a key battleground for global competitiveness”.

“Northvolt, our battery pioneer, showcases that the EU has what it takes to build an innovative, sustainable and globally competitive battery ecosystem,” he said.

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Sodium is plentiful (available at a sea near you), which makes it very attractive for batteries where size isn’t an issue.
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Figma disables AI app design tool after it copied Apple’s Weather app • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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The design tool Figma has disabled a newly launched AI-powered app design tool after a user showed that it was clearly copying Apple’s weather app. 

Figma disabled the feature, named Make Design, after CEO and cofounder of Not Boring Software Andy Allen tweeted images showing that asking it to make a “weather app” produced several variations of apps that looked almost identical to Apple’s default weather app. 

“Within hours of seeing this tweet, we identified the issue, which was related to the underlying design systems that were created. Ultimately it is my fault for not insisting on a better QA process for this work and pushing our team hard to hit a deadline for Config,” Figma CEO Dylan Field said on Twitter. Config is Figma’s annual conference where it showcased Make Design. “I have asked our team to temporarily disable the Make Design feature until we are confident we can stand behind its output. The feature will be disabled when our US based team wakes up in a few hours, and we will re-enable it when we have completed a full QA pass on the underlying design system.”

«

Wonder how that “QA pass” is going to work, exactly. The AI is, one presumes, a generative AI system, which means you have to tear up its entire learning matrix in order to take even one app out. And you’d want to take a fair number of apps out. Which would probably only leave the bad ones. Which you don’t want to have in.

One hopes this is a free upgrade.
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Why most of us are right-handed, and prefer to view faces on the left • Science Museum Blog

Roger Highfield:

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Once upon a time, scientists thought biases in behaviour were unique to humans and reflected differences in the dominance of the left and right brain hemispheres, each of which controls the opposite side of the body.   

But, as has so often been the case, research in recent decades has shown plenty of handedness in other creatures and the way that they behave. 

Studies conducted on animals suggests that brain hemisphere biases evolved because they allow the two sides of the brain to simultaneously do different things without the animals becoming muddled, or the two hemispheres conflicting.   

So being right- or left-handed free up some brain power to make animals more efficient at finding food and, in general, surviving, for instance turning the right way to stay in a shoal or a flock to cut the risk of being picked off by predators, so they can pass their genes on. 

The museum’s Live Science residency allowed the team to use museum visitors to study associations between the degree of hand bias and performance as well as direction of biases and social ability that had already been studied in animal research. 

The team measured handedness using a timed colour-matching pegboard task, along with images of faces expressing different emotion (such as surprise or anger) presented on the right- or left-hand side of a screen. 

People with mild to moderate strength hand bias (left or right) placed more colour-matched pegs correctly than those with a strong or weak bias, showing that, in humans, extremes of handedness may limit our flexibility, unlike wild animals. 

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The full study, based on 1,600 experiments on live humans (visitors to the Science Museum) is published in Nature.
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Apple rumoured to be working on camera-powered AirPods • Gizmodo

Harri Weber:

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Apple is reportedly bringing cameras to AirPods, ear hairs be damned.

The $3 trillion company intends to mass-produce revamped earbuds with built-in infrared cameras by 2026, according to a new report from analyst and longtime Apple insider Ming-Chi Kuo. The cameras could help Apple shore up its current and future augmented-reality headsets with enhanced spatial audio features, the analyst wrote.

Citing a supply-chain survey, Kuo indicated that pairing these enhanced buds with Vision Pro goggles could make Apple’s spatial-computing experience more lifelike. For example, “if users turn their heads to look in a specific direction, the sound source in that direction can be emphasized,” said the analyst.

For folks not interested in dropping thousands on an Apple headset, the IR cameras could offer other perks, including bringing “in-air” gestures to AirPods, per Kuo. The IR module could be similar to the receiver that powers Apple’s facial recognition feature, FaceID.

The analyst’s report follows an earlier story from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, which noted that Apple was looking into the idea of camera-powered AirPods.

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Seems a pretty weird idea. The Ming-Chi Kuo piece contains a paragraph saying “The IR camera can detect environmental image changes, potentially enabling in-air gesture control to enhance human-device interaction. It is worth noting that Apple has filed related patents in this area”. Still seems weird. But also a long way off.
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Three million iOS and macOS apps were exposed to potent supply-chain attacks • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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Vulnerabilities that went undetected for a decade left thousands of macOS and iOS apps susceptible to supply-chain attacks. Hackers could have added malicious code compromising the security of millions or billions of people who installed them, researchers said Monday.

The vulnerabilities, which were fixed last October, resided in a “trunk” server used to manage CocoaPods, a repository for open source Swift and Objective-C projects that roughly 3 million macOS and iOS apps depend on. When developers make changes to one of their “pods”—CocoaPods lingo for individual code packages—dependent apps typically incorporate them automatically through app updates, typically with no interaction required by end users.

“Many applications can access a user’s most sensitive information: credit card details, medical records, private materials, and more,” wrote researchers from EVA Information Security, the firm that discovered the vulnerability. “Injecting code into these applications could enable attackers to access this information for almost any malicious purpose imaginable—ransomware, fraud, blackmail, corporate espionage… In the process, it could expose companies to major legal liabilities and reputational risk.”

The three vulnerabilities EVA discovered stem from an insecure verification email mechanism used to authenticate developers of individual pods. The developer entered the email address associated with their pod. The trunk server responded by sending a link to the address. When a person clicked on the link, they gained access to the account.

In one case, an attacker could manipulate the URL in the link to make it point to a server under the attacker’s control. The server accepted a spoofed XFH, an HTTP header for identifying the target host specified in an HTTP request. The EVA researchers found that they could use a forged XFH to construct URLs of their choice.

…CocoaPods maintainers disclosed and patched the vulnerabilities last October. At the time, they said they weren’t aware of any active attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities. They did, however, confirm that the scenarios described by the researchers were plausible.

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The food chain of code packages really does mirror the complexity of life. But with code, of course.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new scheme is injecting radioactive substances into rhinos’ horns so poaching can be detected at Customs. CC-licensed photo by .waldec 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Not horny. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Brussels follows up Apple charges with Meta ‘pay or consent’ case • FT

Javier Espinoza:

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The EU has charged Facebook’s parent Meta with breaking the bloc’s landmark digital rules, only a week after it pressed a similar case against Apple.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, is exercising new powers granted by the Digital Markets Act — legislation aimed at improving consumer choice and opening up markets for European start-ups to flourish. The tech giants had to comply from March this year. 

In preliminary findings issued on Monday, Brussels regulators said they were worried about Meta’s “pay or consent” model. Facebook and Instagram users can currently opt to use the social networks for free while consenting to data collection, or pay not to have their data shared.

The regulators said that the choice presented by Meta’s model risks giving consumers a false alternative, with the financial barrier potentially forcing them to consent to their personal data being tracked for advertising purposes.

The Financial Times was first to reveal the commission’s move earlier on Monday.

Under the bloc’s new digital rules, tech giants must gain consent from users “when they intend to combine or cross-use their personal data across different core platform services”, the EU said in March, when it opened compliance investigations against Meta and other Big Tech groups.

The EU executive said that Meta “users who do not consent should still get access to an equivalent service which uses less of their personal data, in this case for the personalisation of advertising”.

«

In October last year I wrote about how Meta’s proposed charges were about four times higher than was justified by their advertising revenue in the EU. However, that doesn’t seem to be the basis of the EU’s complaint; it simply wants a free service but with less data collection. Basically, challenging Meta to accept lower profits (if we presume that profits are directly dependent on amount of personal data collected).
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Laid-off tech workers advised to sell plasma and personal belongings • SF Gate

Ariana Bindman:

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Nina McCollum has been laid off so many times that the 55-year-old is basically an unofficial expert. That’s how she describes herself, at least. 

The marketing writer, who went viral in 2019 for documenting how she submitted over 200 applications during her two-year unemployment period, eventually landed her dream job at a major human resources tech company in the Bay Area. But then, in March 2023, she was let go — and suddenly back at square one. 

McCollum is not alone. Over the past two years, major tech companies in the Bay Area have haemorrhaged high-salaried workers, sending a chill throughout an industry that once seemed untouchable. Meta has let go of at least 21,000 workers, while Google has handed pink slips to hundreds of employees across San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Mountain View. Though the state government boasts about California’s growing economy and low unemployment rate, multiple people who spoke with SFGATE painted a bleak picture.

…When tech recruiter Irene Nexica was laid off in March 2023, she was “immediately transported to the world of being poor,” she told SFGATE. Since then, she’s worked a variety of “survival jobs,” ranging from catering to online retail. She also works as a career coach at a federally funded program that helps people train for employment. Anyone who makes under $35 an hour qualifies, she said. “We’re seeing a flood of tech people come in because they are super desperate now,” she continued.

Companies, sensing their desperation, are now taking advantage of it. When Nexica applied for a nonprofit recruiting job, she found that 1,400 people had applied already — and for significantly less money than the role usually pays. Instead of a salary of around $125,000, this one was offering between $80,000 and $90,000. She also found that the people in charge of hiring for roles would message her about so-called opportunities, only to ghost her without explanation.

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Alzheimer’s scientist indicted for allegedly falsifying data in $16m scheme • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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A federal grand jury has indicted an embattled Alzheimer’s researcher for allegedly falsifying data to fraudulently obtain $16m in federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health for the development of a controversial Alzheimer’s drug and diagnostic test.

Hoau-Yan Wang, 67, a medical professor at the City University of New York, was a paid collaborator with the Austin, Texas-based pharmaceutical company Cassava Sciences. Wang’s research and publications provided scientific underpinnings for Cassava’s Alzheimer’s treatment, Simufilam, which is now in Phase III trials.

Simufilam is a small-molecule drug that Cassava claims can restore the structure and function of a scaffolding protein in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s, leading to slowed cognitive decline. But outside researchers have long expressed doubts and concerns about the research.

In 2023, Science magazine obtained a 50-page report from an internal investigation at CUNY that looked into 31 misconduct allegations made against Wang in 2021. According to the report, the investigating committee “found evidence highly suggestive of deliberate scientific misconduct by Wang for 14 of the 31 allegations,” the report states.

The allegations largely centered around doctored and fabricated images from Western blotting, an analytical technique used to separate and detect proteins. However, the committee couldn’t conclusively prove the images were falsified “due to the failure of Dr. Wang to provide underlying, original data or research records and the low quality of the published images that had to be examined in their place.”

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At least with this sort of (alleged) fraud you can see the motivation: all that funding. Though if it’s faked research, won’t the failure of the therapy become clear in the trials? Perhaps in that inevitability one just says “oh well, didn’t work” and drives back to the laboratory in the Ferrari.
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Supreme Court protects the future of content moderation • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

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On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, two consequential cases about the future of speech on the internet. The court explicitly extended First Amendment protections to how social media platforms organize, curate, and moderate their feeds, drawing a comparison between internet content moderation and “traditional publishers and editors.”

The decision elaborates that the compilation and curation of “others’ speech into an expressive product of its own” is entitled to First Amendment protection and that “the government cannot get its way just by asserting an interest in better balancing the marketplace of ideas.” 

The NetChoice cases concern a pair of similar laws in Florida and Texas that aimed to limit how large social media companies could moderate content on their sites. The legislation took shape after conservative politicians in both states criticized major tech companies for allegedly exerting bias against conservative viewpoints. Tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association sued to block both laws. Appeals courts in each state came to different conclusions about whether the statutes could be upheld, setting up the Supreme Court to make the final call.

The Supreme Court vacated both of the appeals court decisions, ruling that neither court adequately analyzed “the facial First Amendment challenges” to the laws — that is, whether the social media content moderation laws in Florida and Texas would always be unconstitutional in all applications. The court sent the cases back down to the lower courts to reconsider.

Under the new Supreme Court decision, content moderation is generally protected by the First Amendment.

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Hurrah, democracy is save–oh, really?
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Florida man charged after shooting at Walmart delivery drone • USA Today

Saleen Martin:

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A Florida man is facing multiple charges after authorities say he shot at a Walmart delivery drone.

The shooting happened in Clermont, about 26 miles west of Orlando. The Lake County Sheriff’s Office received a complaint about the ordeal Wednesday, the office said in a Facebook post. According to the caller, a bullet hole was found in the payload the drone was carrying. 

Witnesses pointed authorities to 72-year-old Dennis Winn, who interviewed with officials and later admitted to shooting at the drone one time with a 9mm pistol, the sheriff’s office said.

In police bodycam footage, Winn told police he tried to shoo the drone off and it didn’t go away, so he shot at it. “I fired one round at it,” he said in the footage. “They say I hit it so I must be a good shot, or else it’s not that far away … I’m going to wind up having to find a real good defense lawyer.”

He was taken into custody and charged with shooting at an aircraft, criminal mischief damage over $1,000 and discharging a firearm in public or residential property, according to the sheriff’s office.

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He tried to “shoo off the drone”? And he’s younger than both the contenders for the US presidency. What a country.
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Do be a quitter! How I broke my exercise streak – and smashed my fitness goals • The Guardian

Phil Daoust:

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that is nothing compared with my boneheadedness 13 or 14 years ago, when I lived in the mountains and used to swim in a long, chilly lake. It was usually just two lengths, and I took them slowly, but it added up to about 3-4km – say 150 lengths of a typical leisure-centre pool. The season was short, and I usually stopped once the temperature began to drop. But this time I got in the water well into autumn. I didn’t own a wetsuit, and this was not the kind of place that had lifeguards. Even in summer, I was sometimes the only person in the water.

After 2-3km, breaststroking my way back to where I had left the car, I began to shiver. I know now that this is one of the first signs of hypothermia. The sensible thing would have been to get out of the lake and walk, but that didn’t even occur to me. It wasn’t in the plan, and perhaps the cold was getting to my brain too. So I swam on for another 40 or 50 minutes, trembling all the way. I survived (obviously), but the more I think about it, the more I see how lucky I was. If I had got into trouble, no one would have seen me, let alone saved me.

Now that I have realised that sometimes the best thing to do with a plan is to ignore it, I have been delighted to discover a lot of experts feel the same. They just don’t make a fuss about it. Take Michael Ulloa, an Edinburgh-based performance nutritionist and personal trainer. “We’re constantly told that if we can’t stick to a plan 100%, then we have somehow failed,” he says. “This couldn’t be further from the truth. It is messing people up. When we deviate from a plan, we shouldn’t overthink it. We should ask why this deviation happened and what we can do to limit the chances of it happening again. Did we try to take on more than we can chew? Are we not enjoying our current training programme? Or maybe we were just tired and we needed to give ourselves a day or two.”

“It’s easy to overanalyse and be over self-critical, but there really is no need,” he says. “Most of us are not professional athletes, we are simply everyday people doing our best – and sometimes we need to take a day when it feels too much.”

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Giving yourself “permission to quit” turns out to be very wise. Quite possibly there’s survivor bias in it. Which means it’s a good thing, not a bad one.
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Generative AI is not going to build your [software] engineering team for you • Stack Overflow

Charity Majors:

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It is really, really tough to get your first role as an engineer. I didn’t realize how hard it was until I watched my little sister (new grad, terrific grades, some hands on experience, fiendishly hard worker) struggle for nearly two years to land a real job in her field. That was a few years ago; anecdotally, it seems to have gotten even harder since then.

This past year, I have read a steady drip of articles about entry-level jobs in various industries being replaced by AI. Some of which absolutely have merit. Any job that consists of drudgery such as converting a document from one format to another, reading and summarizing a bunch of text, or replacing one set of icons with another, seems pretty obviously vulnerable. This doesn’t feel all that revolutionary to me, it’s just extending the existing boom in automation to cover textual material as well as mathy stuff.

…People act like writing code is the hard part of software. It is not. It never has been, it never will be. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it, understanding it, extending it, and governing it over its entire lifecycle.

A junior engineer begins by learning how to write and debug lines, functions, and snippets of code. As you practice and progress towards being a senior engineer, you learn to compose systems out of software, and guide systems through waves of change and transformation.

Sociotechnical systems consist of software, tools, and people; understanding them requires familiarity with the interplay between software, users, production, infrastructure, and continuous changes over time. These systems are fantastically complex and subject to chaos, nondeterminism and emergent behaviors. If anyone claims to understand the system they are developing and operating, the system is either exceptionally small or (more likely) they don’t know enough to know what they don’t know. Code is easy, in other words, but systems are hard.

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First radioactive rhino horns to curb poaching in South Africa • Phys.org

Zama Luthuli:

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South African scientists on Tuesday injected radioactive material into live rhino horns to make them easier to detect at border posts in a pioneering project aimed at curbing poaching.

The country is home to a large majority of the world’s rhinos and as such is a hotspot for poaching driven by demand from Asia, where horns are used in traditional medicine for their supposed therapeutic effect.

At the Limpopo rhino orphanage in the Waterberg area, in the country’s northeast, a few of the thick-skinned herbivores grazed in the low savannah.

James Larkin, director of the University of the Witwatersrand’s radiation and health physics unit who spearheaded the initiative, told AFP he had put “two tiny little radioactive chips in the horn” as he administered the radioisotopes on one of the large animals’ horns.

The radioactive material would “render the horn useless… essentially poisonous for human consumption” added Nithaya Chetty, professor and dean of science at the same university.

The dusty rhino, put to sleep and crouched on the ground, did not feel any pain, Larkin said.

The radioactive material’s dose was so low it would not impact the animal’s health or the environment in any way, he said.

In February the environment ministry said that, despite government efforts to tackle the illicit trade, 499 of the giant mammals were killed in 2023, mostly in state-run parks. This represents an 11% increase over the 2022 figures.

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What a brilliant idea. Especially if you could persuade the poachers that the radioactivity is dangerous.
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Influencers aren’t getting famous like they used to • Glamour

Stephanie McNeal:

»

It used to go like this: An influencer or content creator would spend anywhere from a very short to a respectably decent amount of time building up their content and fan base. Maybe they were family vloggers, or prank YouTubers like the Paul brothers, or makeup artists or fashionistas. Then, there’d be a tipping point. Suddenly, these people were being written about in mainstream media like People and Us Weekly, landing roles in movies and on television shows, and attending high-class events.

Remember in 2021, when influencers like Chamberlain and Rae attended the Met Gala and everyone freaked out? This year, Chamberlain attended the Met again (she’s actually become somewhat of a fixture and works the red carpet for Vogue), but the rest of them have dried up. And even if Anna Wintour wanted to invite a fresh crop of internet talent, who would she choose? Can you name anyone in the past year who has ascended in a major way?

The last true influencer to truly “make it” in this way was Alix Earle, who became a household name seemingly overnight in early 2023 and has done quite well for herself. That’s not just my opinion. Sophie, who runs a business consulting on social media called Pretty Little Marketer, identified Earle as the most recent to “blow up” as well.

“I’d say she’s exceeded well past the title of influencer to global celebrity status,” she says.

This doesn’t mean that people aren’t doing well on social media. The problem is that too many people are doing well on social media. It’s not unique these days to have hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of followers, to have an agent, or to get lucrative brand deals. But with a huge pool of creators who are hard to differentiate from each other, the hard part seems to be standing out at all.

“There are many influencers who still make it ‘big’ in terms of opportunity and following, but we’ve seen fewer boom into mainstream media as we have in the past,” Sophie says.

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Influencing’s too popular? It’s a weird world.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Move over, human beauty pageant contestants: your AI replacements are arriving. CC-licensed photo by Paul Chin 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. Please don’t cry. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘Miss AI’ beauty pageant and the complicated quest for the ‘perfect’ woman • CNN

Issy Ronald:

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Ten women participating in a beauty pageant is nothing new. Some pose candidly, some play to the camera, their beauty forever frozen in this moment in time. Like many other pageants held in countries around the world, the contestants are young, thin and embody many of the standards defining traditional “beauty.”

But that is where the similarities to a traditional beauty pageant end. None of these women are real — everything about them, even the emotion that flickers across their faces, is generated by artificial intelligence (AI), for the world’s first ever AI beauty pageant. Each has a creator or team of creators, who use programmes like Open AI’s DALL·E 3, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion to generate images of the women from text prompts.

These ten contestants have been selected from a pool of more than 1,500 entrants to make the final of “Miss AI,” scheduled to be held at the end of June and broadcast online by its organizers “The World AI Creator Awards.”

For those involved, the event is an opportunity to showcase and demystify the technology’s extraordinary abilities. But for others, it represents a further proliferation of unrealistic beauty standards often linked to racial and gender stereotypes and fueled by the ever-increasing number of digitally enhanced images online.

“I think we’re starting to increasingly lose touch with what an unedited face looks like,” Dr Kerry McInerney, a research associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, told CNN in a video interview.

Each of the contestants has a unique and distinctive personality, as well as face. One red-haired, green-eyed avatar named Seren Ay poses for Instagram photos as she travels around the world and through time, appearing next to Turkey’s first president Kemal Ataturk, on the Oscars red carpet or wandering through the neon-lit streets of Kyoto, Japan at night.

«

The “contestants” all have the correct number of fingers, at least in the still pictures. I guess we’d need to wait for the video round.
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Making sense of the EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries • The Verge

Jon Porter:

»

If you’ve been online in the past week, you’ve probably seen one or two headlines about the European Union voting in favor of easy-to-replace batteries in smartphones by around 2027. That’s based on a June 14th vote in which the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of an agreement that would overhaul the rules around batteries in the bloc. 

The good news is that those headlines are fundamentally accurate; the EU is moving forward with regulation designed to require smartphones to have batteries that are easier to replace, to the benefit of the environment and end users. But this being the European Union, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes. And it’s these details that could have a significant impact on how and when manufacturers will actually have to comply.

For starters, the widely cited 2027 deadline for offering smartphones with more easily replaceable batteries isn’t quite the whole story, according to Cristina Ganapini, coordinator of Right to Repair Europe. That’s because there’s another piece of legislation currently working its way through the EU’s lawmaking process called the Ecodesign for Smartphones and Tablets. It contains similar rules about making smartphone batteries easier to replace and is expected to come into effect earlier in June or July 2025. So by the time 2027 rolls around, some smartphone manufacturers may have already been selling devices with user-replaceable batteries in the EU for over a year.

«

Will Apple claim that its repair kits, which people can hire to do various kinds of work on their own phones, fulfil this “user-replaceable” description, I wonder?
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Revealed: the tech entrepreneur behind a pro-Israel hate network • The Guardian

Jason Wilson:

»

A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.

Shirion has harassed pro-Palestinian activists, including many Jews, offered bounties for the identity of pro-Palestinian protesters, spread conspiracy narratives centered on figures like George Soros, and boasted of an AI-surveillance platform but offered few concrete details of how the technology functions.

The Guardian investigation used public records and open source materials to corroborate information originally provided by the White Rose Society, an Australian anti-fascist research collective.

Linden set up Shirion’s crowdfunding efforts, appears to play a central role in operating the network’s social media accounts, and coordinates the group’s efforts on a Telegram channel. Public records and online materials indicate he lives in Gainesville, Florida, but he has also had recent stints in Durango, Colorado, and Medellin, Colombia.

The Guardian emailed Linden at several addresses associated with him and his business ventures, and attempted to contact him via phone, text, a direct message on Reddit and a post tagging an X account associated with one of his ventures seeking comment on this reporting, but received no response.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said of Linden’s Shirion campaigning that his apparent “grifting” is common among extremists, “but his ideology seems very confused”.

“Regardless,” she added, “he is spreading hateful messages.”

The revelations shed light on the nature of Shirion, which has been criticized in the US congress and attracted media attention around the world, and its role in pushing back against criticisms of Israel’s conduct in its invasion of Gaza.

«

Notable that this is categorised under news article about the “far right”.
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Biden aides plotted debate strategy for months. Then it all collapsed • The Washington Post

Tyler Pager:

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President Biden’s debate prep went fine.

In the sessions, the president still spoke haltingly. He sometimes confused facts and figures. He tripped over words and meandered. Debate prep would not fix his stutter or make him appear any younger, aides knew.

But as Biden boarded Marine One to leave the rustic Camp David presidential retreat for Atlanta, they sought to reassure anxious allies. The president, they said, was prepared and would perform well. Some said the debate might even be boring.

This story is based on conversations with eight individuals involved in or briefed on the president’s debate preparation, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private meetings. The Biden campaign declined to comment.

For a full week, the president sequestered himself at Camp David with more than a dozen aides to prepare for Thursday’s presidential debate with former president Donald Trump. He rehearsed answers, met with policy aides and participated in mock debates, with his personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, playing the part of Trump.

Every topic he was asked about Thursday, he had practiced answers for — including the final one about his age.

So aides were bewildered by his performance. Many felt they had never seen him collapse so dramatically. After all, Biden was a veteran of numerous debates — as a senator, vice-presidential nominee and presidential candidate. And they did not understand why he gave an entirely different answer on the age question than the one they spent more than a week perfecting.

The president did not just stumble over words. He appeared to lose his focus and often was unable to finish sentences. His voice was raspy and thin, and when the debate concluded, first lady Jill Biden appeared to help her husband down the stairs.

«

The debate was at 9pm. Up past his bedtime, basically. CNN had an article ahead of the debate about how each contender was preparing. Trump’s went better on the night, you could say.
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Tories ‘highly alarmed’ by network of pro-Russian Facebook pages interfering in UK election • ABC News

Michael Workman and Kevin Nguyen:

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Revelations of foreign interference in the UK election, uncovered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC(, have been described as “highly alarming” by the Conservative Party, which will be writing to the Cabinet Office seeking urgent advice about how to combat it.

Ahead of the UK elections, the ABC has been monitoring five coordinated Facebook pages which have been spreading Kremlin talking points, with some posting in support of Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party — a key challenger to the Conservatives in the July 4 poll.

The five pages identified by ABC Investigations as being part of a coordinated network appear to have little in common. One page presents itself as a pro-refugee left-wing group, while others reference white supremacist conspiracy theories and use AI-generated images of asylum seekers to stoke anti-immigration fears.

The ABC has been able to link these seemingly disparate pages by examining the location data attached to the pages’ administrators, tracking paid ads, and by analysing the pages’ similar or shared content.

The ABC shared its findings with disinformation experts, who said the network’s activity had the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation.

“For me, it’s Russian,” said AI Forensics head of research Salvatore Romano.

«

You may be surprised to hear that Nigel Farage has rejected this as “cobblers”. Makes a change from actors, though still a form of worker.
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What time will we know who won? Hour-by-hour guide to election night • The Guardian

Jamie Grierson, Jim Waterson and Ashley Kirk:

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After months of speculation on when the election might be held, six weeks of actual campaigning, D-day blunders, gambling scandals, smashing the gangs, stopping the boats, surrendering finances, triple-lock-pluses, national service, VAT on private schools, taxes up and taxes down, the election night will soon be upon us. Here’s how it may unfold.

«

Basically: exit polls 10pm, nothing much until 3am, and then mayhem; all over bar the shouting (and weeping) by 7am.
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What happened when British GQ stopped trying to ‘feed the algorithm’ • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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GQ‘s European director of audience development, analytics and social, Neha-Tamara Patel, joined in July 2022 and told Press Gazette about a strategy shift that has seen the legacy men’s lifestyle brand move away from quick wins towards more considered content with the aim of a more engaged core audience.

She said: “It was apparent to me that we were doing a lot of what I call ‘feeding the algorithm content’: lots of short-form news, a lot of quick fashion news, all of which was still within GQ’s world but from an audience perspective wasn’t really serving us long term.

“It meant that we had a lot of churn, a lot of people coming in for that quickfire content and then leaving again without really accessing the broader spectrum of what we do as a brand.

“So we really made a conscious decision to slow things down, not necessarily feed the news cycle. We are a lifestyle magazine brand at the end of the day, not business of fashion or anything like that. So we obviously do touch on fashion news, but we try and think about where we can add to the conversation rather than it being like pure reportage. We’re not just about headlines. It’s like, how are we moving the story on and what else are we bringing to the table?”

…Ipsos iris data shared with Press Gazette shows gq-magazine.co.uk had a UK audience reach of 888,117 in May, down 25% in two years. But its total minutes were down by a lesser 12% to 2.2 million, with recovery of 19% in the past year after a slump in May 2023.

Across last year British GQ saw a 47% year-on-year increase in engagement among British users with 71 million engaged minutes in total, according to figures shared by the publisher.

«

What are “engaged minutes”? Though it’s evident that for a monthly magazine to not attempt to keep up with the relentless hour-by-hour news cycle is a far more sensible approach.
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Einstein and his peers were ‘irrationally resistant’ to black holes. This illustrated story explores why • BBC Future

Ben Platts-Mills wrote the piece, and illustrated it too:

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Einstein showed that space and time were continually stretched and distorted by masses such as stars and planets, and that this accounted for gravity. The way bodies are drawn together is not due to a “force” attracting them, he argued, but to the “curvature” of the Universe caused by mass. The greater the mass, the more curvature it causes and so the greater the gravitational effect.

When Einstein first published his theory, he hadn’t pinned down the solutions to his own equations, which would have revealed to him the full implications of his discovery. It was another scientist who made this step.

In November 1915, Karl Schwarzschild was an artillery lieutenant in the German army, on the Eastern Front. He read Einstein’s new theory while working at a weather station close to the front line and wrote a letter in response.

His letter supplied the missing solutions and showed how they could be used to model a star’s gravity. One feature of the model, Schwarzschild noted later, was a radius of compression below which a star – or any other spherical mass – would begin to implode indefinitely under its own gravity. If applied to the physics of the real world, this had horrifying implications. It meant that a star would continue collapsing forever, its mass being crushed ever smaller. Its gravitation would become ever more powerful as it insatiably devoured surrounding masses until, finally, it reached the point of “singularity”, a moment where the laws of physics break down, and time and space cease to exist.

Decades later, the Schwarzschild singularity would be recognised as a turning point in theoretical physics – the first time black holes had been hinted at. Schwarzschild himself, however, dismissed the idea as a mathematical artefact.

The critical radius was, Schwarzschild concluded, simply the limit for a star’s compression – the point it would stop collapsing. Instead of discovering black holes, then, he became the first person to reject the evidence for them on principle. We will never know if he might have revised his ideas because he died of an autoimmune disease in 1916. 

Einstein’s reaction to Schwarzschild’s solutions was mixed.

«

Which goes to show: even the greatest minds will dismiss real possibilities as quirks and artefacts because they’re too difficult to contemplate. And even in the midst of a war, people find ideas too tantalising to ignore.
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The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in history • Casey Handmer’s blog

Handmer is a scientist and entrepreneur who founded Terraform Industries (which aims to generate fuel from air, using solar energy:

»

To a good approximation, even as global population climbs towards 10 billion, the number of humans enduring extreme poverty has fallen in both absolute and relative terms, from nearly universal just 200 years ago to rapidly vanishing today. We are living in the first time in the history of any life form where we can put a finite upper bound on the number of poverty-stricken human years left to be endured by the human race: Almost certainly fewer than 10 billion. This is a lot but it’s a lot fewer than infinity.

This unprecedented improvement in the human condition has been unlocked by social and political innovation, and underwritten by the consumption of copious quantities of cheap energy, almost all of it from fossil coal, oil, and gas.

To a good approximation, oil is the antidote to poverty.

But oil is finite. The good stuff is gone. Fracking is expensive. Most places don’t have oil. Climate and scarcity will force us to use other forms of energy, most of them not as useful as oil. Are we headed for economic difficulties as a result of this? A handful of nations have endured severe energy shortages due to political instability, and it has never gone well for them. North Korea. Cuba. Venezuela. Are we doomed?

No.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) power got cheap, then big, then cheaper, then bigger. Last year, we installed about 460 GW globally. Check out the knee in the curve in 2009! A learning rate of 44% means that the cost falls by 44% for every doubling of production, and production is currently doubling roughly every 18 months.

Here’s a free heretical viewpoint, or at least an early prediction: solar PV is not just a partial substitute for oil, it’s a cheaper and better energy source in every way that matters.

Corollary: Our techno-capital machine is a thermodynamic mechanism that systematically hunts for and then maximally exploits the cheapest energy it can find. When it unlocks cheaper energy, first coal, then oil, then gas, and now solar, it drives up the rate of economic growth, due to an expanded spread between energy cost and application value.

«

I think he’s right about the benefits of solar PV, at least.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Being good enough to qualify to play even on the outside courts of Wimbledon is much, much harder that people think. CC-licensed photo by Nic Gould 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Advantageous. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

ID verification service for TikTok, Uber, X exposed driver licences • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

A company that verifies the identities of TikTok, Uber, and X users, sometimes by processing photographs of their faces and pictures of their drivers’ licenses, exposed a set of administrative credentials online for more than a year potentially allowing hackers to access that sensitive data, according to screenshots and data obtained by 404 Media.

The Israel-based company, called AU10TIX, offers what it describes on its website as “full-service identity verification solutions.” This includes verifying peoples’ identity documents, conducting “liveness detection” in a real-time video stream with the user, and performing age verification, where a service will predict how old someone is based on their uploaded photo. AU10TIX also includes the logos of other companies on its site, such as Fiverr, PayPal, Coinbase, LinkedIn, and Upwork, some of which confirmed to 404 Media they are active or former AU10TIX clients.

The news comes as more social networks and pornography sites move towards an identity or age verification model, in which users are required to upload their real identity documents in order to access certain services. The breach highlights that identity services could themselves become a target for hackers. The cybersecurity researcher did not distribute the data beyond providing screenshots and some data to 404 Media for verification purposes.

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On the basis that there are only two classes of companies – those which have been hacked, and those which are going to be hacked – this was absolutely certain to happen, and will happen again. It’s totally the problem with age verification systems that rely on centralised repositories.
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ISS astronauts forced to take shelter after Russian satellite mysteriously disintegrates • Gizmodo

Passant Rabie:

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On Wednesday, space-tracking firm LeoLabs detected a debris cloud forming after a non-operational satellite broke apart in low Earth orbit. The Russian-owned decommissioned satellite, called RESURS-P1, broke apart around 12 p.m. ET on June 26, resulting in more than 100 pieces of trackable debris, according to U.S. Space Command.

The satellite weighs, or rather it used to weigh, around 13,200 pounds (6,000 kilograms) and was in a nearly circular orbit at an altitude of 220 miles (355 kilometers) above Earth when it fell apart, according to LeoLabs. The ISS orbits Earth at an altitude of approximately 250 miles (400 kilometers); accordingly, astronauts on board the space station were ordered to shelter in place as a precautionary measure, NASA wrote on X.

“Mission Control continued to monitor the path of the debris, and after about an hour, the crew was cleared to exit their spacecraft and the station resumed normal operations,” the space agency added. The U.S. Space Command also confirmed that it “observed no immediate threats and is continuing to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain.”

In 2021, Russia drew widespread criticism when it purposely destroyed a defunct Soviet-era satellite in low Earth orbit in an anti-satellite test, producing thousands of pieces of debris. At the time, fragments from the satellite also forced astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the ISS to seek shelter. NASA condemned Russia’s ASAT missile test, calling it “reckless and dangerous,” and the United Nations adopted a resolution against tests of anti-satellite (ASAT) missile systems, with Russia and China voting against it.

The most recent breakup of the defunct Russian satellite raises suspicion that this may have been the result of yet another anti-missile test. Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell took to X to speculate on the reason behind the satellite falling apart, suggesting it may have been the result of a small impact or the explosion of an onboard battery. He also did not rule out that it may have been an anti-missile test.

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‘I’m good, I promise’: the loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player • The Guardian

Conor Niland was a professional tennis player, reaching a career high ranking of 127:

»

I spent all of September 2005 – including my 24th birthday – alone in Switzerland, playing four week-long tournaments back to back. After 20 matches and with two trophies under my belt, I was ready for a rest. But I had already entered a tournament in Edinburgh – not knowing Switzerland would be quite so intense – for my ninth tournament in 10 weeks.

I phoned Mum from the airport in Geneva, telling her I was tired and would skip Edinburgh and fly home instead. She wasn’t having that. “This is your job now, Conor,” she said. “You can’t just not turn up because you’re tired.” I remembered my friend and one-time tennis partner Pat Briaud’s words: “Your parents don’t mess around.” I turned up and made the semi-final, losing a feisty two-and-a-half-hour match to Britain’s Jamie Baker. It was my 24th match in five weeks. Exhausted, I collected my prize money: $480, before 20% tax.

This is your job now, Conor.

There are three tiers in the hierarchy of men’s professional tennis. The ATP Tour is the sport’s top division, the preserve of the top 100 male tennis players in the world. The Challenger Tour is populated mainly by players ranked between 100 and 300 in the world. Below that is the Futures tour, tennis’s vast netherworld of more than 2,000 true prospects and hopeless dreamers.

I wasn’t schlepping my way through the lower ranks of the professional tour for the money or the prestige, both of which were in short supply. I, like everyone else, was there to remove myself from the clutches of the lower tiers. The Futures tour sometimes felt like a circle of hell, but in practical terms it’s better understood as purgatory: a liminal space that exists only to be got out of as quickly as possible.

«

This is an excellent introduction to life amid the grind for those who may only just scrape into Wimbledon next week. The book from which this is an extract, called The Racket: One Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation – and the other 99%, is excellent. Fun fact: only the top 150 (or so) players in the world make a living playing tournaments.
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Executive summary: batteries and secure energy transitions – analysis • International Energy Agency

»

Batteries are key to the transition away from fossil fuels and accelerate the pace of energy efficiency through electrification and greater use of renewables in power. In transport, a growing fleet of EVs on the road displaces the need for 8 million barrels of oil per day by 2030 in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario, more than the entire oil consumption for road transport in Europe today. In the power sector, battery storage supports transitions away from unabated coal and natural gas, while increasing the efficiency of power systems by reducing losses and congestion in electricity grids. In other sectors, clean electrification enabled by batteries is critical to reduce the use of oil, natural gas and coal.

…Solar PV plus batteries is competitive today with new coal-fired power in India and, in the next couple years, become competitive with new coal in China and new natural gas-fired power in the United States. Even in the Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), which is based on today’s policy settings, the total upfront costs of utility-scale battery storage projects – including the battery plus installation, other components and developer costs – are projected to decline by 40% by 2030. This makes stand-alone battery storage more competitive with natural gas peaker plants, and battery storage paired with solar PV one of the most competitive new sources of electricity.

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That’s an amazing stat: solar plus batteries can compete with coal in India. Technology outdoes commodities.
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Most of Gen Z describe themselves as video content creators • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz:

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For the first two decades of the social internet, lurkers ruled. Among Gen Z, they’re in the minority, according to survey data from YouTube.

Tech industry insiders used to cite a rule of thumb stating that only one in ten of an online community’s users generally post new content, with the masses logging on only to consume images, video or other updates. Now younger generations are flipping that divide, a survey by the video platform said.

YouTube found that 65% of Gen Z, which it defined as people between the ages of 14 and 24, describe themselves as video content creators — making lurkers a minority. The finding came from responses from 350 members of Gen Z in the US, out of a wider survey that asked thousands of people about how they spend time online [emphasis added – Overspill Ed], including whether they consider themselves video creators. YouTube did the survey in partnership with research firm SmithGeiger, as part of its annual report on trends on the platform.

YouTube’s report says that after watching videos online, many members of Gen Z respond with videos of their own, uploading their own commentary, reaction videos, deep dives into content posted by others and more. This kind of interaction often develops in response to videos on pop culture topics such as “RuPaul’s Drag Race” or the Fallout video game series. Fan-created content can win more watch time than the original source material, the report says.

«

When I worked on one daily newspaper I was once asked, in all seriousness, how to calculate a percentage, given two numbers. Here we now get the example of the self-selected and misrepresentative survey. Gen Z are video content creators in that they all have a video camera in their pocket – but so, for that matter, do millennials, Gen Y and boomers.

But it still remains the case that almost everyone consumes more content than they create. It’s why mass media exists.
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Recipe bloggers want Congress to scrutinize Google’s “AI Overviews” • The Washington Post

Will Oremus:

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If you Google “guacamole,” there’s a good chance your top result will be Lisa Bryan’s recipe. Titled “Best Ever Guacamole (Fresh, Easy & Authentic),” it calls for a classic mélange of avocados, Roma tomatoes, cilantro, garlic, onion, lime, jalapeño and sea salt.

That prime placement on a popular search query is Bryan’s meal ticket. But she fears artificial intelligence will soon snatch it away.

A former health-care executive from Southern California, Bryan burned out in her career a decade ago and started posting recipes online for family and friends. Now she runs a food and lifestyle blog called Downshiftology, where she advocates “taking life down a notch” and savoring simple pleasures. She employs a full-time social media manager, has 2.5 million YouTube followers and says her website reaches 130 million people a year.

Hers is a success story made possible in large part by Google Search, which directs millions of people to her blog — with noticeable boosts ahead of the Super Bowl and Cinco de Mayo, when searches for guacamole peak. But as Google shifts from traditional search results toward answering users’ questions directly with AI, independent web publishers like Bryan fear for their livelihoods.

Now the bloggers are taking their case to Congress. On Wednesday, they staged an “Independents’ Day” lobbying push on Capitol Hill. The push is being organized by a company called Raptive, which handles advertising and marketing for online publishers and helps them rank highly in search results — giving it a vested interest in beating back AI.

Bryan is among thousands who signed onto an open letter to Congress from Raptive CEO Michael Sanchez urging scrutiny of Google’s “AI Overviews.” Several of those creators will also meet with staffers and lawmakers from their home states.

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AI-generated Al Michaels to deliver Paris Olympics highlights on NBC • The New York Times

John Koblin:

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This year, highlights from the Summer Olympics will be brought to you by artificial intelligence — and more specifically, the A.I.-generated narration of Al Michaels.

Executives at NBCUniversal and the streaming service Peacock said on Wednesday that a customized, daily highlight reel for the Olympics would be available to streaming subscribers. The reel will feature the voice of Mr. Michaels, the 79-year-old American broadcaster, who first covered the Olympics decades ago.

Mr. Michaels, however, will not be holing up in a broadcast booth each night to briefly summarize the dozens of Olympic events that took place. Instead, Peacock’s program has been trained from Mr. Michaels’s NBC clips — he joined the network in 2006 and was its longtime “Sunday Night Football” announcer — to formulate coherent, realistic-sounding sentences, which “will provide his signature expertise and elocution,” the company said.

Mr. Michaels granted approval for the use of his voice. “When I was approached about this, I was skeptical but obviously curious,” Mr. Michaels said in a statement issued by the company. “Then I saw a demonstration detailing what they had in mind. I said, ‘I’m in.’”

It does raise a key question, one that recalls Mr. Michaels’s most famous Olympic call: do NBCUniversal executives believe in miracles?

NBC has been exclusively broadcasting the Olympics in the United States since 1996, and the network frequently finds itself subject to intense public scrutiny for its coverage of the Games.

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No idea why the line about “miracles” is stuck in there: it isn’t referenced further. But obviously it’s a lot easier on commentators if they don’t have to be involved. How the script emerges isn’t specified – one presumes a human writes it, rather than the AI “watching” the video.
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A Supreme Court justice is why you can’t buy a car right now • The Big Newsletter

Matt Stoller:

»

Last Wednesday, Americans trying to buy a car were greeted with a troubling message. The system was down. Not everywhere, but at 15,000 of the roughly 18,000 auto dealers in the country, at giant dealers like AutoNation, Sonic Automotive, Penske Automotive Group, Group 1 Automotive, and Lithia Motors. A corporation named CDK Global, which had been taken over by private equity titan Brookfield in 2021, operated a software platform that serves as the nervous system for the car sales industry, what is known as dealer management software. And its DMS was down. [Hacked by a Russian hacker group called Blacksuit.]

DMS helps dealers manage servicing, parts and inventory, vehicle financing, accounting, payroll, insurance information, customer information, completed and pending sales, etc. With that software down, auto dealers are paralyzed. And the system won’t be back up until the end of the month, at the earliest.

…CDK Global is indeed a rudderless organization, as are many private equity backed shops. It is what Americans in the 19th century used to refer to as an absentee owner, supposedly owning property, but unable to do caretaking of it. My guess is that BlackSuit hackers used some rudimentary technique, like cracking a password of 1-2-3-4-5, which is essentially how our nuclear weapons facilities were hacked through a private equity owned software company named Solar Winds in 2021.

It’s easy to get why CDK Global got hacked. What’s harder to understand is why CDK Global is still running the nervous system of most of America’s car sales industry. To get there, we have to go to an antitrust ruling by one of the most important Supreme Court justices of the 20th and early 21st century, Antonin Scalia. Because it was a ruling that allowed CDK Global to maintain its dominant position in the dealer management software industry, even as customers were primed to revolt.

«

I’d noted the ransomware attack on the company, but the fact that it’s completely paralysed this system because it’s been allowed to monopolise the market – and allowed is the operative word – is a classic example of business gone wrong.
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Aggregating poll predictions for the UK General Election • Github

Peter Inglesby:

»

This summary shows, for each model and each party, the number of seats where that party is predicted to get the most votes.

Note that these totals are indicative of how the parties’ level of support from each model’s prediction, but won’t match the number of seats predicted by each model.

To understand why, imagine two parties and ten constituencies, where a model predicts that party X will get more votes than party Y, and assigns party X a 90% chance of winning. In this case, the model may predict that X will win nine seats and Y one. However, in this summary, we will instead show X with ten and Y with none.

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This is a lot of fun! There have been tons of polls in this election runup and keeping track of them has been difficult, to say the least. This lets you scan across and see where they agree, or disagree.

All it needs is a printable version that you can use on election night, if you’re sober enough for long enough.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Why mow the actual lawn, when you can play a video game that lets you pretend you’re doing it instead? CC-licensed photo by Tony Alter 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Stripey. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

SCOTUS rejects suit alleging federal government bullied social media into censoring content • Yahoo News

»

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected arguments by Missouri and Louisiana that the federal government violated the First Amendment in its efforts to combat false, misleading and dangerous information online.

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court held that neither the states nor seven individuals who were co-plaintiffs in the case were able to demonstrate any harm or substantial risk that they will suffer an injury in the future. Therefore, they do not have legal standing to bring a case against the federal government.

Plaintiffs failed to prove that social media platforms acted due to government coercion, Barrett wrote, rather than their own judgment and policies. In fact, she wrote, social media platforms “began to suppress the plaintiffs’ COVID–19 content before the defendants’ challenged communications started.”

Plaintiffs cannot “manufacture standing,” Barrett wrote, “merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.”

The ruling overturns a lower court decision that concluded officials under Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump unlawfully coerced social media companies to remove deceptive or inaccurate content out of fears it would fuel vaccine hesitancy or upend elections.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who inherited the lawsuit from his predecessor, has called the federal government’s actions “the biggest violation of the First Amendment in our nation’s history.”

…In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the government’s actions in this case were not ” ham-handed censorship” that the court has routinely rejected, but they were coercive and illegal all the same. “It was blatantly unconstitutional,” he wrote, “and the country may come to regret the court’s failure to say so… If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this court should send.”

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The dissent (after p29 of the judgment) makes entertaining reading because it’s so full of nonsense. Alito aligns himself with conspiracy theories and antivax nutters. But if, as he says, social media is an important source of news, shouldn’t the news be truthful?
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We are losing the battle against election disinformation • The New York Times

Renee DiResta was research director at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a disinformation monitoring project which was shut down recently:

»

The way theories of “the steal” [of the 2020 election] went viral was eerily routine. First, an image or video, such as a photo of a suitcase near a polling place, was posted as evidence of wrongdoing. The poster would tweet the purported evidence, tagging partisan influencers or media accounts with large followings. Those accounts would promote the rumour, often claiming, “Big if true!” Others would join, and the algorithms would push it out to potentially millions more. Partisan media would follow.

If the rumour was found to be false — and it usually was — corrections were rarely made and even then, little noticed. The belief that “the steal” was real led directly to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Within a couple of years, the same online rumour mill turned its attention to us — the very researchers who documented it. This spells trouble for the 2024 election.

For us, it started with claims that our work was a plot to censor the right. The first came from a blog related to the Foundation for Freedom Online, the project of a man who said he “ran cyber” at the State Department. This person, an alt-right YouTube personality who’d gone by the handle Frame Game, had been employed by the State Department for just a couple of months.

Using his brief affiliation as a marker of authority, he wrote blog posts styled as research reports contending that our project, the Election Integrity Partnership, had pushed social media networks to censor 22 million tweets. He had no firsthand evidence of any censorship, however: his number was based on a simple tally of viral election rumours that we’d counted and published in a report after the election was over. Right-wing media outlets and influencers nonetheless called it evidence of a plot to steal the election, and their followers followed suit.

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The recipe for crap: America has perfected it. HG Wells said “we are in a race between education and catastrophe”, and it’s hard to feel that education is winning.
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‘It’s impossible to play for more than 30 minutes without feeling I’m about to die’: lawn-mowing games uncut • The Guardian

Rich Pelley:

»

Recreating the act of trimming grass is nothing new. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator for the ZX Spectrum came free on a Your Sinclair magazine cover tape in 1988. Written as an April fool joke by writer Duncan MacDonald, it mocked all the Jet Bike, BMX and Grand Prix simulators by budget game house Codemasters. In spite of this, Advanced Lawnmower Simulator spawned legions of clones and fans and even its own rubbish games competition where people still, to this day, try to write the worst game possible on the ZX Spectrum.

Lawn Mowing Simulator, created by Liverpool-based studio Skyhook Games, is not an April fool joke. It strives for realism and has its own unique gaggle of fans. But why would you want to play a game about something you could easily do in real life? As a journalist, I had to know, so I decided to consult some experts.

“It’s weird that this genre not only exists, but is so popular,” explains Krist Duro, editor-in-chief of Duuro Plays, a video game reviews website based in Albania – and the first person I could find who has actually played and somewhat enjoyed Lawn Mowing Simulator. “But you need to be wired in a particular way. I like repetitive tasks because they allow me to enter into a zen-like state. But the actual simulation part needs to be good.”

Duro namechecks some other simulators I’ve thankfully never heard of: Motorcycle Mechanic 2021, Car Mechanic Simulator, Construction Simulator, Ships Simulator. “These games are huge,” says Duro. “Farming Simulator has sold 25m physical copies and has 90m downloads. PowerWash Simulator sold more than 12m on consoles. As long as the simulators remain engaging, people will show up.”

Duro reviewed the latest VR version of Lawn Mowing Simulator but wasn’t a fan. “Your brain can’t accept that you’re moving in the game while in real life you’re staying still. It made it impossible to play for more than 30 minutes without feeling like I was about to die,” he says. But otherwise, he liked it.

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There’s a short trailer for the game on YouTube. I can see what Duro means about the dying part.
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Tracking as a service: ShareThis to be profiled! • Privacy International

»

Behind their tecchie names, AddThis and ShareThis are simple services: they allow web-developers and less tech-savvy users to integrate social networking “share” buttons on their site. While they might also offer some additional services such as analytics, these tools gained traction mostly by providing an easy and free way to integrate Facebook, Twitter and other social networks share buttons.

Anyone can use any of these service and in a few clicks be provided with a plugin for their site or a few lines of code they can integrate, making it a very simple and accessible service used by millions of people.

However, behind this seemingly helpful and practical service lies a darker truth: these companies make money by tracking and profiling website visitors. By being implemented on hundreds of thousands of websites, these companies are in a unique position to track people on the web, compiling their browsing history into profiles that can then be shared, processed and sold. They are able to do so using different tracking technologies such as cookies or canvas fingerprinting (which AddThis was one of the first to develop and deploy back in 2014).

This basically allows them to give users a unique identifier so that when you visit, for example, Page A about sport and Page B about dogs the company is capable of recording you as a unique individual interested in these two topics.

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So very predictable, but it’s always worth asking yourself before you click on these things.
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Researchers prove Rabbit AI breach by sending email to us as admin • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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Members of a community focused on jailbreaking and reverse engineering the Rabbit R1 AI assistant device say that Rabbit left critical API keys hardcoded and exposed in its code, which would have allowed them to see and download “all r1 responses ever given.” The API access would have allowed a hacker to use various services, including text-to-speech services and email sending services, as if they were the company. To verify their access, the researchers sent 404 Media emails from internal admin email addresses used by the Rabbit device and the Rabbit team.

The disclosure, which was made on the group’s website and in its Discord Tuesday, is the latest in a comedy of errors for the device, which, under the hood is essentially just an Android app that runs requests through a series of off-the-shelf APIs like ElevenLabs, which is a text-to-speech AI product. The device’s poor design has been the subject of many articles, investigations, and YouTube videos. 

The exposed API keys were discovered by a group called Rabbitude, a community of hackers and developers who have been reverse engineering the Rabbit to explain how it works, find security problems, jailbreak the devices, and add additional features.

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We – as in the world of tech – don’t seem to be producing many products lately that don’t have gigantic holes either in their security or their usability or their reliability. In order: this, Humane’s AI Pin, LLMs.
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Garbage in, garbage out: Perplexity spreads misinformation from spammy AI blog posts • Forbes

Rashi Shrivastava:

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even as the startup has come under fire for republishing the work of journalists without proper attribution, Forbes has learned that Perplexity is also citing as authoritative sources AI-generated blogs that contain inaccurate, out of date and sometimes contradictory information.

According to a study conducted by AI content detection platform GPTZero, Perplexity’s search engine is drawing information from and citing AI-generated posts on a wide variety of topics including travel, sports, food, technology and politics. The study determined if a source was AI-generated by running it through GPTZero’s AI detection software, which provides an estimation of how likely a piece of writing was written with AI with a 97% accuracy rate; for the study, sources were only considered AI-generated if GPTZero determined with at least 95% certainty that they were written with AI (Forbes ran them through an additional AI detection tool called DetectGPT which has a 99% accuracy rate to confirm GPTZero’s assessment).

On average, Perplexity users only need to enter three prompts before they encounter an AI-generated source, according to the study, in which over 100 prompts were tested.

“Perplexity is only as good as its sources,” GPTZero CEO Edward Tian said. “If the sources are AI hallucinations, then the output is too.”

Searches like “cultural festivals in Kyoto, Japan,” “impact of AI on the healthcare industry,” “street food must-tries in Bangkok Thailand,” and “promising young tennis players to watch,” returned answers that cited AI-generated materials.

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Seems like Perplexity can’t catch a break. And probably doesn’t deserve to.
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Studios • Toys”R”Us

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Watch the story of a dream come true: The creation of Toys”R”Us and Geoffrey the Giraffe

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This is a video created by video AI generator Sora, trying its little heart out to not look like an AI-generated film. As a result, it’s a complete nothing; there’s no depth of meaning, but also none of the dreamlike transitions that AI is capable of (because it has no boundaries about what’s “wrong”).

This sort of stuff is going to be all over the place quite soon, and we’re going to hate it as we should. A smart comment on eX-Twitter points out: “Toys R Us isn’t even really a company anymore because private equity destroyed it. Commercial made by no one to advertise a company that doesn’t exist featuring childhood experiences that will never happen again.”
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Instagram doesn’t want you to watch the presidential debate • FWIW News

Kyle Tharp:

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Just one day before the first general election presidential debate of 2024, social media giant Meta changed users’ settings to automatically limit the amount of political content they can see on Instagram.

Several months ago, Instagram made a widely-publicized change that required users to go to their settings and “opt-in” to seeing political content in their feeds from accounts they do not already follow. Many political creators criticized that move, and encouraged their followers to update their settings and opt-in.

Now, Instagram has gone a step further, changing all users’ settings to automatically restrict political content every time they exit the app.

It’s unclear when the company pushed this update, but it appears to have happened in the past 48 hours and was first brought to my attention by a group of large political accounts Tuesday night.

A Meta spokesman has stated “This was an error and should not have happened. We’re working on getting it fixed.”

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Even so: a bit of a weird update to have made, and a strange mistake.
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Google Slides is actually hilarious (or trolling) • Medium

Laura Javier:

»

Perhaps like you, I naively started out thinking that Google Slides was just a poorly maintained product suffering from some questionable foundational decisions made ages ago that worshipped at the shrine of PowerPoint and which have never since been revisited, but now, after having had to use it so much in the past year, I believe that Google Slides is actually just trolling me.
I’m a designer, but — stay with me! I don’t think I’m being fussy. This may surprise you, but I’ve become so desperate that I don’t care about nice slide transitions or nice typography. All I really want is to make really basic slides like this…

…without wanting to jettison my laptop into the nearest trash can.

Reasonable, no?!

Join me on this cathartic journey which aspires to be none of the following: constructive, systematic, exhaustive. I’m too tired for that, dear reader. Consider this a gag reel. A platter of amuse-bouches. A chocolate sampler box of nightmares.

«

And truly, it turns out that Google Slides is terrible. This piece is from a couple of years ago, but I doubt Google Slides has changed much. The problem, as with much Google stuff, is that it’s effectively abandonware after it reaches a certain point; nothing important or useful gets fixed or improved.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Setting up third-party accessories on iOS could be as easy as with AirPods in iOS 18. CC-licensed photo by HS You 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Smoothly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

I paid $365.63 to replace 404 Media with AI • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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Over the last week I have published dozens of news articles and blogs about technology without lifting a finger on a news website called Prototype.Press. The articles are fairly short, but written in perfect English, and as far as I can tell, accurate. They are also very nicely laid out and categorized into “tech,” “science,” “AI,” and other sections, making it easier for visitors to navigate the cornucopia of content I publish on the site every day. On Monday, June 17, I published 53 articles on everything from the “Top Internet Service Providers in South Dakota” to how “AI-generated images in Google Search Results have provided access to an alternate reality.”

If that latter story sounds familiar that’s because it is a blatant, uncredited rip-off of a story I published on 404 Media the same day. I was able to publish it alongside 52 other articles that day all by myself because I created an entirely autonomous, ChatGPT-powered technology news site that steals other people’s original reporting for just $365.63.

It wasn’t hard to set up, and didn’t require one of the most advanced large language models in the world, but since this is the second technology news and investigations website I’m running these days, I outsourced its creation to a Fiverr freelancer in Turkey. I told him what I wanted, picked a layout, and two days later got a fully operational website.

What I learned from this experiment is that flooding the internet with an infinite amount of what could pass for journalism is cheap and even easier than I imagined, as long as I didn’t respect the craft, my audience, or myself.

I also learned that while AI has made all of this much easier, faster, and better, the advent of generative AI did not invent this practice—it’s simply adding to a vast infrastructure of tools and services built by companies like WordPress, Fiverr, and Google designed to convert clicks to dollars at the expense of quality journalism and information, polluting the internet we all use and live in every day.

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I think we knew that, to be honest. It’s why news organisations stopped doing full-text RSS feeds long ago, and why robots.txt (see below) has suddenly become important.
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Google: stop burning counterterrorism operations • Poppopret

Michael Coppola:

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In January 2021, Google’s Project Zero published a series of blog posts coined the In the Wild Series. Written in conjunction with Threat Analysis Group (TAG), this report detailed a set of zero-day vulnerabilities being actively exploited in the wild by a government actor.

The event was a bombshell story and provided a rare, exciting, and deeply technical look into the often secret world of nation-state computer hacking. The report dissected not only the state actor’s exploit code but detailed how the entire operation worked, including deployment configuration and a teardown of implant code and command-and-control communications.

Project Zero and TAG were not passive observers in their investigation. They actively probed the actor’s attack servers, extracted as many exploits as they were able to, and reverse engineered the capabilities. Yet despite performing this intimate level of analysis, one of TAG’s main work products – attribution of the attacker and parties being targeted – was conspicuously absent from the report.

What the Google teams omitted was that they had in fact exposed a nine-month-long counterterrorism operation being conducted by a US-allied Western government, and through their actions, Project Zero and TAG had unilaterally destroyed the capabilities and shut down the operation.

«

There’s a lot more (non-specific) detail in here, but it does show how things like Project Zero can unthinkingly stumble like Mr Blobby into delicate operations on which real human lives depend.
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Why ‘intelligence’ exists only in the eye of the beholder • Aeon Essays

Abigail Desmond:

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Absolute brain size, relative brain size, brain organisation, and neuronal density have all been used to predict where intelligence will emerge. Among living animals, Homo sapiens has the highest encephalisation quotient, meaning that our brains are much bigger than expected for our body size. This plays to our vanity, but some of the smartest creatures out there have brains quite unlike ours – cuttlefish, for example, rely on neurons in their arms for complex problem-solving. African grey parrots have the smarts of a human child, but much smaller brains than might be expected. Shrews, on the other hand, have some of the highest neuronal densities among mammals but, ironically, they aren’t terribly shrewd. Tiny-brained digger wasps use tools, and monarch butterflies perform continent-spanning annual migrations. Large brains are important for human intelligence, but life finds other ways to succeed.

Adding to the mire, intelligent behaviour in people is not always the result of conscious choice or rational strategy, but can arise from autonomic processes. The cognitive bubbling up of hunches, intuitions and gut feelings can often be credited to ‘lower-order’ systems such as the sympathetic nervous system or the amygdala, or manifest as subliminal or subconscious conditioned responses to environmental cues. In some contexts, the brain itself has been suggested as a poor candidate for the locus of intelligence. Supporters of swarm or collective intelligence tell us that the problem of problem-solving can be shared among a host of similar entities, as in a shoal of fish or a surge of grasshoppers.

Ants build boats, bridges and metropolises with populations in the millions, and yet their individual cerebral horsepower doesn’t amount to much. The boundaries of an interacting group – the nest, the shoal, the rational mind, the nation-state – all can be argued as the scale at which true intelligence arises. Paradoxically, we value intelligence as a marker of individual success, yet it exists both as a collective of our own neurons, and an aggregate of collective behaviour. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, we keep using this word, but perhaps it does not mean what we think it means.

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Jingle writers and singers feel impact of AI song technology • Billboard

Steve Knopper:

»

In the mid 1990s, Jason Paige, then a struggling singer trying to break with his rock band, could make a solid living by writing Mountain Dew, Taco Bell and Pepto Bismol earworms for jingle houses that dominated the music-in-advertising industry for decades. But during an interview a few weeks ago, Paige — who ultimately became most famous as the voice of the Pokemon theme song “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” — fires up an artificial-intelligence program. Within minutes, he emails eight studio-quality, terrifyingly catchy punk, hip-hop, EDM and klezmer MP3s centered on the reporter’s name, the word Billboard and the phrase “the jingle industry and how it’s changed so much over the years.”

The point is self-evident. “Yeah,” Paige says, about the industry that once sustained him. “It is dark.”

Today, the jingle business has evolved an assembly line of composers and performers competing to make the next “plop plop fizz fizz” into a more multifaceted relationship between artists and companies, involving brand relationships (like Taylor Swift’s long-standing Target deal); Super Bowl synchs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; production-house music allowing brands to pick from hundreds of thousands of pre-recorded tracks; and “sonic branding,” in which the Intel bong or Netflix’s tudum are used in a variety of marketing contexts. Performers and songwriters make plenty of revenue on this kind of commercial music, and they’re far more open to doing so than they were in the corporation-skeptical ‘90s. But AI, which allows machines to make all these sounds far more cheaply and quickly for brands than human musicians could ever do, remains a looming threat.

“It definitely has the potential to be disruptive,” says Zeno Harris, a creative and licensing manager for West One Music Group, an LA company that licenses its 85,000-song catalog of original music to brands. “If we could use it as a tool, instead of replacing [musicians], that’s where I see it heading. But money dictates where the industry goes, so we’ll have to wait and see.”

This vision of an AI-dominated future in a crucial revenue-producing business is as disturbing for singers and songwriters as it is for Hollywood screenwriters, radio DJs and voiceover actors.

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With the rise of AI, web crawlers are suddenly controversial • The Verge

David Pierce:

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For three decades, a tiny text file has kept the internet from chaos. This text file has no particular legal or technical authority, and it’s not even particularly complicated. It represents a handshake deal between some of the earliest pioneers of the internet to respect each other’s wishes and build the internet in a way that benefitted everybody. It’s a mini constitution for the internet, written in code. 

It’s called robots.txt and is usually located at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. That file allows anyone who runs a website — big or small, cooking blog or multinational corporation — to tell the web who’s allowed in and who isn’t. Which search engines can index your site? What archival projects can grab a version of your page and save it? Can competitors keep tabs on your pages for their own files? You get to decide and declare that to the web.

It’s not a perfect system, but it works. Used to, anyway. For decades, the main focus of robots.txt was on search engines; you’d let them scrape your site and in exchange they’d promise to send people back to you. Now AI has changed the equation: companies around the web are using your site and its data to build massive sets of training data, in order to build models and products that may not acknowledge your existence at all. 

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Smart piece. Every leap in capability means we discover how much the internet relies on good faith. Newsgroup spam meant administrators taking on more and more powers to delete it (though they lost). Email spam meant not trusting other email servers. And now AI means we discover how robots.txt will have to be made into something stronger.
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Microsoft risks huge fine over “possibly abusive” bundling of Teams and Office • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Microsoft may be hit with a massive fine in the European Union for “possibly abusively” bundling Teams with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software suites for businesses.

On Tuesday, the European Commission (EC) announced preliminary findings of an investigation into whether Microsoft’s “suite-centric business model combining multiple types of software in a single offering” unfairly shut out rivals in the “software as a service” (SaaS) market.

“Since at least April 2019,” the EC found, Microsoft’s practice of “tying Teams with its core SaaS productivity applications” potentially restricted competition in the “market for communication and collaboration products.”

The EC is also “concerned” that the practice may have helped Microsoft defend its dominant market position by shutting out “competing suppliers of individual software” like Slack and German video-conferencing software Alfaview. Makers of those rival products had complained to the EC last year, setting off the ongoing probe into Microsoft’s bundling.

Customers should have choices, the EC said, and seemingly at every step, Microsoft sought instead to lock customers into using only its software.

“Microsoft may have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to Teams when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications,” the EC wrote. This alleged abusive practice “may have been further exacerbated by interoperability limitations between Teams’ competitors and Microsoft’s offerings.”

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A claim brought by Slack, among others, but unless the fine is absolutely gigantic then it’s yet another case of firmly slamming the stable door shut when the horse has moved to the next town, raised some children and sent them off to school.
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iOS 18 brings AirPods setup experience to third-party accessories • 9 to 5 Mac

Filipe Espósito:

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When Apple introduced AirPods in 2016, the company also unveiled a new, easy and intuitive way to pair wireless accessories to iPhone and iPad. Rather than having to go to Bluetooth settings and press buttons, the system identifies the accessory nearby and prompts the user to pair it. With iOS 18, this quick pairing process will be available for the first time to accessory makers.

Called AccessorySetupKit, the new API gives third-party accessories the same setup experience as Apple accessories such as AirPods and AirTag. As soon as the iPhone or iPad running iOS 18 with the right app detects a compatible accessory, it will show the user a popup to confirm pairing with that device.

With just a tap, the system will automatically handle all the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connectivity required by the accessory. This also means that users will no longer have to manually give Bluetooth and Wi-Fi permissions individually to that accessory’s app.

If the accessory requires a more complex pairing process, such as confirming a PIN code, the iOS 18 API can also ask the user for this information without the need to open an app. Once the accessory has been paired, more information about it can be found in a new Accessories menu within the Privacy settings.

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Now, this is obviously intended to put third-party products on a par with Apple ones, but what are the chances that people will complain Apple is prioritising some products (which take the trouble to incorporate the API) over others?
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‘Weightless’ battery stores energy directly in carbon fibre structures • New Atlas

CC Weiss:

»

Imagine an electric car that isn’t weighed down by a huge, kilowatt-hour-stuffed battery. It wouldn’t need as much power to drive it forward and could rely on a smaller motor, saving yet more weight. Or imagine an eVTOL that could take off without lifting a lithium-ion anchor that requires it to be back on the ground within an hour for charging. Or a windmill with blades that work as their own batteries, storing energy during low demand periods for distribution at peak hours.

Sinonus hopes to write a future in which all those visions come true. It’s hard at work on a new breed of smart carbon fibre capable of serving as the electrodes of an integrated battery.

The Swedes have long been working on structural composites capable of storing electricity. We first heard tell of the work over a decade ago when Volvo publicized its participation in a research project it had undertaken in cooperation with a number of academic partners, including Chalmers [University of Technology].

A few years later, Chalmers had identified a specific subset of carbon fibres that could deliver just the right blend of electrical conductivity and structural stiffness. It eventually went on to develop a prototype “massless” carbon battery.

In 2022, the university and VC firm Chalmers Ventures spun off the project into its own company, Sinonus. The startup sums up its purpose as “multipurpose,” pursuing materials that serve two or more functions in an effort to conserve overall resources.

In an EV, for instance, its carbon fibre battery system would presumably [“presumably”? – Overspill Ed.] weigh the same as or less than traditional steel and aluminum structural components but with the advantage of storing its own power and eliminating the need for a large, heavy battery pack.

…“Storing electrical energy in carbon fibre may perhaps not become as efficient as traditional batteries, but since our carbon fiber solution also has a structural load-bearing capability, very large gains can be made at a system level,” [Sinonus CEO Markus] Zetterström explains.

«

Though in a car, wouldn’t storing energy in the frame mean any bump could be calamitous for the battery?
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Apple wasn’t interested in AI partnership with Meta due to privacy concerns • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple turned down an AI partnership with Facebook parent company Meta due to privacy concerns, according to a report from Bloomberg. Meta and Apple had a brief discussion about a possible partnership in March, but the talks did not progress and Apple does not plan to integrate Meta’s large language model (LLM) into iOS.

Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal suggested that Apple and Meta were in active discussions about integrating Llama, Facebook’s LLM, into iOS 18 as part of Apple Intelligence. The report suggested that the discussions were ongoing had not been finalized, but Bloomberg’s follow-up indicates Apple never seriously considered a partnership.

Preliminary talks happened at the same time that Apple began discussions with OpenAI and Google parent company Alphabet, but Apple decided not to move on to a more formal discussion because “it doesn’t see that company’s privacy practices as stringent enough.”

Apple did end up signing a deal with OpenAI, and ChatGPT will be integrated into iOS 18 , iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. Users can opt-in to ChatGPT, with Siri able to hand some requests off to the more sophisticated AI model.

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Hardly surprising that Apple would find Meta’s desire for personal information unwelcome. But OpenAI’s expectation that much revenue will flow its way from the tieup I find.. optimistic.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Are you ready to be an extreme passenger – as in, one who just sits there watching, eating and doing nothing? CC-licensed photo by Matthew Hurst 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Chicken, please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US record labels are suing AI music generators, alleging copyright infringement • NBC News

Angela Yang:

»

Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, among others, filed lawsuits Monday against Suno and Udio-maker Uncharted Labs, both of which recently released AI programs that enable users to generate songs from text prompts.

The proliferation of accessible AI tools capable of generating realistic music, including full songs using AI versions of real artists’ voices, has triggered a slew of legal and ethical questions for the music industry. Many artists have expressed concern over how generative AI technologies could undermine human work and compensation.

Coordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America, the music recording industry’s largest trade organization, the lawsuits were filed in US federal courts for the District of Massachusetts and the Southern District of New York.

“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us.”

“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” he added.

The music labels allege in the lawsuits that building services Suno or Udio requires “copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings” in order to train their models, and that both AI companies have been “deliberately evasive” about what exactly they used.

But it’s “obvious” what their music generators were trained on, according to the lawsuits. Their models could only succeed in producing such realistic songs, the suits stated, if they had been trained on “vast quantities of sound recordings from artists across every genre, style, and era” — many of which remain copyrighted by these record labels.

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At 404 Media, you can hear the AI-generated songs that the labels claim are ripoffs. They’re very derivative. But infringing? Don’t bet against the RIAA.
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AI is getting better fast. Can you tell what’s real now? • The New York Times

Stuart Thompson:

»

Artificial intelligence tools can create lifelike faces and realistic photographs — and they are getting better all the time. The phony images now appear regularly on social media, with many users seeming to believe that the images are real. But there are still some telltale signs that an image was made by AI.

Can you tell the difference? Take our quiz.

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Entertaining. I got 9/10, frustratingly – had the right thoughts about the one I got wrong but changed my mind.
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Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas on plagiarism accusations • Fast Company

Mark Sullivan:

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Wired, along with an independent researcher, says it has proof that Perplexity has been ignoring those [robot and crawler exclusion] codes and scraping content from off-limits sites anyway. 

“Perplexity is not ignoring the Robot Exclusions Protocol and then lying about it,” said Perplexity cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas in a phone interview Friday. “I think there is a basic misunderstanding of the way this works,” Srinivas said. “We don’t just rely on our own web crawlers, we rely on third-party web crawlers as well.”  

Srinivas said the mysterious web crawler that Wired identified was not owned by Perplexity, but by a third-party provider of web crawling and indexing services. Srinivas would not say the name of the third-party provider, citing a Nondisclosure Agreement. Asked if Perplexity immediately called the third-parter crawler to tell them to stop crawling Wired content, Srinivas was non-committal. “It’s complicated,” he said.

Srinivas also noted that the Robot Exclusion Protocol, which was first proposed in 1994, is “not a legal framework.” He suggested that the emergence of AI requires a new kind of working relationship between content creators, or publishers, and sites like his.

Wired also claims that it was able to get the Perplexity answer engine to closely paraphrase Wired articles by prompting the tool with the headlines or substance of Wired articles. At times Perplexity even paraphrased the Wired stories incorrectly. In one case, the Perplexity “answer” falsely claimed that a California police officer had committed a crime. 

Srinivas suggested that Wired used prompts designed to get the Perplexity tool to behave that way, and that normal users wouldn’t see those kinds of results. “We have never said that we have never hallucinated,” he added.

«

Masterful misdirection. It’s not the hallucinations that have people up in arms.
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Why men are ‘rawdogging’ flights • GQ

Kate Lindsay:

»

Everyone has their own tricks for staving off boredom on a long-haul flight. Some people load up on podcast episodes, others power through the available in-flight entertainment. But no one simply sits, staring silently at the real-time flight map on the screen in front of them, for the entirety of a trip. Right? Wrong. A small group of hardy men—the gender that brought you frat hazing and Logan Paul—are now doing exactly that, and for a variety of surprisingly solid reasons.

A 26-year-old Londoner named West (who asked to use only his first name) went viral in May when he posted about his decision to forgo any entertainment and pass a seven-hour trip watching the flight map. “Anyone else bareback flights?” he asked in the caption.

The concept—referred to in a vivid and perhaps unfortunate parlance as “rawdogging,” “flying raw,” and “bareback”—resonated with many in the comments on West’s TikTok page, @WestWasHere. “Yup, from London to Miami this week…pure bareback no food or water,” one wrote. “I swear barebacking flights make it go quicker,” another added.

“I’ve got DMs on Instagram like, ‘Bro, you need to teach us how to bareback flights,’” West tells GQ.

“I am a nervous flier and generally cannot focus on anything on a plane—movies, TV shows, books, articles, whatever—with any success,” says Luke Winkie, a 33-year-old staff writer at Slate, who has used the flight map as his only in-flight entertainment for years. “For some reason I don’t like processing new information when I’m in the air. I want to stick to things that are predictable and safe.”

…West and others have also come to see rawdogging flights as a kind of challenge, like the Tough Mudder or No Nut November, the goal being to see how fully participants can deprive themselves of creature comforts, up to and including free snack and drinks and even bathroom visits. A true rawdogger takes no indulgences.

«

See? You don’t need the internet to be absolutely hatstand. The photo illustrating this article is Idris Elba in aircraft thriller Hijack. You’ll be able to spot the GQ readers on your next plane flight.
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Experts say Telegram’s ’30 engineers’ team is a security red flag • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

Over the weekend, a clip from a recent interview with Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov went semi-viral on X (previously Twitter). In the video, Durov tells right-wing personality Tucker Carlson that he is the only product manager at the company, and that he only employs “about 30 engineers.” 

Security experts say that while Durov was bragging about his Dubai-based company being “super efficient,” what he said was actually a red flag for users.

“Without end-to-end encryption, huge numbers of vulnerable targets, and servers located in the UAE? Seems like that would be a security nightmare,” Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University, told TechCrunch.

Green was referring to the fact that — by default — chats on Telegram are not end-to-end encrypted like they are on Signal or WhatsApp. A Telegram user has to start a “Secret Chat” to switch on end-to-end encryption, making the messages unreadable to Telegram or anyone other than the intended recipient. Also, over the years, many people have cast doubt over the quality of Telegram’s encryption, given that the company uses its own proprietary encryption algorithm, created by Durov’s brother, as he said in an extended version of the Carlson interview.  

Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a longtime expert in the security of at-risk users, said that it’s important to remember that Telegram, unlike Signal, is a lot more than just a messaging app. 

“What makes Telegram different (and much worse!) is that Telegram is not just a messaging app, it is also a social media platform. As a social media platform, it is sitting on an enormous amount of user data.”

«

The expectation, if you use Telegram, is that everything is monitored, potentially by people you might not want it monitored by.
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US House of Representatives narrowly passes DJI drone ban bill • PetaPixel

David Crewe:

»

DJI may have been right to be worried about its potential ban moving through the United States legislation as the Countering CCP Drone Act narrowly passed through the House of Representatives this past week.

There are multiple steps a bill like the Countering CCP Drones Act, which was initially introduced last April by Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY), needs to take in order to become law. Beyond official submission, the bill has to pass both House and Senate committee votes followed by passage in both houses of congress, and finally it must be signed by the President. The first of those steps occurred in May as the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) and the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) both passed the bill easily.

The next major hurdle was jumped on Friday as the bill, which was bundled into the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, passed by a narrow margin of 217:199, Drone Life reports. Now the bill moves on to the Senate where it will be debated and possibly amended (bills out of the House rarely look the same once the Senate is done with them). If that bill isn’t identical to the one passed by the House, members of both wings of Congress will meet to reconcile the differences and both houses of congress will vote on the reconciled version. If both pass, the final step is for the President to approve and sign.

Gallagher and Stefanik (R-NY) argued that Chinese law allows the government there to compel DJI to participate in and assist in its “espionage activities” and as such, the company should be added to the FCC’s list of banned communications equipment and services in the United States.

“DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America,” Stefanik has said. “DJI drones pose the national security threat of TikTok, but with wings.”

«

The paranoia is racking up in America. Of course China could change the clause compelling companies to do its bidding. But then, nobody would believe it anyway, would they?
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Has Facebook stopped trying? • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

In spring, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg invited more than a dozen professors and academics to a series of dinners at his home to discuss how Facebook could better keep its platforms safe from election disinformation, violent content, child sexual abuse material, and hate speech. Alongside these secret meetings, Facebook was regularly making pronouncements that it was spending hundreds of millions of dollars and hiring thousands of human content moderators to make its platforms safer. After Facebook was widely blamed for the rise of “fake news” that supposedly helped Trump win the 2016 election, Facebook repeatedly brought in reporters to examine its election “war room” and explained what it was doing to police its platform, which famously included a new “Oversight Board,” a sort of Supreme Court for hard Facebook decisions.

…Several years later, Facebook has been overrun by AI-generated spam and outright scams. Many of the “people” engaging with this content are bots who themselves spam the platform. Porn and nonconsensual imagery is easy to find on Facebook and Instagram. We have reported endlessly on the proliferation of paid advertisements for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, and ads for electricians and roofers who appear to be soliciting potential customers with sex work. Its own verified influencers have their bodies regularly stolen by “AI influencers” in the service of promoting OnlyFans pages also full of stolen content. 

Meta still regularly publishes updates that explain what it is doing to keep its platforms safe.

…But experts I spoke to who once had great insight into how Facebook makes its decisions say that they no longer know what is happening at the platform, and I’ve repeatedly found entire communities dedicated to posting porn, grotesque AI, spam, and scams operating openly on the platform.

Meta now at best inconsistently responds to our questions about these problems, and has declined repeated requests for on-the-record interviews for this and other investigations. Several of the professors who used to consult directly or indirectly with the company say they have not engaged with Meta in years.

Some of the people I spoke to said that they are unsure whether their previous contacts still work at the company or, if they do, what they are doing there. Others have switched their academic focus after years of feeling ignored or harassed by right-wing activists who have accused them of being people who just want to censor the internet.

«

Too big to fail? Too big to control? Just failing silently? If Facebook is consumed from the inside out by AI slop, who will be left to monetise?
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Five hours a day on Facebook: how voters are keeping up with the election • The Guardian

Jim Waterson:

»

ix voters across the UK volunteered to let the research agency Revealing Reality spend three days recording what they saw on their phone screens as part of a study aimed at understanding what media people are consuming in the run-up to the election. These are their stories.

[Zoya, 28].. When she does want political information, she searches TikTok for summaries of party policies. She is mainly concerned about health and crime, but is opposed to proposals to send more money to Ukraine and wants it spent in the UK instead.

[Stacey, 36].. Her main exposure to election-related media on her phone was a paid-for Facebook advert by the local Labour party candidate. She stumbled across his video in her feed by chance

[Simon, 45].. has heard Conservative minister Grant Shapps’ warning of a Labour supermajority – which strengthened his desire to vote for the Scottish National party.

[Ava, 67].. Ava’s phone activity shows she has retreated from political news on social media. On Facebook, she has unfriended many “acquaintances” due to unpleasant political discussions during past elections. Instead, she has turned back to BBC TV news and the World Service.

[Finley, 19].. He trusts the BBC News brand, but never actively consumes any of its content. He also could not understand why older people posted political content under their own names on social media.

«

Mixed up muddled up shook up world.
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Brussels accuses Apple of breaking EU ‘gatekeeper’ rules • FT

Javier Espinoza:

»

In preliminary findings issued on Monday, regulators in Brussels said they were concerned about restrictions Apple is imposing on developers’ ability to “freely steer their customers” by directing them to promotions outside the App Store.

Thierry Breton, the EU internal market commissioner, said: “Apple’s new slogan should be ‘act different’. Today we take further steps to ensure Apple complies with the DMA rules.”

If found guilty, the iPhone maker faces a penalty of up to 10% of its global annual revenue, meaning any fine could run into tens of billions of dollars. The fines can rise to 20% in the event the offence is repeated, the EU said. Apple said it was “confident” in its compliance.

Speaking at a conference on the DMA in Amsterdam on Monday, Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s executive vice-president in charge of digital policy, said: “We are dealing with the biggest and most valuable companies on the planet. The DMA is not an excessive ask. [It] is plain vanilla to ask for a fair, open and contestable marketplace.”

She added: “I find that it is surprising that some of the most valuable, respected big companies on this planet do not take compliance as a badge of honour.”

The commission’s preliminary findings have to be finalised within one year from the start of its official investigation in March. The move against Apple was first reported by the Financial Times this month.

The commission, the bloc’s executive arm, also announced on Monday that it was investigating whether Apple’s developer fees breached the EU’s rules.

«

Has to be said that the DMA does not seem to be an easy law to comply with – at least if you, a platform owner, want to retain any integrity on your platform. The EU does seem to act as though being in control of a platform is a sort of accident of birth, rather that a multi-billion pound game that has to be played exactly right or everything is lost. BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Nokia all played, and lost it all.
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Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets • Righto

Ken Shirriff:

»

To use the Montreal subway (the Métro), you tap a paper ticket against the turnstile and it opens. The ticket works through a system called NFC, but what’s happening internally? How does the ticket work without a battery? How does it communicate with the turnstile? And how can it be so cheap that you can throw the ticket away after one use? To answer these questions, I opened up a ticket and examined the tiny chip inside.

…The chip uses NFC (Near-Field Communication). The idea behind NFC is that a reader (i.e. the turnstile) and an NFC tag (i.e. the ticket) communicate over a short distance through magnetic fields, allowing them to exchange data. The reader generates a magnetic field that both powers the tag and sends data to the tag. Both the reader and the tag have coil-like antennas so the reader’s magnetic field can be picked up by the tag. When you tap your ticket on the turnstile, the NFC communication happens in 35 milliseconds, faster than an eyeblink. The data provided by the NFC tag shows that you have a valid ticket and then you can enter the subway.

The photo [below in the post] shows the subway ticket, made of printed paper. At the right, the ticket appears to have golden smart-card contacts, like a credit card with an EMV chip. However, those contacts are completely fake, just printed onto the card with ink, and there is no chip there. Presumably, the makers thought that making the card look like a smart card would help people understand it. The card actually uses an entirely different technology.

Although the subway card is paper on the outside, its core is a thin plastic sheet, shown below [on the post]. The sheet has a coiled antenna made from a layer of metal foil. If you look closely, you can see the tiny NFC chip in the lower right, a black speck connected to two sides of the antenna wire.3 The diagonal metal stripe in the upper left makes the antenna into a loop; topologically, a spiral antenna won’t work on a 2-D sheet, so the diagonal bridge completes the circuit.

«

The working part is the size of a grain of salt; uses 180nm parts (which were old even in 2012); has about 45,000 transistors; a 12in wafer with 215,712 chips would cost about $19,000, so about 9c per chip. There’s plenty more in the blogpost: you can even examine tickets like this with an app on your phone.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you’ve used Google Maps recently, you’ve been using a motif from one of the very first arcade games. CC-licensed photo by Steven Miller 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. Blast it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Before smartphones, an army of real people helped you find stuff on Google • WIRED

Amelia Tait:

»

The internet first became available on cell phones in 1996, but before affordable data plans, accidentally clicking the browser icon on your flip phone would make you sweat. In the early 2000s, accessing a single website could cost you as much as a cheeseburger, so not many people bothered to Google on the go.

Instead, a variety of services sprang up offering mobile search without the internet. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans could call GOOG-411 to find local businesses, and between 2006 and 2016, you could text 242-242 to get any question answered by the company ChaCha. Brits could call 118 118 or text AQA on 63336 for similar services. Behind the scenes, there were no artificially intelligent robots answering these questions. Instead, thousands of people were once employed to be Google.

“Some guy phoned up and asked if Guinness was made in Ireland, people asked for the circumference of the world,” says Hayley Banfield, a 42-year-old from Wales who answered 118 118 calls from 2004 to 2005. The number was first launched in 2002 as a directory enquiries service—meaning people could call up to find out phone numbers and addresses (back then calls cost an average of 55 pence). In 2008, the business started offering to answer any questions. Although Banfield worked for 118 118 before this change, customers would ask her anything and everything regardless. “We had random things like ‘How many yellow cars are on the road?’”

While directory enquiry lines still exist, Banfield worked during their boom—she answered hundreds of calls in her 5:30 pm to 2 am shifts—and quickly noticed patterns in people’s queries. “Anything past 11 pm, that’s when the drunk calls would come in,” she says. People wanted taxis and kebab shops but were so inebriated that they’d forget to finish their sentences. Sometimes, callers found Banfield so helpful that they invited her to join them on their nights out. As the evening crept on, callers asked for massage parlors or saunas—then they would call back irate after Banfield recommended an establishment that didn’t meet their needs.

The “pizza hours” were 8 pm to 10 pm—everyone wanted the number for their local takeout. Banfield had a computer in front of her in the Cardiff call center, loaded with a simple database. She’d type in a postcode (she had memorized all of the UK’s as part of her training) and then use a shortcut such as “PIZ” for pizza or “TAX” for taxi. People sometimes accused Banfield of being psychic, but if the power had gone out in a certain area, she automatically knew that most callers wanted to know why.

«

It’s a lovely story of the days before mobile internet. Those companies made a killing, though. Insanely profitable, sky-high prices, only capped in 2019.
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Amid record high energy demand, America is running out of electricity • The Washington Post

Evan Halper:

»

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.

In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.

Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.

The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants.

“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”

«

Step forward, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and the rest. Plus all the other data centres.
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When you’re driving in Google Maps you’re re-enacting an ancient space combat sim • Interconnected

Matt Webb:

»

So, that dart-shaped arrow [used by a 1985 “computer navigation system for cars” called Etak] is also the arrow used in Google Maps turn-by-turn navigation to show your current location. You can see it if you use directions in the app today. You can see it in the Google Maps Navigation launch blog post from 2009.

And what [journalist Benj] Edwards spotted is that the same Google Maps arrow was used by Etak to show the current location of your car, way back then.

To give you an idea of how much 1985 was a different era: there were no GPS satellites. So you had to put magnetic sensors in your wheels to count rotations. Map data was stored on audio cassette tapes in the back of the car. The screen didn’t have pixels. It was a vector screen, with electron beams painting lines on directly on the phosphors, like an oscilloscope.

So check out his article [about Etak], because there’s a photo of the Etak Navigator, and you can see the dart-arrow, right there in the mirror. So is that the origin?

Edwards goes further. In a follow-up article, he figured out the connection:

»

To Etak’s benefit, Catalyst’s shared office building encouraged the cross-pollination of ideas between companies. Alcorn, while working at Cumma, recalls being fascinated by the activities at Etak. During development, he snuck into nearby Atari’s coin-op division building with Etak engineers to show them the hit 1979 arcade title Asteroids. The game used a vector display that produced fluid animations with low-cost hardware. It’s little surprise, then, that Etak’s final on-screen representation of the car in its shipping product was a vector triangle nearly identical to the ship from Asteroids.

– Benj Edwards, Fast Company, The Untold Story of Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell’s Visionary 1980s Tech Incubator (2017)

«

Asteroids? Asteroids (Wikipedia). The break-out coin-op arcade game. The dart-arrow is the spaceship: it’s right there!

«

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Solar power’s giants are providing more energy than big oil • Bloomberg via The Business Standard

David Fickling:

»

you can start by converting the barrels of crude and cubic meters of gas produced by the big petroleum companies into a measure of energy — exajoules. An exajoule of electricity would be able to power Australia, Italy or Taiwan for a year. And the big oil companies are making a lot of it: about 8.3 EJ annually for ExxonMobil and 6.2 EJ at Shell.

The vast majority of that is wasted, however. Only about a fifth of the chemical energy in freshly pumped crude ends up being turned into kinetic energy moving cars and trucks, because oil refineries and vehicle engines fritter most of it away as useless heat and noise. Gas turbines are a bit more efficient at turning methane into power, but still end up operating at about one-third efficiency once you account for losses from gas well to electrical socket. At a rough estimate, only about a quarter of the energy coming out of an oil company’s wells gets turned into useful power. 

We can do a similar transformation with solar. Companies such as [China’s] Tongwei, GCL or Xinte that produce the polysilicon raw material for solar panels measure their output capacity in metric tons per year. It’s a simple process to convert that into gigawatts of the solar cells made by Longi, Jinko and the like, and ultimately into the exajoules that the resulting panels will generate.

Put the two side by side, and the result is striking. The biggest polysilicon producers right now can go head-to-head with some of the biggest oil companies such as BP, Eni and ConocoPhillips — and panel makers aren’t far behind. Should Tongwei go ahead with plans announced in December to build a 400,000 ton polysilicon plant in Inner Mongolia, nearly doubling its current output, it might overtake even ExxonMobil

«

Someone described this transition thus: the fossil fuel age relies on commodities, the solar (and nuclear and wind) age relies on technologies. And the price of technologies plummets reliably – although in the case of nuclear, all the concerns around it have effectively halted it in the west.
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Death toll at Hajj pilgrimage rises to 1,300 amid extreme high temperatures • AP via CBS News

»

More than 1,300 people died during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia as the faithful faced extreme high temperatures at Islamic holy sites in the desert kingdom, Saudi authorities announced Sunday.

Saudi Health Minister Fahd bin Abdurrahman Al-Jalajel said that 83% of the 1,301 fatalities were unauthorized pilgrims who walked long distances in soaring temperatures to perform the Hajj rituals in and around the holy city of Mecca.

Speaking to state-owned television, the minister said 95 pilgrims were being treated in hospitals, some of whom were airlifted for treatment in the capital, Riyadh. He said the identification process was delayed because there were no identification documents with many of the dead pilgrims.

The fatalities included more than 660 Egyptians. All but 31 of them were unauthorized pilgrims, according to two officials in Cairo. Egypt has revoked the licenses of 16 travel agencies that helped unauthorized pilgrims travel to Saudi Arabia, authorities said.

…Saudi authorities cracked down on unauthorized pilgrims, expelling tens of thousands of people. But many, mostly Egyptians, managed to reach holy sites in and around Mecca, some on foot. Unlike authorized pilgrims, they had no hotels to return to to escape the scorching heat.

…During this year’s Hajj period, daily high temperatures ranged between 46ºC (117ºF) and 49ºC (120ºF) in Mecca and sacred sites in and around the city, according to the Saudi National Center for Meteorology.

«

Extreme heat, extreme deaths. But:

»

Islam follows a lunar calendar, so the Hajj comes around 11 days earlier each year. By 2029, the Hajj will occur in April, and for several years after that it will fall in the winter, when temperatures are milder.

«

A stampede in 2015 killed more people – over 2,400. But in a couple of decades, the Hajj will occur when it’s hottest, and temperatures will have risen even further.

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Linda Yaccarino shakes up X amid pressure from Elon Musk over costs • FT

Hannah Murphy and Daniel Thomas:

»

Linda Yaccarino has shaken up her inner circle at X as she faces pressure from Elon Musk to boost sales and cut costs, a year after she became chief executive.

Yaccarino fired her right-hand man and head of business operations and communications, Joe Benarroch, this month, said three people familiar with the matter.

Among other things, Yaccarino held Benarroch responsible for bungling the rollout of the platform’s new adult content policy by failing to tell clients of the changes before it became public, two X employees said.

Taking over Benarroch’s responsibilities will be global government affairs head Nick Pickles, whose role has temporarily been expanded to include directing all global communications, the people said.

This week, Pickles, one of the few top Twitter staffers who survived the billionaire’s takeover, also attended the Cannes advertising festival alongside Yaccarino and Musk for the first time, several people said.

The shake-up has been seen as a boon for British-born Pickles, who once ran for office as a Conservative MP in the UK, before rapidly rising up the ranks at the platform to oversee its public policy and relationships with governments.

The reshuffle comes amid growing tensions between Musk and Yaccarino, stemming from her struggle to steady X’s financial health a year after Musk poached her from NBCUniversal.

One X senior staffer said she had become increasingly nervous as Musk piled pressure on her to raise revenues and lower her expenses — for example cutting staff from the US and UK sales teams and reducing spending on items such as travel.

«

It’s an interesting progression for Pickles, who used to be at Big Brother Watch and is also a BBC Trustee. But this doesn’t look like a company sailing along happily.
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X still has a Verified bot problem; this time they came for TechCrunch writers • TechCrunch

Rebecca Bellan:

»

This week while scrolling on X, formerly Twitter, I noticed that I had reposted a series of TechCrunch articles. Except, wait, no, I hadn’t.

But someone else using my name had. I clicked on the profile, and there was another Rebecca Bellan, using the same default and header photos as my actual profile: me onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 and side-eye Chloe, respectively. The bio read, “@Techcrunch senior reporter | journalist,” and it had the location set to NY, where I am currently based. The account was created in May 2024.

Perhaps most surprising after realizing that someone — who? A bot?! — had created an impersonator account of me was the fact that they had ostensibly paid to do so, as evidenced by the little blue checkmark next to my name.

When X was still Twitter, the blue checkmark would let other users know that a profile had been verified as a person of note. But since Elon Musk’s hostile takeover, that checkmark now means that a user has paid at least $8 per month for a premium subscription that gets them access to longer posts, fewer ads, better algorithmic consideration and Grok. And while X changed tack in April and gave the verification badge back to some users based on number of followers, the blue checkmark could also mean someone is a fan of Musk. Don’t believe me? Just check all the zealous reply guys on any of Musk’s posts.

«

The purpose is unclear, but it probably just helps the bot accounts evade the spam filters. And what motive would eX-Twitter have to remove accounts which are paying it?
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Perplexity plagiarized our story about how Perplexity is a bullshit machine • WIRED

Tim Marchman:

»

Perplexity and its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, did not substantively dispute the specifics of WIRED’s reporting [last week]. “The questions from WIRED reflect a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of how Perplexity and the Internet work,” Srinivas said in a statement. Backed by Jeff Bezos’ family office and by Nvidia, among others, Perplexity has said it is worth a billion dollars based on its most recent fundraising round, and The Information reported last month that it was in talks for a new round that would value it at $3bn. (Bezos did not reply to an email; Nvidia declined to comment.)

After we published the story, I prompted three leading chatbots to tell me about the story. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude generated text offering hypotheses about the story’s subject but noted that they had no access to the article. The Perplexity chatbot produced a six-paragraph, 287-word text closely summarizing the conclusions of the story and the evidence used to reach them. (According to WIRED’s server logs, the same bot observed in our and Knight’s findings, which is almost certainly linked to Perplexity but is not in its publicly listed IP range, attempted to access the article the day it was published, but was met with a 404 response. The company doesn’t retain all its traffic logs, so this is not necessarily a complete picture of the bot’s activity, or that of other Perplexity agents.) The original story is linked at the top of the generated text, and a small gray circle links out to the original following each of the last five paragraphs. The last third of the fifth paragraph exactly reproduces a sentence from the original: “Instead, it invented a story about a young girl named Amelia who follows a trail of glowing mushrooms in a magical forest called Whisper Woods.”

This struck me and my colleagues as plagiarism.

«

The evidence against Perplexity is piling up very quickly, and if the Sauron’s Eye of the big publishers turns to focus on it, there might be trouble.
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Tory MPs paid £100,000 of public funds to party’s in-house web designers • The Guardian

Jessica Elgot:

»

More than 120 Conservative MPs, including Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss, Sajid Javid and Gillian Keegan, paid £100,000 of taxpayers’ money to the Conservatives’ in-house web design services, it can be revealed.

The MPs used the Bluetree website service to design their websites. When billed by Bluetree, they would pay for the sites then claim back the costs from the public purse via expenses, prompting a complaint to parliament’s expenses watchdog about the practice.

Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) has denied Bluetree is wholly owned by the party and says it is a separate organisation, but repeatedly refused to deny the party receives income from the company, saying it has “commercial arrangements with CCHQ”.

Records show more than 330 invoices from Bluetree to Conservative MPs, including Hunt, Truss, Javid and Keegan, for web design services. Other high-profile Conservatives who have expensed services from Bluetree include Ben Wallace, Tobias Ellwood, Mark Francois and Helen Whately.

The company – which describes itself as the “Conservative party UK official website platform” and says it is run “inside the party” – has an address that is the same office as CCHQ and has been paid £100,695 in taxpayers’ money since 2019.

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It’s just amazing: as though the Tories are trying to achieve some sort of Grand Slam of corruption.
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