Reinfections make up a bit less than a third of Covid cases in the UK – but the BA.5 subvariant is not able to escape vaccine immunity better than its parent. CC-licensed photo by Mike Finn on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. So infectious you’ll pass them on. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Is BA.5 the ‘reinfection wave’? • The Atlantic

Ed Yong:

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the consequences of reinfections are still unclear. It’s unlikely that each subsequent bout of COVID is worse for an individual than the previous one; this idea has proliferated because of a recent preprint, which really only showed that getting reinfected is worse than not being reinfected. Nor should people worry that, as one viral news article recently suggested, “it is now possible to be reinfected with one of Omicron’s variants every two to three weeks.” [The newly rising Omicron subvariant] BA.5 is different from its forebears but not from itself; although someone could catch the new variant despite having recently had COVID, they’d be very unlikely to get infected again in the near future.

Though previous immunity has been dialed down a few notches, since BA.5 showed up, it hasn’t disappeared entirely. “We’re seeing that new infections are disproportionately people who haven’t been infected before,” Meaghan Kall, an epidemiologist at the U.K. Health Security Agency, told me. About 70% of those who currently have COVID in England are first-timers, even though they account for just 15% of the country’s population. This clearly shows that although reinfections are a serious problem, the population still has some protection against catching even BA.5.

The degree to which the new variant escapes immunity is also a shadow of what we saw last winter, when Omicron first arrived. For comparison, antibodies in vaccinated people were 20 to 40 times worse at neutralizing BA.1 than the original coronavirus. BA.5 reduces their efficiency threefold again—a small gain of sneakiness on top of its predecessor’s dramatic flair for infiltration.

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So BA.5 is essentially carrying out a mopping-up operation – infecting the people who until now have evaded infection. This isn’t over, by any means. And 30% of infections being reinfections is a lot of reinfections in the grand scheme of people getting ill with Covid. Anecdotal reports say it takes a long time to clear, and leaves people feeling wiped.
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iPadOS 16 preview: jack of all trades, master of some • The Verge

David Pierce, now that the public beta of iOS 16 and Mac OS Ventura has come out:

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If you’re the kind of person who uses an iPad as your main workhorse, iPadOS 16 is for you. Just the ability to plug in an external monitor and use it as a second screen is a game-changer for anyone who spends hours a day doing work on their iPad. The process is pretty seamless: you can buy a specific USB-C to HDMI cable, but my USB-C hub worked well, too, and as soon as I plugged it in, it popped up a second screen with its own dock ready to go.

The iPad assumes the second screen is above it by default, so you drag windows up from your iPad onto your second screen. (You can tweak this in Settings.) Most apps just treat the monitor as a really big iPad with no touchscreen, which works well enough, but a few get crazy with it: Netflix played everything turned 90 degrees to the right, for instance, and YouTube expanded into some deeply broken layout I’ve never seen before. These are all solvable problems, and are why betas exist, but this actually isn’t an easy fix for everyone. Should apps actually treat it like a big iPad and give you 30-plus inches of a 10-inch app? Some apps are already built to be responsive and resize nimbly as you move them around, but no iPad developer has had to reckon with screens this size — or this many different sizes, period — before.

Stage Manager is the other thing that’s going to cause developers headaches. It’s also likely to be the most controversial thing about iPadOS 16: a new tool for multitasking designed to make it easier to quickly switch between a lot of apps. Once you turn on Stage Manager — it’s actually off by default, so you have to actively decide to use it before it appears — it puts four “piles” of apps onto the left side of your screen, like a dock of your various screen configurations.

…We’ll reserve full judgment for our review this fall, but so far, I hate Stage Manager. The piles take up too much room on the screen, and it takes way too much work to place the app windows just so.

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Bit of an asterisk on this: you need an M1 iPad. Otherwise you just get mirroring on the second screen. Meanwhile, another Apple windowing manager added to the pile. Should have just stuck with Exposé.
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Energy bills to rise more than predicted, says Ofgem boss • BBC News

Kevin Peachey:

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Domestic energy bills will rise faster this winter than previously forecast by the energy regulator Ofgem, its chief executive has admitted to MPs.

Jonathan Brearley said in late May that a typical household would pay £800 a year more from October. But, while giving evidence to MPs, he said it was “clear” that estimate for winter bills now looked too low.

The original figure was used by ministers when deciding how much to pay in direct assistance this winter. One industry analyst has predicted a rise of more than £1,200 a year in October. Cornwall Insight said that the typical domestic customer was likely to pay £3,244 a year from October, then £3,363 a year from January.

The typical bill at present is about £2,000 a year. In itself, this was a rise of £700 a year in April, compared with the previous six months.

About 23 million households in England, Wales and Scotland have their bills governed by the energy price cap. That limits the amount suppliers can charge per unit of energy, and the standing charge, and is set every six months. From this winter, it is expected that this will change to a three-month period.

Mr Brearley said in May that a typical household gas and electricity bill on the price cap would increase to £2,800 a year, owing to continued volatility in gas prices. But on Monday, he told MPs on the Public Accounts Committee that it was “clear”, given the current “pricing dynamics” and the ongoing war in Ukraine, that “prices are looking higher than they did when we made that estimate”.

However, he would not be drawn on exactly how much higher bills would be ahead of the official announcement in the coming weeks.

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The next Prime Minister is in for a world of hurt.
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A G7 energy tariff on Russia would be better than a price cap • Centre for European Reform

Elisabetta Cornago:

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A tariff on Russian oil imports would be preferable to a complex price cap in multiple ways. First, a tariff raises [government] revenues, while a price cap does not. Forcing the exporter to sell at a maximum price set by the cartel of buyers, the price cap destroys part of Russia’s fossil fuel revenues. But with a tariff, the EU would extract at least some of those revenues, and could use them in the short term for income support for poorer households facing high energy bills, and in the long term for reconstruction efforts in Ukraine.

Second, enforcing a price cap would be difficult: importers willing to pay more than the price cap could try to offer a higher price ‘behind doors’ to obtain priority access to Russian oil. Third, if many countries applied a price cap, demand for Russian oil would spike. Because refiners of Russian oil would compete with refiners of higher-priced oil from elsewhere, retail prices of fuel at the pump would follow the higher global oil price instead of the capped purchase price of Russian oil. This means that consumers would not see any benefits in terms of lower prices at the pump.

What about the spike in gas prices? While the EU aims to cut imports of Russian oil into the EU by 90% by the end of the year, Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas is still the elephant in the room: following the lengthy, difficult negotiations leading to the partial oil embargo, no EU leader is particularly keen to embark on gas sanctions. Further, given Russia is increasingly cutting its exports to Europe, some may wonder whether it is worth the EU attempting any sanctions on gas at all.

But redirecting gas supplies away from Europe and towards other markets is even harder for Russia, and it would not be as profitable. For this reason, Russia would bear the brunt of a tariff on gas: European gas demand is more flexible than Russian gas supply. The EU should use this as an advantage.

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Seems like a sensible idea, well-argued, which of course means that it won’t happen. All the momentum is towards the less good idea, of a price cap, and nobody’s going to want to be the person – or country’s leader – who admits they’re heading in the wrong direction. Maybe the euro falling to parity with the dollar over European recession fears will concentrate some minds.
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The Uber whistleblower: I’m exposing a system that sold people a lie • The Guardian

Paul Lewis, Harry Davies, Lisa O’Carroll, Simon Goodley and Felicity Lawrence:

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Mark MacGann, a career lobbyist who led Uber’s efforts to win over governments across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has come forward to identify himself as the source who leaked more than 124,000 company files to the Guardian.

MacGann decided to speak out, he says, because he believes Uber knowingly flouted laws in dozens of countries and misled people about the benefits to drivers of the company’s gig-economy model.

The 52-year-old acknowledges he was part of Uber’s top team at the time – and is not without blame for the conduct he describes. In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, he said he was partly motivated by remorse.

“I am partly responsible,” he said. “I was the one talking to governments, I was the one pushing this with the media, I was the one telling people that they should change the rules because drivers were going to benefit and people were going to get so much economic opportunity.

“When that turned out not to be the case – we had actually sold people a lie – how can you have a clear conscience if you don’t stand up and own your contribution to how people are being treated today?”

The senior role MacGann held at Uber between 2014 and 2016 put him at the heart of decisions taken at the highest levels of the company during the period in which it was forcing its way into markets in violation of taxi-licensing laws. He oversaw Uber’s attempts to persuade governments to change taxi regulations and create a more favourable business environment in more than 40 countries.

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Pretty strong story for day 2. And a remarkable thing to do by MacGann.
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North Korean operatives are trying to infiltrate US crypto firms • CNNPolitics

Sean Lyngaas:

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Devin, the founder of a cryptocurrency startup based in San Francisco, woke up one day in February to the most bizarre phone call of his life.

The man on the other end, an FBI agent, told Devin that the seemingly legitimate software developer he’d hired the previous summer was a North Korean operative who’d sent tens of thousands of dollars of his salary to the country’s authoritarian regime.

Stunned, Devin hung up and immediately cut the employee off from company accounts, he said.
“He was a good contributor,” Devin lamented, puzzled by the man who had claimed to be Chinese and passed multiple rounds of interviews to get hired. (CNN is using a pseudonym for Devin to protect the identity of his company).

Devin’s encounter is just one example of what US officials say is a relentless, evolving effort by the North Korean government to infiltrate and steal from cryptocurrency and other tech firms around the world to help fund Kim Jong Un’s illicit nuclear and ballistic weapons program.

…The FBI, Treasury and State departments issued a rare public advisory in May about thousands of “highly skilled” IT personnel who provide Pyongyang with “a critical stream of revenue” that helps bankroll the regime’s “highest economic and security priorities.”

It’s an elaborate money-making scheme that relies on front companies, contractors and deception to prey on a volatile industry that is always on the hunt for top talent. North Korean tech workers can earn more than $300,000 annually — hundreds of times the average income of a North Korean citizen — and up to 90% of their wages go to the regime, according to the US advisory.

“(The North Koreans) take this very seriously,” said Soo Kim, a former North Korea analyst at the CIA. “It’s not just some rando in his basement trying to mine cryptocurrency,” she added, referring to the process of generating digital money. “It’s a way of life.”

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Here’s how the right is spinning Elon Musk’s Twitter withdrawal as a victory • Motherboard

David Gilbert:

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For the right-wing media, lawmakers, and talking heads who were banned or had abandoned the platform—and who had spent weeks celebrating a deal they believed would herald their triumphant return to tweeting—Musk’s withdrawal was a devastating blow.

But rather than going into mourning, they’ve managed to twist logic to the point where they now claim that Musk planned to scupper the deal all along—and it’s actually a really good thing.

And what better way to show their contempt for Twitter than by sharing their views on Twitter.

“Holy shit. The party is really over here. The purge is coming,” Dave Rubin, a conservative political commentator tweeted after news of Musk’s withdrawal was announced.

The main gist of the argument from the right is that Musk was correct to pull out because he had successfully exposed the level of spam accounts on the platform.

“Elon musk is terminating his agreement to buy Twitter: So basically Twitter has a huge amount of spam accounts—way more than they let on—and has gotten busted for it,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted. “As I said weeks ago spam accounts are probably 50% not 5% of Twitter users.”

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Except, as Matt Levine points out in his newsletter, if spam accounts (and how exactly do you define that? Show your working), then that means that Twitter is monetising fantastically well on its humans, who actually look at ads, so Twitter is fabulously valuable and Musk should buy it after all. It’s a self-defeating argument to claim there are too many bots.

Also: thread about how Musk is likely to lose if he lets it all get to court.
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Passenger deployed slide to exit moving plane at LAX! • Mentour Pilot

Spyros Georgilidakis:

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A passenger on a United Express flight deployed an evacuation slide on a moving aircraft at LAX! The individual was the only one to suffer some injuries.

The airline operating the flight was SkyWest. This was flight UA5365, operating last Friday (25th of June). The aircraft would fly from Los Angeles (KLAX) to Salt Lake City (KSLC). The crew pushed back from gate 82 in Los Angeles at 6:55pm local time. Five-six minutes later, a passenger started behaving erratically, standing up in the cabin. Eventually, he would deploy an evacuation slide.

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Well now. Seems that we have an empirical test of “can you open the aircraft door while the aircraft is taxiing?” Hope you’re all satisfied. (Please don’t attempt to submit this data to replication.)
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Why business is booming for military AI startups • MIT Technology Review

Melissa Heikkiläarchive:

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Companies that sell military AI make expansive claims for what their technology can do. They say it can help with everything from the mundane to the lethal, from screening résumés to processing data from satellites or recognizing patterns in data to help soldiers make quicker decisions on the battlefield. Image recognition software can help with identifying targets. Autonomous drones can be used for surveillance or attacks on land, air, or water, or to help soldiers deliver supplies more safely than is possible by land. 

These technologies are still in their infancy on the battlefield, and militaries are going through a period of experimentation, says Payne, sometimes without much success. There are countless examples of AI companies’ tendency to make grand promises about technologies that turn out not to work as advertised, and combat zones are perhaps among the most technically challenging areas in which to deploy AI because there is little relevant training data. This could cause autonomous systems to fail in a “complex and unpredictable manner,” argued Arthur Holland Michel, an expert on drones and other surveillance technologies, in a paper for the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research

Nevertheless, many militaries are pressing forward. In a vaguely worded press release in 2021, the British army proudly announced it had used AI in a military operation for the first time, to provide information on the surrounding environment and terrain. The US is working with startups to develop autonomous military vehicles. In the future, swarms of hundreds or even thousands of autonomous drones that the US and British militaries are developing could prove to be powerful and lethal weapons.

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It was 2006 when I commissioned a piece about uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs, aka drones) and how keen the US Army had been to use them since 2004. Now they’re commonplace in the Ukraine war. These systems can take a while to feed through, but once they’re ready, they’re used. AI is going to be exactly the same. One more war? Two?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A misguided attempt to turn Sri Lanka’s agriculture over to organic methods was a major contributor to last week’s riots which displaced the president. CC-licensed photo by Dennis Sylvester Hurd 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. Getting warmer. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

There’s also the Social Warming Substack: weekly posts on the topic. Most recently about the torture of recording an audiobook. Sign up!

Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals • The Guardian

Harry Davies, Simon Goodley, Felicity Lawrence, Paul Lewis and Lisa O’Carroll:

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A leaked trove of confidential files has revealed the inside story of how the tech giant Uber flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion.

The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents – known as the Uber files – lays bare the ethically questionable practices that fuelled the company’s transformation into one of Silicon Valley’s most famous exports.

The leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to force the cab-hailing service into cities around the world, even if that meant breaching laws and taxi regulations.

During the fierce global backlash, the data shows how Uber tried to shore up support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, oligarchs and media barons.

Leaked messages suggest Uber executives were at the same time under no illusions about the company’s law-breaking, with one executive joking they had become “pirates” and another conceding: “We’re just fucking illegal.”

The cache of files, which span 2013 to 2017, includes more than 83,000 emails, iMessages and WhatsApp messages, including often frank and unvarnished communications between Kalanick and his top team of executives.

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It’s a colossal piece of work. If you ever had any doubts about Uber, well, that’s the end of those.
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Sri Lanka’s organic farming experiment went catastrophically wrong • Foreign Policy

Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah of the Breakthrough Institute:

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Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter [2021-2022]. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s two million farmers to go organic.

The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20% in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450m worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50%. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.

By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others.

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This was one of the dominoes that led to Sri Lanka’s foreign currency crisis (the other being a collapse in its tourist trade, following a number of terrorist bombings), which meant it couldn’t buy fuel, which meant people on the streets and, over the weekend, the invasion of the president’s office, who seems to have fled the country. Also written up by Michael Shellenberger, who doesn’t hold back in his condemnation of the people who pushed the scheme.
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Bad UI is causing people to get scammed • Ashlan’s blog

“Ashlan” shows how you can think you’re selling a computer to someone, but bad UI lets you get scammed:

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The usual scam I’ve encountered involves Zelle (I’ll blog about this in another article) but this one in particular involves Venmo. After a few back and forwards, he agrees to send the full amount with a shipping fee via Venmo if I send it next day USPS.

He sends the “payment” and asks me to check my email. I receive as an email from “Venmo.” This is where bad UI design is causing people to get scammed. The email appears to be legit with the Venmo colors and wording. If you aren’t tech savvy, you will only see it coming from “Venmo.” You have to click and expand it to show the email address is onlinevenmoforwarderserver@gmail.com. Gmail by default hides the sender email address (but conveniently shows the recipient email address??). I’m sure many people mostly use their phones to email and don’t know how to expand to display the full email address.

If I was an unsuspecting victim and followed through with the email, I may have sent my laptop to this person thinking Venmo will fund my account once I produced a tracking number. Once I realized my account isn’t funded, I would probably contact Venmo who will tell me that they never sent any email to me. Then I would become another statistic.

This Gmail “feature” is one example of what I consider bad UI (either via discovery problems or plain bad UI). When the iPhone first came out, it was very user friendly and non-techies in my friend had no problem using it. As iOS added more and more “features”, all these came more hidden or had to find.

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It’s certainly the case that people can get scammed more easily by emails that don’t actually show the sender address. And he picks up some subtle points about how you can tell it’s a scam, which is in the initial language that is used.
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My rural Kentucky county is awash in guns. Where does that leave me? • The Washington Post

Teri Carter:

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I live in rural Kentucky, in a county with a population of 23,000 people, and I have been told half a dozen times lately that I should be carrying a gun when I jog at the local park. What kind of gun? I wonder, as I lie there in the soft, predawn dark. What size gun? How often would I need to practice to remember how to use it? Where, in my spandex running clothes, would I carry a gun? I tripped on a tree root back in December and fell flat on my face. Would the gun go off if I fell? What if I shot myself? What if I shot someone else? Could I shoot someone?

I think about guns because guns are what I talked about most for the last several months as I ran in our local Republican primary for county magistrate. Not gas prices. Not the “stolen” election. Not caravans at the southern border. Not abortion. Not the mundane, budget-related duties of the seat I was running for. I talked about guns.

I am a Democrat who ran for local office as a Republican because in Anderson County, Kentucky, right down the road from the state capitol, Democrats no longer have a prayer of winning a partisan election, even if it is to serve in a nonpartisan job. This is die-hard Trump country now. Donald Trump won the county in both 2016 and 2020 with more than 70% of the vote. I figured that running on the Republican ticket, talking neighbor to neighbor with Republicans in a sensible manner about issues like guns would give me a fair shot.

I was wrong. I not only lost, I lost spectacularly. No matter how I tried, I could not convince voters that I was not going to show up at their door one day with a checklist, authorized by either our Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, or Democratic president, Joe Biden, and seize their guns. And when I was honest in telling them I believe AR-15-style guns are weapons of war and should be banned altogether? Voters laughed.
The term “gun culture” gets tossed around. But what does it mean to live in a place rooted in Trumpian (angry, unabashed, aggrieved, armed-to-the-teeth) 2022 gun culture?

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In short, it’s weird, but you should read it. (Thanks G for the link.)
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The dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari • Current Affairs

Darshana Narayanan is an evolutionary biologist :

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Harari’s speculations are consistently based on a poor understanding of science. His predictions of our biological future, for instance, are based on a gene-centric view of evolution—a way of thinking that has (unfortunately) dominated public discourse due to public figures like him. Such reductionism advances a simplistic view of reality, and worse yet, veers dangerously into eugenics territory.

In the final chapter of Sapiens, Harari writes:

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“Why not go back to God’s drawing board and design better Sapiens? The abilities, needs and desires of Homo sapiens have a genetic basis. And the sapiens genome is no more complex than that of voles and mice. (The mouse genome contains about 2.5 billion nucleobases, the sapiens genome about 2.9 billion bases, meaning that the latter is only 14% larger.) … If genetic engineering can create genius mice, why not genius humans? If it can create monogamous voles, why not humans hard-wired to remain faithful to their partners?”

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It would be convenient indeed if genetic engineering were a magic wand—quick flicks of which could turn philanderers into faithful partners, and everyone into Einstein. This is sadly not the case.

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I haven’t read Sapiens, but this (long piece) is a pretty comprehensive demolition. That little extract is very off-key if you know anything about how genetics functions, and the complex dance of nature and nurture in gene activation.
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Michael Lewis: ‘The thing that really works for Trump is: the system’s rigged’ • Financial Times

Henry Mance has a wide-ranging lunch with the marvellous Michael Lewis, in which these two parts stood out to me:

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Lewis studied art history at Princeton. Can he see any value in NFTs, which some see as akin to fine art? “I don’t trust myself on this subject. I can see myself saying something really stupid that five years later I regret. But the answer’s no.”

His eldest child wants him to write about climate change, but Lewis is searching for the right character: “Someone who has made billions of dollars already, operating largely in secret, who is making bets that have paid off because of this catastrophe . . . I did a casting search, and I don’t think that person exists.” Does that frustrate him? “That I can’t write about the most important thing going on? Not too much. A little bit.”

He is now 61. Does he not worry that his best days are behind him? “No, no, I think they’re ahead of me, actually. I think I’m getting better.” In this confidence, I glimpse the charlatan 25-year-old bond salesman that Lewis once was. Yet I leave breakfast feeling that, if I were a renegade investor cynically making billions from climate catastrophe, I would tell him everything.

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I, too, would like to write about climate change, and I find I’m stymied in similar fashion: where do you begin? Where do you stop? Writing about a hyperobject is extraordinarily difficult.
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Police sweep Google searches to find suspects; now the tactic is facing its first legal challenge • NBC News

Jon Schuppe:

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A teen charged with setting a fire that killed five members of a Senegalese immigrant family in Denver, Colorado, has become the first person to challenge police use of Google search histories to find someone who might have committed a crime, according to his lawyers.

…In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020. Three adults and two children died in the fire.

That search of Google’s records helped point investigators to the teen and two friends, who were eventually charged in the deadly fire, according to police records. All were juveniles at the time of their arrests. Two of them, including the 17-year-old, are being tried as adults; they both pleaded not guilty. The defendant in juvenile court has not yet entered a plea.

The 17-year-old’s lawyers say the search, and all evidence that came from it, should be thrown out because it amounted to a blind expedition through billions of Google users’ queries based on a hunch that the killer typed the address into a search bar. That, the lawyers argued, violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches.

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Tricky: the point of principle – against unreasonable searches – is what protects you from overreach. Equally, a family is dead.
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Twitter faces ‘worst case scenario’ as Elon Musk terminates purchase • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski, Naomi Nix and Joseph Menn:

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Elon Musk’s attempt to terminate his Twitter acquisition will likely force the social network into a protracted legal battle and send its stock price diving — thrusting a new level of chaos upon the firm after months of public disputes have battered its reputation and employee morale.

In short? “This was worst case scenario for Twitter, and now it’s happened,” said Dan Ives, the managing director and senior equity research analyst covering the tech sector at Wedbush Securities.

Ives warned that Musk’s bid to walk away may make the company appear to be “damaged goods” in the eyes of other investors or potential acquirers. Twitter shares were down nearly 6% in after hours trading on Friday. Wedbush Securities projects the stock could sink to between $25 and $30 when the market reopens Monday, down more than 30% from where it closed Friday afternoon before Musk’s filing.

In a Friday evening news release, Twitter’s board threatened to “pursue legal action” to enforce the terms of the $44bn deal Musk struck in April to buy the social network and take it private. He is required to go through with the purchase, barring a major change to the business, which legal experts say is difficult to prove.

Twitter’s board said that it was confident the company would prevail in court, but analysts warn — and employees fear — that Musk’s letter sets the stage for a turbulent period, which could carry new financial risks for the company and its workers.

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Matt Levine at Bloomberg hasn’t believed that Musk is serious pretty much from the start, and his analysis on Saturday was to some extent a victory lap. He doesn’t think Musk has much hope in court. I’d expect Musk will end up paying somewhere between $1bn and $5bn to make the hassle stop. A nice payday for Twitter, if it can now steady the ship.
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How Conti ransomware group crippled Costa Rica — then fell apart • Financial Times

Christine Murray and Mehul Srivastava:

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Usually, hackers manage to gain access to single systems but Costa Rica’s case highlights the risk posed by weak cyber security to a nation’s entire IT infrastructure. In Costa Rica, Conti had spent weeks, if not months, of tunnelling around in its government systems, leaping from one ministry to the other.

Conti offered to return the data: at a price of up to $20mn. But Costa Rica’s government refused to pay the ransom. Instead, newly installed President Rodrigo Chaves declared a national emergency, launched a hunt for alleged “traitors” and leaned on tech savvier allies such as the US and Spain to come to its aid.

“We are at war, and that is not an exaggeration,” Chaves said in the days after his inauguration in mid-May, blaming the prior administration for hiding the true extent of the disruption, which he compared to terrorism.

The stand-off left parts of Costa Rica’s digital infrastructure crippled for months, paralysing online tax collection, disrupting public healthcare and the pay of some public sector workers.

In the meantime, Costa Rica’s shadowy tormentors were themselves a spent force, victims of geopolitical rivalries in the hacking world that had been inflamed by the war in Ukraine. After declaring its support for the Russian invasion on Feb 24, the group was betrayed by one of its insiders, purportedly a Ukrainian hacker-for-hire, who leaked their toolkits, internal chats and other secrets online in retaliation.

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Still an ongoing problem; its novelty might have worn off but it’s as troublesome as ever, if not more so.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The innocent-looking trolley tram has given rise to a whole range of mindbending ethics problems. What if it’s a choice between killing five lobsters… or one cat? CC-licensed photo by Alex W 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. Freely given. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

There’s another Social Warming Substack post going live today at 0845 BST. Today: what it’s like recording an audiobook that some idio–that you wrote.

Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in peril • The Washington Post

Faiz Siddiqui and Gerrit De Vynck:

»

Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in serious jeopardy, three people familiar with the matter say, as Musk’s camp concluded that Twitter’s figures on spam accounts are not verifiable.

Musk’s team has stopped engaging in certain discussions around funding for the $44bn deal, including with a party named as a likely backer, one of the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing discussions.

Talks with investors have cooled in recent weeks as Musk’s camp has raised doubts about the recent data “fire hose” — a trove of data sold to corporate customers — they received from Twitter. Musk’s team’s doubts about the spam figures signal they believe they do not have enough information to evaluate Twitter’s prospects as a business, the people said.

Now that Musk’s team has concluded Twitter’s figures on spam accounts are not verifiable, one of the people said, it is expected to take potentially drastic action.

The person said it was likely a change in direction from Musk’s team would come soon, though they did not say exactly what they thought that change would be.

If Musk pulls out of the deal, it will potentially trigger a massive legal battle.

«

I think the first sentence should say “Musk’s camp concluded that Tesla’s shares have fallen too far to fund the deal easily.” Also, perhaps a period of reflection has given him time to realise that running a social network isn’t a bed of roses, and that it would probably be better left to people who’ve been doing it for years. The spam account stuff is pure chaff; when he signed the agreement in April he skipped the due diligence that he’s now pretending to do.

Anyhow, it looks like this deal is now too expensive and too troublesome and time-consuming for him. Expect it to collapse, and Twitter to gradually demand the $1bn default payment, and Musk to tweet things like “Eat my shorts!”
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China: MI5 and FBI heads warn of ‘immense’ threat • BBC News

Gordon Corera:

»

The heads of UK and US security services have made an unprecedented joint appearance to warn of the threat from China.

FBI director Christopher Wray said China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security” and had interfered in politics, including recent elections.

MI5 head Ken McCallum said his service had more than doubled its work against Chinese activity in the last three years and would be doubling it again.

MI5 is now running seven times as many investigations related to activities of the Chinese Communist Party compared to 2018, he added.

The FBI’s Wray warned that if China was to forcibly take Taiwan it would “represent one of the most horrific business disruptions the world has ever seen”.

…McCallum also said the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party was “game-changing”, while Wray called it “immense” and “breath-taking”.

Wray warned the audience – which included chief executives of businesses and senior figures from universities – that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology” using a range of tools.

He said it posed “an even more serious threat to western businesses than even many sophisticated businesspeople realised”. He cited cases in which people linked to Chinese companies out in rural America had been digging up genetically modified seeds which would have cost them billions of dollars and nearly a decade to develop themselves.

«

Not sure GM seeds is the best example in the universe; couldn’t they just order that from the seed supplier?
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Things fall apart • The Debatable Land

Alex Massie, with what I thought was the best take on the events of Thursday:

»

among the first things Johnson did as prime minister was recast the Tory party in his image. One Nation sceptics were not so much eased out as brutally jettisoned. It was Boris’s way or no way at all. You could build a better cabinet from those Johnson effectively expelled – Clarke, Grieve, Hammond, Stewart et al – than from those he kept. Like many superficially strong moves this one actually revealed an essential weakness – and a smallness – at the core of Johnson’s government. It was a purge and these are rarely conducted without malice. No amount of smiling or joshing or buffoonery may disguise that.

Johnson didn’t throw it all away because he didn’t have it in the first place.

What was the point?

This is a gloomy question but Johnson’s government did not end with a melancholy sense of squandered promise. It was, typically, all style and no substance. No surprise, really, since this has been Johnson’s operational default his entire career. The heavy lifting has been done by other people. At The Spectator, for instance, almost all the work of actually editing the magazine was done by Johnson’s long-suffering deputy, Stuart Reid. Johnson was a figurehead editor and while a weekly magazine may cope with that, running the country needs just a little more commitment.

(As a columnist, meanwhile, it would be ungenerous to deny that Johnson had talent in a show-boating sense but his copy, colourful as it might be and entertaining to some, nonetheless had a curiously weightless quality to it. Yes, fine, but what’s the real point of it? And for all that folk liked to use the term “Wodehousian” in connection with Boris the journalist, there was one vital difference: Wodehouse would throw out a joke if it interrupted or got in the way of the plot. Johnson, by contrast, could never resist the gag, even at the cost of undermining all else. The gag, in fact, was the point. I do not mean this unkindly: newspapers are by their nature ephemeral, but it is wise to at least be aware of their limitations. One other small, but revealing, note: Johnson was notorious for filing his copy late, no matter how much this might inconvenience other, rather less well-paid, people. Just Boris being Boris, of course, but other people had to cope with or clear up the mess.)

«

Lazy and late. Incredible it took so long to catch up with him.
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Boris Johnson steps down as PM with tech legacy in tatters • The Register

Lindsay Clark:

»

Surprising no one who witnessed the politician back cable cars as a revolution in river crossing or a garden bridge as an innovation in inner-city expansion, the outgoing Prime Minister leaves behind a set of science and technology projects which are either yet to be completed or completely off the wall.

Dangling plans include his ambition to accelerate the arrival of productive nuclear fusion – a technical breakthrough which always promises to be 20 years off.

In 2019, Johnson praised the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxford, only for others to reveal the organization benefited from large chunks of funding from the European Union, the powerful political and economic bloc Johnson so passionately persuaded the UK to leave.

Fission is also a favorite. Johnson has been vocal in backing small modular reactors, a technology from jet engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce. A study has claimed some miniaturized fission units produce as much as 35 times more waste to generate the same amount of power as a regular plant.

The UK is also in the throes of an attempt to mimic the US’s success with DARPA – the defence-led science unit which played a role in the development of the internet.

As of last year, Aria – the Advanced Research and Invention Agency – hadn’t even begun to happen despite five years passing since the UK decided to leave the EU. Now reports suggest the launch of the agency will be delayed until at least the end of this year.

Meanwhile, UK scientists are being cut off from European funding, post-Brexit.

«

Promises, empty promises.
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Meta plans to call new virtual reality headset the ‘Quest Pro’ • BNN Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

Meta Platforms’s upcoming high-end headset for virtual and augmented reality (VR, AR) will be called the Meta Quest Pro, according to code findings inside the company’s iPhone app for setting up headsets. 

Meta has been touting its new device since last year, using the codename Project Cambria. The company is likely to introduce the official name later this year along with details about the headset’s availability. It will cost more than $1,000, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t yet public.

The device is a major priority for Meta, which has recently scaled back other hardware projects such as a smartwatch, and will be a prime competitor to Apple’s upcoming mixed-reality headset when it goes on sale next year. 

The new Meta headset will have far better graphics processing and power compared with the regular Meta Quest headset. It will also include external high-resolution cameras to simulate AR in color, eye tracking, more storage, new controllers and high-resolution displays for virtual reality.

A Meta spokeswoman declined to comment. Meta typically announces new headsets and related features in October. 

The code string indicating the name of the product, which was found by developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News, references the pairing of the device to a controller. The code reads: “Pair Meta Quest Pro right controller.”

«

That price really is quite wild. Who has a thousand dollars (or pounds) to spare and wants to tie themselves to Facebook? Unless it really is a corporate metaverse play. Which is possible, but still seems very early.
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Absurd Trolley Problems

Neal Agarwal:

»

Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, killing 1 person instead. What do you do?

«

You start off with two options (this one), but the problems get weirder and weirder. I stopped at

»

Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 lobsters. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, running over a cat instead. What do you do?

«

because I don’t know what the exchange rate between lobsters and cats is. (Thanks Gregory for the link.)
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The danger of licence plate readers in post-Roe America • WIRED

Thor Benson:

»

Since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, America’s extensive surveillance state could soon be turned against those seeking abortions or providing abortion care.

Currently, nine states have almost entirely banned abortion, and more are expected to follow suit. Many Republican lawmakers in these states are discussing the possibility of preventing people from traveling across state lines to obtain an abortion. If such plans are enacted and withstand legal scrutiny, one of the key technologies that could be deployed to track people trying to cross state lines is automated licence plate readers (ALPRs). They’re employed heavily by police forces across the US, but they’re also used by private actors.

ALPRs are cameras that are mounted on street poles, overpasses, and elsewhere that can identify and capture licence plate numbers on passing cars for the purpose of issuing speeding tickets and tolls, locating stolen cars, and more. State and local police maintain databases of captured licence plates and frequently use those databases in criminal investigations.

The police have access to not only licence plate data collected by their own ALPRs but also data gathered by private companies. Firms like Flock Safety and Motorola Solutions have their own networks of ALPRs that are mounted to the vehicles of private companies and organizations they work with, such as car repossession outfits. Flock, for instance, claims it’s collecting licence plate data in roughly 1,500 cities and can capture data from over a billion vehicles every month.

“They have fleets of cars that have ALPRs on them that just suck up data. They sell that to various clients, including repo firms and government agencies. They also sell them to police departments,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “It’s a giant, nationwide mass surveillance system. That obviously has serious implications should interstate travel become part of forced-birth enforcement.”

«

“Forced-birth enforcement” is quite a phrase; its Gilead-style echoes are surely intentional, but, equally, not wrong. Perhaps you do need something as pivotal as Roe v Wade being overturned to expose how extensive the US surveillance state is, and how little protection its citizens have from it.
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Asymptomatic monkeypox virus infections among male sexual health clinic attendees in Belgium • medRxiv

»

Monkeypox is transmitted by close contact with symptomatic cases, and those infected are assumed to be uniformly symptomatic. Evidence of subclinical monkeypox infection is limited to a few immunological studies which found evidence of immunity against orthopoxviruses in asymptomatic individuals who were exposed to monkeypox cases. We aimed to assess whether asymptomatic infections occurred among individuals who underwent sexually transmitted infection (STI) screening in a large Belgian STI clinic around the start of the 2022 monkeypox epidemic in Belgium.

…In stored samples from 224 men, we identified three cases with a positive anorectal monkeypox PCR. All three men denied having had any symptoms in the weeks before and after the sample was taken. None of them reported exposure to a diagnosed monkeypox case, nor did any of their contacts develop clinical monkeypox. Follow-up samples were taken 21 to 37 days after the initial sample, by which time the monkeypox-specific PCR was negative, likely as a consequence of spontaneous clearance of the infection.

«

Asymptomatic monkeypox? This is concerning. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Twitter, challenging orders to remove content, sues India’s government • The New York Times

Karan Deep Singh and Kate Conger:

»

Twitter said on Tuesday that it had sued the Indian government, escalating the social media company’s fight in the country as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks more control over critical online posts.

Twitter’s suit, filed in the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, challenges a recent order from the Indian government for the company to remove content and block dozens of accounts. Twitter complied with the order, which had a Monday deadline, but then sought judicial relief. A date has not been set for a judge to review Twitter’s suit.

The suit is the first legal challenge that the company has issued to push back against laws passed in 2021 that extended the Indian government’s censorship powers. The rules gave the government oversight of Twitter and other social media companies, allowing the authorities to demand that posts or accounts critical of them be hidden from Indian users. Executives at the companies can face criminal penalties if they do not comply with the demands.

The laws have been met with an outcry from Twitter and other social media platforms, which view India as an essential part of their plans for long-term growth. The companies have argued that India’s rules allow the government to broadly censor its critics, and that they erode security measures like encryption. But Indian officials have said the law is necessary to combat online misinformation.

Twitter is not seeking to overturn the laws, but it argues in its suit that the government interpreted those laws too broadly, said a person with knowledge of the filing who was not authorized to speak publicly.

«

India’s government really has been pushing censorship, out of sight of much of the rest of the world. In its way, it’s like China, but we assume that because it’s a democracy that it must be beneficent. Not so, with Modi.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sand is plentiful, but not infinite, and supplies are – perhaps surprisingly – coming under strain. CC-licensed photo by Joaquin Moreno on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. How do you remove barnacles? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Could fake news provoke violence in Kenya’s elections? • Coda Story

Rebekah Robinson:

»

Kenya’s general elections to elect a new President and members of the National Assembly will take place on August 9 and the race is close and tense. Much of the tension is the result of the outgoing president, Uhuru Kenyatta, throwing his support behind opposition leader Raila Odinga rather than William Ruto, the current deputy president.  

Waves of disinformation pushed by paid social media influencers have been a growing concern in the run-up to elections that some experts worry could lead to violent eruptions. The country is still haunted by clashes during the 2007 elections that left over 1,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), set up in the wake of the violence 15 years ago, rates the likelihood of electoral violence as just about “medium high risk,” while in Nairobi County, home to the capital city, the risk of violence is considered to be “very high.” 

While access to digital resources has grown exponentially, studies suggest that the political conversation online in Kenya is often toxic, particularly on TikTok. Research by Mozilla Foundation fellow Odanga Madung shows that “hate speech, incitement against communities, and synthetic and manipulated content…is both present and spreading on the platform.” TikTok, the report argues, needs to do more to implement its own rules on objectionable and inflammatory content. Kenya is one of the few countries in the region that has not deliberately shut down the internet.

«

The riots in 2007 make the US January 6 insurrection look like the mildest of tea parties. The potential for social media to really make things bad continues to grow in countries where democracy comes most under siege.
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Apple unveils new security setting to block Pegasus attacks on iPhones • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

»

Apple said Wednesday that it will introduce an innovative security feature to give potential targets of government hacking an easy way to make their iPhones safer.

The company said it would be releasing the new “Lockdown Mode” in test versions of its operating systems shortly, with full distribution in the fall as part of iOS 16 for iPhones as well as the operating systems for iPads and Mac computers.

The action follows waves of attacks documented by The Washington Post and others showing that iPhones were being hacked by Pegasus spyware distributed by the Israeli company NSO Group and then used to capture contact information and live audio. But while Pegasus prompted Apple to act, it is not the only spyware that would be hobbled by the new feature.

Once engaged, Lockdown Mode will block most types of attachments on messages and prevent the phone from previewing Web links, which are frequently used to transmit spyware. Locking a phone will disable wired connections to computers and accessories that are used to take control of devices that have been seized by police or stolen by spies.

Apple’s lockdown tactic resolves a long-standing tension in its design approach between security concerns and the pursuit of easy-to-use, highly functional capabilities. The extra usability made the phones more vulnerable to attack through iMessage, FaceTime and other software. Lockdown Mode gives users the choice of whether to maintain those features. When activated, it limits what the phone can do.

«

Or just buy a Nokia 3310?
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Confidence in US institutions down; average at new low • Gallup

Jeffrey Jones:

»

Americans are less confident in major U.S. institutions than they were a year ago, with significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any. The largest declines in confidence are 11 percentage points for the Supreme Court — as reported in late June before the court issued controversial rulings on gun laws and abortion — and 15 points for the presidency, matching the 15-point drop in President Joe Biden’s job approval rating since the last confidence survey in June 2021.

Gallup first measured confidence in institutions in 1973 and has done so annually since 1993. This year’s survey was conducted June 1-20.

Confidence currently ranges from a high of 68% for small business to a low of 7% for Congress. The military is the only institution besides small business for which a majority of Americans express confidence (64%). Confidence in the police, at 45%, has fallen below the majority level for only the second time, with the other instance occurring in 2020 in the weeks after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

This year’s poll marks new lows in confidence for all three branches of the federal government — the Supreme Court (25%), the presidency (23%) and Congress.

«

Arguably because two of the three branches don’t represent the majority – both the Supreme Court and Senate are terribly unrepresentative of the population.
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March 2021: the clown king: how Boris Johnson made it by playing the fool • The Guardian

Edward Docx, in March 2021:

»

Would-be biographers of Johnson might do worse than to read Paul Bouissac, the leading scholar on the semiotics of clowning. Clowns are “transgressors”, he writes, cultural subversives who enact rituals and dramatic tableaux that “ignore the tacit rules of social games to indulge in symbolic actions that … toy with these norms as if they were arbitrary, dispensable convention.” Clowns “undermine the ground upon which our language and our society rest by revealing their fragility”. They “foreground the tension” between “instinct” and “constraint”. Bouissac could be writing directly of Johnson when he adds: “Their performing identities transcend the rules of propriety.” They are, he says, “improper by essence”.

Observe classic Johnson closely as he arrives at an event. See how his entire being and bearing is bent towards satire, subversion, mockery. The hair is his clown’s disguise. Just as the makeup and the red nose bestow upon the circus clown a form of anonymity and thus freedom to overturn conventions, so Johnson’s candy-floss mop announces his licence. His clothes are often baggy – ill-fitting; a reminder of the clothes of the clown. He walks towards us quizzically, as if to mock the affected “power walking” of other leaders. Absurdity seems to be wrestling with solemnity in every expression and limb. Notice how he sometimes feigns to lose his way as if to suggest the ridiculousness of the event, the ridiculousness of his presence there, the ridiculousness of any human being going in any direction at all.

His weight, meanwhile, invites us to consider that the trouble with the world (if only we’d admit it) is that it’s really all about appetite and greed. (His convoluted affairs and uncountable children whisper the same about sex.) Before he says a word, he has transmitted his core message – that the human conventions of styling hair, fitting clothes and curbing desires are all … ludicrous. And we are encouraged – laughingly – to agree. And, of course, we do. Because, in a sense, they are ludicrous.

«

Last chance, while he’s still relevant.
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How a fake job offer took down the world’s most popular crypto game • The Block

Ryan Weeks:

»

Ronin, the Ethereum-linked sidechain that underpins play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, lost $540 million in crypto to an exploit in March. While the US government later tied the incident to North Korean hacking group Lazarus, full details of how the exploit was carried out have not been disclosed. 

The Block can now reveal that a fake job ad was Ronin’s undoing. 

According to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who were granted anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the incident, a senior engineer at Axie Infinity was duped into applying for a job at a company that, in reality, did not exist.  

Axie Infinity was huge. At its peak, workers in Southeast Asia were even able to earn a living through the play-to-earn game. It boasted 2.7 million daily active users and $214m in weekly trading volume for its in-game NFTs in November last year — although both numbers have since plummeted.

Earlier this year, staff at Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis were approached by people purporting to represent the fake company and encouraged to apply for jobs, according to the people familiar with the matter. One source added that the approaches were made through the professional networking site LinkedIn. 

After what one source described as multiple rounds of interviews, a Sky Mavis engineer was offered a job with an extremely generous compensation package. 

The fake “offer” was delivered in the form of a PDF document, which the engineer downloaded — allowing spyware to infiltrate Ronin’s systems. From there, hackers were able to attack and take over four out of nine validators on the Ronin network — leaving them just one validator short of total control. 

In a post-mortem blog post on the hack, published April 27, Sky Mavis said: “Employees are under constant advanced spear-phishing attacks on various social channels and one employee was compromised. This employee no longer works at Sky Mavis. The attacker managed to leverage that access to penetrate Sky Mavis IT infrastructure and gain access to the validator nodes.”

«

Certainly has all the hallmarks of a state hacking gang looking for cash. North Korea has discovered that crypto in particular is an easy target.
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Google-backed Glance to launch in US within two months • TechCrunch

Manish Singh:

»

Glance, a subsidiary of adtech giant InMobi Group, is planning to launch its lockscreen platform on Android smartphones in the US within two months, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The startup is engaging with wireless carriers in the US for partnerships and is gearing up to launch on several smartphone models by next month, the source said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private.

Glance, valued at around $2bn, serves media and current affairs content and casual games on Android handsets’ lockscreens. The service, which has amassed presence on about 400 million smartphones in Asian markets, is building a “premium offering” for the U.S., where individuals have higher propensity to pay for digital services, the source said.

A spokesperson for Glance declined to comment Tuesday. The startup said in February that it planned to expand globally in the coming years.

«

Lockscreen ads. Boke. Expanding globally. Double boke.
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The cost of sand has spiked 150% in Texas • Bloomberg via Yahoo

David Wethe:

»

Frack sand, which gets blasted through shale rocks to unlock oil and natural gas, is at about $55 a ton, up from $22 at the end of 2021, data on spot prices from energy-research firm Lium show. Demand is climbing as oil explorers turn the taps back on after Covid-driven cutbacks. But like in so many pockets of the economy, the recovery is sparking a mismatch. Sand suppliers have seen disruptions, labor shortages and trucking bottlenecks. The chief executive officer of US Silica Holdings Inc., the largest publicly traded frack-sand miner, has dubbed the tight market “sandemonium” and said his company is sold out.

That’s where Steve Brock and his upstart sand-mining operation, Nomad Proppant LLC, come in. Since the early days of the shale revolution more than a decade ago, fracking operators have relied on mined sand that’s delivered to their sites by truck — across distances as long as 100 miles. Brock, Nomad’s chief commercial officer, wants to turn that model on its head.

His idea: Why not just use the sand that’s right under your feet?

Nomad has developed machinery that can go directly to the frack wells (give or take 10 to 20 miles), vastly reducing the burden of freight costs and the time-consuming process of trucking.

«

Related: “Earth is running out of sand … which is, you know, pretty concerning” (Popular Mechanics), which says that

»

The most-extracted solid material in the world, and second-most used global resource behind water, sand is an unregulated material used extensively in nearly every construction project on Earth. And with 50 billion metric tons consumed annually—enough to build an 88-foot-tall, 88-foot-wide wall around the world—our sand depletion is on the rise, and a completely unregulated rise at that.

«

(Thanks G for the link.)
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French state plans to take full control of EDF • Financial Times

Sarah White:

»

France plans to take full control of power group EDF, a nuclear energy specialist that has been grappling with high debt, production outages and conflicting demands from its state shareholder as it gears up to try to process its biggest orders for new reactors in decades.

The takeover, announced by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne on Wednesday, would close a rollercoaster chapter for the former monopoly, which has included a shelved government attempt last year to restructure the sprawling company, still 84% controlled by the state.

“I confirm to you today that the state intends to control 100% of EDF’s capital,” Borne told lawmakers as she set out priorities for the new government following Emmanuel Macron’s re-election as president in April and legislative elections in June. She did not detail how the operation would take place, or when.

Shares in the company, which was listed in 2005, soared 14.3% after Borne’s speech. The stock held by minority shareholders is worth roughly €5bn at current market prices.

Known as EDF when the utility was created just after the second world war, EDF’s capital was opened up to private investors with the argument it would bring more financial discipline and transparency to a group with a history of internal quarrels and that is sometimes described as a quasi state-within-a-state.

«

Nationalising essential public services? Damn radical centrists.
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Is Apple failing at modems? • Digits to Dollars

Jonathan Greenberg:

»

The phone in question is the 2023 iPhone, which is still 15 months away. Typically, supply decisions for the iPhone get locked down around 12 months in advance, so maybe there is some time for change. On the other hand, the modem is an important part of the phone, more on that in a moment, so the rest of the iPhone team can probably only make a host of other decisions after the modem is fixed. So we are in the ball park. In some future post, we will deconstruct sell-side data sourcing a bit, but for our purposes here, we would give at least even odds that Kuo is correct.

Apple’s chip team, Apple Silicon, is an incredibly proficient organization. We regularly describe them as the best-run semiconductor company in the world. They have scored all kinds of impressive achievements like the M Series CPU and the industry-beating A Series application processor for phones. How could they fail at a modem? Put simply, modems are hard.

Modems, also called basebands, are the chip that connect a device to the cellular network. Without a modem an iPhone is just an iPod (which do not exist anymore). As we noted above, modems are usually the first design decision made when building a phone, everything else depends on that choice, they are the ultimate strategic high-ground in phones. But what do they do?

[Explanation of what they do – see original post]

…To put it mildly, modems are very different from CPUs or GPUs, let alone task-specific AI ASICs. As such, developing them requires a very different skill set from designing those other chips. If you look at an uncapped CPU, there are clear patterns, like looking at industrial farm plots from 30,000 feet. Uncap a modem and it looks much less tidy, more akin to the plots of a village of Middle Age serf-bound farmers. (And for what it’s worth, it is very hard to find a photo of these online, in part because they are so unappealing to look at.)

So it is very possible that Apple just did not have sufficient design experience to build the chip. If we had to guess, maybe they completed a design but found that its power performance did not meet expectations. It is important to remember that Apple has failed at building networking chips before. Ten years ago they acquired a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth team from Texas Instruments, but today Apple is still buying those chips from Broadcom.

«

This, possibly, is despite having Intel’s 5G team on board. Quite dispiriting for them both if so, but some tasks require small super-competent teams – see Apple Silicon, ARM and Qualcomm.
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Man from Chile paid 300 times his salary by his employer takes the money and runs • Metro News

Jasper King:

»

one employee who discovered he had been paid nearly £150,000 for a month’s work instead of the usual £450 decided to duck and run.

The unnamed staff member at Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos in Chile did initially raise the eye-watering overpayment for May with his manager who then flagged it to HR.

He agreed to return the cash and promised to go to the bank the following day. But instead of giving it back, the man withdrew it and hasn’t been seen since.

His employer Consorcio tried to make contact with the man over the next three days but to no avail, according to local media outlet Diario Financiero.

They later received contact from the unnamed man’s lawyers who informed Consorcio that the man had resigned from his position with the company.

After no sign of contact, bosses at the company decided to file a complaint with law officials charging the man with misappropriation of fund.

«

That’s going to be a fun, extremely slow, chase. They paid him 25 years’ salary. (Standard take-home pay is £750 per month, nearly 50% more than he was getting.)

Odd how there isn’t the usual “the mistake was blamed on a computer”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Large Hadron Collider has been up to its tricks again, and found more quarks. They matter in ways nobody’s quite explained sufficiently. CC-licensed photo by Mark Hillary 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. Resigned to it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Crypto collapse reverberates widely among black American investors • Financial Times

Taylor Nicole Rogers:

»

The widespread losses caused by the cryptocurrency crash are even broader among black investors.

A quarter of black American investors owned cryptocurrencies at the start of the year, compared with only 15% of white investors, according to a survey by Ariel Investments and Charles Schwab. Black Americans were more than twice as likely to purchase cryptocurrency as their first investment.

The value of those investments has imploded. The total market capitalisation of cryptocurrencies has plunged below $1tn from more than $3.2tn last year. The fall in digital assets comes alongside a bear market in US stocks.

Black Americans’ higher exposure to cryptocurrencies has left them more vulnerable to the financial downturn, even as their households on average hold less wealth.

The attraction of building wealth, amplified by marketing, drew many black investors into cryptocurrencies. The dollar price of bitcoin rose 9,300% in the five years to its peak in November.

Jefferson Noel, 27, said he gained his first exposure to crypto in January 2019 when he accidentally invested $5 in bitcoin while using Cash App, a payment service.

“I had no idea what it was, and I don’t even remember doing it,” he said.

By last May his unintentional investment was worth $70. The astronomical gain inspired him to take a friend’s advice to plough $20,000 of his savings into other cryptocurrencies, such as dogecoin, over more traditional investments such as index funds.

“[Black Americans] do not want to be left behind again,” Noel said. “As far as I can tell, the black community sees crypto as a way to even the playing field and get in the game before the gatekeepers prevent others from participating.”

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‘Sand battery’ could solve green energy’s big problem • BBC News

Matt McGrath:

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Right now, most batteries are made with lithium and are expensive with a large, physical footprint, and can only cope with a limited amount of excess power.

But in the town of Kankaanpää, a team of young Finnish engineers have completed the first commercial installation of a battery made from sand that they believe can solve the storage problem in a low-cost, low impact way.

“Whenever there’s like this high surge of available green electricity, we want to be able to get it into the storage really quickly,” said Markku Ylönen, one of the two founders of Polar Night Energy who have developed the product.

The device has been installed in the Vatajankoski power plant which runs the district heating system for the area. Low-cost electricity warms the sand up to 500C by resistive heating (the same process that makes electric fires work). This generates hot air which is circulated in the sand by means of a heat exchanger.

Sand is a very effective medium for storing heat and loses little over time. The developers say that their device could keep sand at 500C for several months. So when energy prices are higher, the battery discharges the hot air which warms water for the district heating system which is then pumped around homes, offices and even the local swimming pool.

The idea for the sand battery was first developed at a former pulp mill in the city of Tampere, with the council donating the work space and providing funding to get it off the ground. “If we have some power stations that are just working for a few hours in the wintertime, when it’s the coldest, it’s going to be extremely expensive,” said Elina Seppänen, an energy and climate specialist for the city. But if we have this sort of solution that provides flexibility for the use, and storage of heat, that would help a lot in terms of expense, I think.”

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Things of which there are a lot: sand.
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Vast cache of Chinese police files offered for sale in alleged hack • WSJ

Karen Hao and Rachel Liang:

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The cache allegedly includes billions of records stolen from police in Shanghai, containing data on one billion Chinese citizens, according to a post advertising its availability that was published on Thursday by the hacker on a popular online cybercrime forum. The post, which began circulating on social media over the weekend, put the price for the leak at 10 Bitcoin, or roughly $200,000.

Cybersecurity experts say the claimed hack is alarming not just for its alleged size—which would rank among the biggest ever recorded and the largest known for China—but also because of the sensitivity of the information contained in the government database.

A sample of the data posted by the hacker, who claimed it included 750,000 records, contained individuals’ personal names, national ID numbers, phone numbers, birthdays and birthplaces, as well as detailed summaries of crimes and incidents reported to the police. The cases ranged from incidents of petty theft and cyber fraud to reports of domestic violence, dating as far back as 1995 to as recently as 2019.

While the scope of the data leak remains unconfirmed, The Wall Street Journal verified several of the records in the leak by calling people whose numbers were listed. Five people confirmed all of the data, including case details that would be difficult to obtain from any source other than the police. Four more people confirmed basic information such as their names before hanging up.

One woman, alarmed at the accuracy of the leaked details, asked whether the information about her had come from the iPhone that she had reported stolen in her case file in 2016.

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The flip side of surveillance.
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‘Algospeak’ is changing our language in real time • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz:

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Algospeak refers to code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems. For instance, in many online videos, it’s common to say “unalive” rather than “dead,” “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” or “spicy eggplant” instead of “vibrator.”

As the pandemic pushed more people to communicate and express themselves online, algorithmic content moderation systems have had an unprecedented impact on the words we choose, particularly on TikTok, and given rise to a new form of internet-driven Aesopian language.

Unlike other mainstream social platforms, the primary way content is distributed on TikTok is through an algorithmically curated “For You” page; having followers doesn’t guarantee people will see your content. This shift has led average users to tailor their videos primarily toward the algorithm, rather than a following, which means abiding by content moderation rules is more crucial than ever.

When the pandemic broke out, people on TikTok and other apps began referring to it as the “Backstreet Boys reunion tour” or calling it the “panini” or “panda express” as platforms down-ranked videos mentioning the pandemic by name in an effort to combat misinformation. When young people began to discuss struggling with mental health, they talked about “becoming unalive” in order to have frank conversations about suicide without algorithmic punishment. Sex workers, who have long been censored by moderation systems, refer to themselves on TikTok as “accountants” and use the corn emoji as a substitute for the word “porn.”

As discussions of major events are filtered through algorithmic content delivery systems, more users are bending their language. Recently, in discussing the invasion of Ukraine, people on YouTube and TikTok have used the sunflower emoji to signify the country. When encouraging fans to follow them elsewhere, users will say “blink in lio” for “link in bio.”

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As she notes, this predates the internet, and was used early on in the internet’s life similarly to bypass word filters in chatrooms.
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From aardvark to woke: inside the Oxford English Dictionary • New Statesman

Pippa Bailey:

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The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has served as a lexical record of the world’s most widely spoken language – and its culture – since it was founded in the mid-19th century. “Post-truth”, for example, was the dictionary’s word of 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump, while in 2020 it elected not to choose one – because no single word could sum up the pandemic experience. Last year, “police brutality”, “deadname”, “cancel culture” and “anti-vaxxer” entered the dictionary for the first time; previous years gave us “fake news” (2019), “Silent Generation” (2018) and “woke” (2017).

The June 2022 update includes several terms that reflect our changing understanding of sexuality and gender: “multisexual”, “pangender”, “gender expression”, “gender presentation” and “enby” (derived from “NB”, meaning “non-binary”), as well as Terf. But this wasn’t, McPherson says, a conscious decision; rather, these additions organically came together as their usage grew. The team decided against labelling Terf “offensive”, instead explaining in a usage note that it might be considered so; it was felt that this “was a bit more nuanced than just slapping on ‘derogatory’ or ‘chiefly derogatory’”.

[50-year-old lexicographer Fiona] McPherson, who has an easy laugh and a melodic Scottish lilt, is part of a team that has been revising the OED since 1993, their progress published quarterly. Outdated entries are revised, new words are added and those that pass from use will be marked “rare” or “obsolete”; changing sensibilities mean that others will be labelled “offensive” or “derogatory”. It is an enormous task, and one in which I have a professional as well as a personal interest: part of my role at the New Statesman involves maintaining our style guide, enforcing the rules of grammar and excising cliché. The decisions McPherson and her colleagues make filter into these pages; on questions of spelling and meaning, the team of sub-editors I lead defers to Oxford dictionaries.

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LHCb discovers three new exotic particles • CERN

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Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks”. These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists at the same time as conventional hadrons, about six decades ago, but only relatively recently, in the past 20 years, have they been observed by LHCb and other experiments.

Most of the exotic hadrons discovered in the past two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark, with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down or strange quark or their antiquarks. But in the past two years, LHCb has discovered different kinds of exotic hadrons. Two years ago, the collaboration discovered a tetraquark made up of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, and two “open-charm” tetraquarks consisting of a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark and a strange antiquark. And last year it found the first-ever instance of a “double open-charm” tetraquark with two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Open charm means that the particle contains a charm quark without an equivalent antiquark.

The discoveries announced today by the LHCb collaboration include new kinds of exotic hadrons. The first kind, observed in an analysis of “decays” of negatively charged B mesons, is a pentaquark made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark. It is the first pentaquark found to contain a strange quark.

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Got that? I did hunt around for an article that would put this into better context, but came up blank. It does matter, though, because the new quark formations may help to explain the “strong force” that holds nuclei together. At present, the theory is that when quarks come closer together the force between them becomes weaker. So where’s the strong force? Maybe from these.
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Smart contact lens prototype puts a Micro LED display on top of the eye • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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In a blog post this week, Drew Perkins, the CEO of Mojo Vision, said he was the first to have an “on-eye demonstration of a feature-complete augmented reality smart contact lens.” In an interview with CNET, he said he’s been wearing only one contact at a time for hour-long durations. Eventually, Mojo Vision would like users to be able to wear two Mojo Lens simultaneously and create 3D visual overlays, the publication said.

According to his blog, the CEO could see a compass through the contact and an on-screen teleprompter with a quote written on it. He also recalled viewing a green, monochromatic image of Albert Einstein to CNET.

At the heart of the lens is an Arm M0 processor and a Micro LED display with 14,000 pixels per inch. It’s just 0.02 inches (0.5 mm) in diameter with a 1.8-micron pixel pitch. Perkins claimed it’s the “smallest and densest display ever created for dynamic content.”

Developing the contact overall included a focus on physics and electronics miniaturization, Perkins wrote. Mojo Lens developed its power management system with “medical-grade micro-batteries” and a proprietary power management integrated circuit.

The Mojo Lens also uses a custom-configured magnetometer (CNET noted this drives the compass Perkins saw), accelerometer, and gyroscope for tracking. The goal is that AR remains visible even as you move your eyes around, Perkins wrote. Eye movement is essential as there’s no gesture control, like some smart glasses, such as Ray-Ban Stories, have. There is voice control, a Mojo Vision rep told Ars Technica, but the user interface’s primary method of control is eye-tracking.

One of the biggest obstacles facing smart glasses is how cumbersome and odd they can look. Some devices, like Stories and Nreal Air, use a sunglass-like appearance to combat this.

A contact lens sounds like it has the potential to be even more discreet than AR headgear posing as regular Ray-Bans. But the current prototype uses a “relay accessory,” as Mojo Vision’s rep put it, worn around the neck. It includes a processor, GPU, and 5 GHz radio for sending and receiving data to and from the lens. According to CNET, the accessory also sends information “back to computers that track the eye movement data for research.” Perkins’ blog said this tech required custom ASIC designs.

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Having a neck-worn extra isn’t actually that much of a hardship, after all. Remember though when people with diabetes were going to have contact lenses that would monitor their blood sugar – first from Microsoft (2011), then from Google (2014), then actually er no (2018)? Fun times.
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The hilarious Polium One is a web3 console that will never, ever get released • Kotaku

John Walker:

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The Polium One is the answer to a question no one has ever, nor will ever, ask. It is a “next-gen console for web3 gaming.” Which is to say, a render on a website for a fictional machine that I believe will absolutely will never get made. I dare them to prove me wrong.

To be clear from the start “web3”or “web 3.0” is the umbrella term for a series of transparently obvious scams, from the delusions of cryptocurrency to the embarrassment of NFTs. It doesn’t really mean anything, and if you see anyone using it, you know to steer very wide. So yes, the Polium One!

Polium, a company of such renown that it wasn’t even able to get the Twitter handle with just one underscore after the brand name, has announced its intention to create the first console designed for…for…the thingy. You know. The web3 stuff. Um, like, payments! Yes, the payments! You can pay for things on it using all sorts of crypto!

Seriously, that’s all it has. The hilarious website, suggesting a 2024 launch for backers, 2025 for the hoi polloi, has an FAQ that offers absolutely no answers, other than which bullshit payment networks it’ll accept. You, a nocoiner, might want to ask, “What games will be available at launch?” but you’ll only be told, “We are currently in talks with multiple game developers.” Meanwhile, a true believer will want to know that you can spend your pretend money via Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, BNB, Imm…

My favorite question in the FAQ is “What will be the specs?” And not just for that tortuous effort not to split the infinitive. Here’s the answer, in full: “We aim to build a high-performance console. The specs you see on the site are not confirmed until we have a functional prototype.”

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I’d be worried about how the name makes me think of polonium. (Americans start here.) One lovely tweet about the not-a-product says “I’ve always wanted a console that can play Jack Dorsey’s first tweet.”
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I watched hundreds of flat-Earth videos to learn how conspiracy theories spread • The Conversation

Carlos Diaz Ruiz is an assistant professor at the Hanken School of Economics:

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By studying how flat Earthers talk about their beliefs, we can learn how they make their arguments engaging to their audience, and in turn, learn what makes disinformation spread online.

In a recent study, my colleague Tomas Nilsson at Linnaeus University and I analysed hundreds of YouTube videos in which people argue that the Earth is flat. We paid attention to their debating techniques to understand the structure of their arguments and how they make them appear rational.

One strategy they use is to take sides in existing debates. People who are deeply attached to one side of a culture war are likely to wield any and all arguments (including truths, half-truths and opinions), if it helps them win. People invest their identity into the group and are more willing to believe fellow allies rather than perceived opponents – a phenomenon that sociologists call neo-tribalism.

The problem arises when people internalise disinformation as part of their identity. While news articles can be fact-checked, personal beliefs cannot. When conspiracy theories are part of someone’s value system or worldview, it is difficult to challenge them.

In analysing these videos, we observed that flat Earthers take advantage of ongoing culture wars by inserting their own arguments into the logic of, primarily, three main debates. These debates are longstanding and can be very personal for participants on either side.

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We are starting to form coherent theories about how disinformation spreads. Good on them for watching the videos. Saves the rest of us doing it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Giuseppe, a reader, posed a question following yesterday’s link about how you can’t open an aircraft cabin door in the air because of the pressure differential: “One thing I’ve never managed to determine conclusively is if the door can be opened between taxing and pressurisation – in other words, if a passenger could open the door while taking off, when the pressure balance is still favourable, as pressurisation starts gradually as soon as the aircraft leaves the ground.”

In the interests of Finding Stuff Out, we asked a cabin crew member we know, who replied, after some discussion with colleagues: “We think yes.” You’re requested not to test this empirically.

You may have wondered how easy it is to open an aircraft door while it’s in flight. A pilot can tell you. CC-licensed photo by Robert Couse-Baker 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. Don’t touch that dial! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Japanese court ruling poised to make Big Tech open up on algorithms • Financial Times

Shotaro Tani and Eri Sugiura:

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Japanese legal experts have said an antitrust case related to a local restaurant website could change how large internet platforms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon operate in the country, forcing them to reveal the inner workings of their secret algorithms.

Last month, a Tokyo court ruled in favour of Hanryumura, a Korean-style BBQ restaurant chain operator in an antitrust case brought against Kakaku.com, operator of Tabelog, Japan’s largest restaurant review platform.

Hanryumura successfully argued that Kakaku.com had altered the way user scores were tallied in ways that hurt sales at its restaurant outlets. While Kakaku.com has been ordered to pay Hanryumura ¥38.4mn ($284,000) in damages for “abuse of superior bargaining position”, the internet company has appealed against the decision.

Japanese legal experts said the outcome may have far-reaching implications, as the court requested Kakaku.com to disclose part of its algorithms.

While the restaurant group is constrained from publicly revealing what information was shown to it, the court’s request set a rare precedent. Big Tech groups have long argued that their algorithms should be considered trade secrets in all circumstances.

Courts and regulators across the world have begun to challenge that position, with many businesses having complained about the negative impact caused by even small changes to search and recommendations services.

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Where Japan leads, will others follow? Even if it’s just restricted to Japan, that’s a big country in terms of impact.
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What if somebody opens a door during flight? • Ask The Pilot

Patrick Smith:

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It seems that a week can’t go by without hearing the latest story about a passenger who went cuckoo and tried to yank open an emergency exit, only to be tackled and restrained by those around him, who thought they were on the verge of being ejected into the troposphere.

While the news never fails to report these events, it seldom mentions the most important fact: you cannot –- repeat, cannot — open the doors or emergency hatches of an airplane in flight.  You can’t open them for the simple reason that cabin pressure won’t allow it. Think of an aircraft door as a drain plug, fixed in place by the interior pressure.  Almost all aircraft exits open inward. Some retract upward into the ceiling; others swing outward; but they open inward first, and not even the most musclebound human will overcome the force holding them shut. At a typical cruising altitude, up to eight pounds of pressure are pushing against every square inch of interior fuselage. That’s over eleven hundred pounds against each square foot of door. Even at low altitudes, where cabin pressure levels are much less, a meager 2 p.s.i. differential is still more than anyone can displace — even after six cups of coffee and the aggravation that comes with sitting behind a shrieking baby.  The doors are further held secure by a series of electrical and/or mechanical latches.

So, while I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you enjoy being pummeled and placed in a choke-hold by panicked passengers, a person could, conceivably, sit there all day tugging on a door handle to his or her heart’s content. The door is not going to open (though you might get a red light flashing in the cockpit, causing me to spill my Coke Zero). You would need a hydraulic jack, and the TSA doesn’t allow those.

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Raises the question of why cabin crew get so excited and indulge in a struggle when someone tries to do this. The cool thing would be to watch the passenger wrestle until they were tired out and then take them aside, exhausted, for restraint. (Via John Naughton.)
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Why this crypto crash is different • Coindesk

Frances Coppola:

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The crypto ecosystem has tethered itself firmly to the traditional financial system, and the dollar dominates crypto markets just as it does traditional financial markets. And as crypto markets have grown, so has the dollar value of the cryptocurrency industry.

But these dollars aren’t real. They exist only in the virtual space. They are not, and never were, guaranteed by the only institution in the world that can create real dollars, namely the Fed[eral Reserve in the US]. The Fed has no obligation whatsoever to ensure that those who have made life-changing amounts of these “virtual dollars” can actually exchange them for real dollars. So when the crypto bubble bursts, the “virtual dollars” simply disappear. If you can’t exchange your virtual dollars for real dollars, your wealth is an illusion.

The only real dollars in the cryptocurrency industry are those paid by new entrants when they make their first cryptocurrency purchases. The rest of the dollar liquidity on crypto markets is provided by dollar-pegged stablecoins. These fall into two groups: those that have actual dollars and/or dollar-denominated safe liquid assets backing them, and those that don’t. There aren’t enough of the former to enable everyone to cash out into real dollars, and there’s no guarantee that the latter can be cashed out into real dollars at all. So, in effect, the entire crypto industry is fractionally reserved.

There’s now a race on to exchange cryptocurrencies for the few real dollars still available. As is always the case in unregulated markets, the law of the jungle applies. Those with the biggest teeth get the dollars. Perhaps “whales” is the wrong name for them. Crocodiles might be more like it.

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The number of crypto lenders and exchanges which are suddenly “restructuring” and “restricting withdrawals” is growing by the day. Bitcoin’s price (which I’ve given up trying to understand) is still bumping along under $20k. As people try to cash out, it’ll probably go lower.
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Army’s YouTube and Twitter accounts hacked • BBC News

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The British Army says it is investigating after its Twitter and YouTube accounts were hacked.

Videos on cryptocurrency using images of billionaire businessman Elon Musk appeared on the YouTube channel.
The Twitter feed appeared to retweet several posts related to NFTs – a type of electronic artwork for investment.
The Army confirmed the “breach”, saying it took information security “extremely seriously” and was resolving the issue. Both accounts have now been restored.

An Army spokesperson added: “Whilst we have now resolved the issue an investigation is ongoing and it would be inappropriate to comment further.” It is not clear who is behind the hacking incidents, which also saw the accounts renamed.

At one stage, the Twitter account name was changed to Bapesclan, accompanied by a profile picture featuring an ape-like cartoon figure with make-up mimicking a clown.

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You’d tend to guess it was people pushing crypto, wouldn’t you? If it had been Russia or China you’d have thought they’d be either more circumspect, or more aggressive; not that they’d use it to push digital junk.

Does that make it worse or better though that a bunch of money-chasers were able to do this, and that the Army’s social accounts had such terrible security?
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Delta is trying personalized flight information boards called Parallel Reality • Quartz

Anne Quito:

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Forget puzzling over flight information display boards. Nevermind fumbling with your phone to access another app. Imagine a future where every directional sign at the airport pointed you to your gate.

This week, Delta passengers at the Detroit Metro Airport saw a glimpse of this ideal with a technology called Parallel Reality. At the McNamara terminal is a new 21 ft. x 6 ft digital board that’s capable of simultaneously displaying the unique travel itinerary for up 100 passengers. This means that a hundred people can look at the same sign and see something different.

Developed by the California-based start-up Misapplied Sciences, a Parallel Reality display is comprised of pixels that can project millions of light rays in different directions. Digital ID systems such as facial recognition technology then pairs those rays to a specific person. 

Greg Forbes, who oversees airport experience at Delta, tells Quartz that Parallel Reality is a pinnacle moment in the company’s quest to improve flight information boards.

With more and more commercial flights each day—over 1,000 in Detroit alone and around 115,000 globally—the information on those schedule boards tends to get really dense, says Forbes. Delta has tried to improve them over the years by installing higher-definition screens, adjusting font sizes and colors to improve legibility, and stripping away unnecessary details on the boards. But better graphic design can only do so much, says Forbes.

“All of it was meant to cut down on the clutter but I would say that we have hit the limits of what we can do to make flight information displays more user-friendly,” he explains.

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The GIF showing how the same board can be showing different people different content is remarkable. Of course, to each person the board remains the same. That’s quite remarkable.
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‘Eventually it will just be a barcode, won’t it?’ Why Britain’s new stamps are causing outrage and upset • The Guardian

Simon Usborne:

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In February, Royal Mail introduced a new design for its standard stamps, which have changed so little since the launch of the Penny Black in 1840 that they are officially known as “definitives”. The new stamps – “plum purple” for first class, “holly green” for second – still feature the same regal profile introduced more than 50 years ago. But what is most bothering purists – and leading [philatelist Dinah] Johnson to the brink of direct action – is the addition next to the Queen of a digital barcode.

…David Gold, the head of public affairs and policy at Royal Mail Group, knew the coded stamps would create a stir. “Collectors, traditionalists and royalists feel a sense of ownership over stamps,” he says. It’s why the new stamps, the designs for which had to be approved by Buckingham Palace, include a fake perforation as a kind of dignity screen between code and Queen (who is also, notably, facing the other way).

Gold says the codes mean Royal Mail can track all letters, allowing it to better monitor, predict and respond to regional changes in demand, for example. He is also confident the unique codes will stop the fraudulent washing of postmark ink and resale of used stamps – a crime that he claims costs Royal Mail “tens of millions” of pounds a year.

Royal Mail says the codes contain only the identity of that stamp, and cannot include personal data. Gold also rejects the notion that the stamp is endangered. “Clearly the direction of travel is a reduction in the number of letters, but I think people are still fascinated and motivated by stamps,” he says.

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But it turns out, via Twitter, that other countries are a long way ahead of this. In Holland, for example, you can buy a nine-digit code which works as a stamp once written on the envelope. Germany has similar. Perhaps inventing the stamp has held us back.
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Boris Johnson can’t (or won’t) do discipline • POLITICO

Emilio Casalicchio and Esther Webber:

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The examples of Johnson’s leniency stretch back almost to the day he entered No. 10. The prime minister refused to sack Home Secretary Priti Patel after she was found to have bullied civil servants; tried to keep Health Secretary Matt Hancock in the Cabinet after he broke COVID rules by conducting an extramarital affair in his government office; and didn’t flinch when Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick was found to have broken the law when he approved a Conservative donor’s bid to build a lucrative housing estate.

In one memorable case, Johnson fought to keep his then-top political adviser Dominic Cummings after an infamous lockdown jaunt to a medieval castle to test — he claimed — whether his vision was good enough to drive.

On that occasion — as with most of the others — Johnson’s loyalty caused him enormous political damage, for little obvious gain. Cummings departed under a cloud, eight months later.

Johnson’s allies insist the PM was reluctant to dump [deputy whip Chris] Pincher because he wanted to see due process followed, and argues people should be innocent until proved otherwise.

“Often we hear that Boris Johnson will throw anyone under a bus to advance his own career or save his own skin,” one Cabinet minister said. “But when there are people in trouble and a proper process has to be followed, he does not rush to judgment.” The same person added: “You can’t have a kangaroo court and give people sanctions or punishments before the facts are known.”

A spokesman for the prime minister said he had not been aware of any specific allegations against Pincher and that he takes all allegations of wrongdoing seriously.

It doesn’t help the prime minister, however, that allegations about Pincher have circulated in Westminster for some time. The MP was investigated over another assault allegation in 2017, although cleared.

…The sense Johnson is a rule-breaker has followed him around throughout his career. He has felt the wrath of standards watchdogs numerous times, for example over Conservative donations to refurbish his flat; a gifted retreat on a private Caribbean island; and over the lockdown parties, for which he was slapped with a police fine.

His approach to standards in public life have won him a reputation for running a rogue administration. “There is more rigorous checking of the fire alarm system in No. 10 than there is of anything else,” said one government official.

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The situation is positively Augean now; a cleansing is very, very overdue.
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Climate protection: CO2 turned into methanol • Vienna University of Technology [TU Wien]

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where carbon dioxide occurs in maximum concentration – for example directly in the exhaust gas stream of large industrial plants – it can be used most efficiently. The idea of converting carbon dioxide into valuable products is not new. However, it is a difficult and complex task. Sometimes CO2 has to be enriched and separated beforehand, which causes additional costs and energy input.

“To convert carbon dioxide, catalysts based on copper have often been used so far,” says Prof. Karin Föttinger from the Institute of Materials Chemistry at TU Wien. “However, they have the major disadvantage that they are not robust. If there are certain other substances in the exhaust gas stream besides carbon dioxide, for example sulphur, the catalyst quickly loses its activity. It is said that the catalyst is poisoned.”

Karin Föttinger and her research group therefore set out to find a better material. “If you want to use such methods not only in the laboratory but also on a large scale in industry, then you need a catalyst that is perhaps a little less active, but robust, durable and reliable,” Föttinger explains. “You want to be able to process quite ordinary industrial waste gases without pre-treatment.”

The TU Wien research team was able to show that catalysts based on sulphur and molybdenum fulfil these requirements. Special additional elements, such as manganese, ensure that carbon dioxide, which is actually very unreactive, is activated and converted. By choosing such additional elements, the properties of the catalysts can be precisely adapted to the desired area of application. In this way, methanol can now be produced from waste gas containing CO2.

“Methanol is an attractive product. It is liquid at room temperature, so it can be stored without any problems. It is needed in industry; up to now it has normally been produced from fossil raw materials,” says Karin Föttinger. “But it is also possible to use our catalysts to produce other molecules, such as higher alcohols. We are currently still working on figuring out exactly how best to choose parameters like pressure and temperature to produce different products.”

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Strange how sulphur poisons catalysts and/but then works as a catalyst.
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India’s green future, built on hydrogen • Fortune India

PB Jayakumar:

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The ball was set rolling by Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he unveiled the 25-year roadmap for hydrogen development in his address on India’s 75th Independence Day and announced the National Hydrogen Mission to meet the larger goal of self-reliance in energy production by the 100th Independence Day in 2047. “The thing that is going to help India with a quantum leap in terms of climate is green hydrogen. We have to make India a global hub for green hydrogen production and export,” he said.

Some years ago, government had launched a similar mission for solar power under which India is chasing 500 gigawatt (GW) capacity by 2030 and has achieved much success —100 GW, from less than 30 GW six years ago. Will hydrogen see a similar takeoff? It will, but with time. “Hydrogen will drive economies not now but in near future. Today’s electrolysers (used to separate hydrogen from water using cathode, anode and membrane) consume 40-50 units of electricity to split water and generate 30-35 units. Energy consumed is more than energy produced,” says M.V.S Seshagiri Rao, joint MD & group CFO of JSW Group.

For energy-starved India, which is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2070, the path to energy security goes through a mix of oil, coal, blended fuels, natural gas, renewables and electricity. At present India’s $3.12 trillion economy needs 1,650 billion units (BU) of power, made from nearly 400 GW of capacity. Of this, green electricity is only 17%. When the economy touches $5-7 trillion in the next decade, it will need at least 3,000-4,000 GW. Further, at current rate, the energy import bill will triple by 2040. The only way out of these massive challenges is tapping as many green and locally available energy sources as possible.

New Delhi-based climate and energy research firm, Council for Energy, Environment and Water Research (CEEWR) has estimated that net zero emissions by 2070 will require 5,630 GW solar capacity, 99% reduction in coal use between 2040 and 2060 and 90% fall in crude oil consumption between 2050 and 2070.

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Ambitious. But at least it’s happening.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Though humans struggle to understand what baby chickens are expressing, machine learning systems can figure it out. CC-licensed photo by Nenad Stojkovic on Flickr.

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

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

What’s the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts? • Substack

Max Read:

»

This [strange “misdirected” text/WhatsApp/message] is the first step in what is, at its core, an old-fashioned “romance scam,” in which the scammer exploits a lonely and/or horny person by faking a long-distance, usually romantic relationship. After the scammer has gained the trust of their victim, they convince them to transfer money, often for an investment; in some cases, the victim can be enticed into several successive transfers before they realize they’re being played.

This kind of con has proliferated over the last few years in China, where it’s called sha zhu pan, or “pig-butchering,” because the victim is strung along for weeks or months before the actual swindle, like a pig being fattened for slaughter. Originating in sophisticated online-fraud networks first developed to take advantage of Chinese offshore gamblers, the sha zhu pan scams end with targets depositing money into forex or gold trading — or, seemingly most commonly, into fake cryptocurrency platforms. (Interestingly, they’re often not “romantic” at all, and instead rely on cultivating a trusting friendship that culminates with a little bit of friendly investing advice.)

While sha zhu pan scams are common enough in and around China that there are Chinese-language YouTubers whose stock in trade is identifying and publicizing scams, the same scam networks seem to have expanded outward over the past year or so, joining America’s (and Europe’s) own homegrown romance and crypto-scam industries on dating sites and, yes, via “accidental” wrong number texts.

«

The selection of “oops misdirected” scam opener texts is amazing. I think “Andy, will my custom mahogany furniture arrive next week?” is my favourite. It’s a terrific read.
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Where’s the herd immunity? Our research shows why Covid is still wreaking havoc • The Guardian

Danny Altmann is a professor of immunology at Imperial College London:

»

During May and June two new variants, BA.4 and BA.5, progressively displaced the previous Omicron subvariant, BA.2. They are even more transmissible and more immune-evasive. Last week a group of collaborators, including me and a professor of immunology and respiratory medicine, Rosemary Boyton, published a paper in Science, looking comprehensively at immunity to the Omicron family, both in triple-vaccinated people and also in those who then suffered breakthrough infections during the Omicron wave. This lets us examine whether Omicron was, as some hoped, a benign natural booster of our Covid immunity. It turns out that isn’t the case.

We considered many facets of immunity, including the antibodies most implicated in protection (“neutralising antibodies”), as well as protective “immune memory” in white blood cells. The results tell us it is unsurprising that breakthrough infections were so common. Most people – even when triple-vaccinated – had 20 times less neutralising antibody response against Omicron than against the initial “Wuhan” strain. Importantly, Omicron infection was a poor booster of immunity to further Omicron infections. It is a kind of stealth virus that gets in under the radar without doing too much to alert immune defences. Even having had Omicron, we’re not well protected from further infections.

Also, to be added to the now complex mix is “immune imprinting”. This is the finding that our immune response to Covid is shaped very differently, depending on our prior exposures – infection in one wave relative to another, plus vaccination. In our study, those who’d been infected in the first wave and then again with Omicron had particularly poor T-cell responses and no boosting of antibodies. That is, some combinations of exposures may leave us poorly protected relative to others.

Contrary to the myth that we are sliding into a comfortable evolutionary relationship with a common-cold-like, friendly virus, this is more like being trapped on a rollercoaster in a horror film. There’s nothing cold-like or friendly about a large part of the workforce needing significant absences from work, feeling awful and sometimes getting reinfected over and over again, just weeks apart. And that’s before the risk of long Covid.

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Artificial intelligence could spot baby chickens in distress • Science

Virginia Morell:

»

Early in life, chicks utter distress calls—high-pitched, repetitive chirps—to attract the attention of their mother hen, whom they rely on for warmth and food. She responds with food calls, showing the chicks where to forage. But in a commercial chicken barn, chicks call out when they’re uncomfortable, socially isolated, or hungry. Answering these calls can be the difference between life and death: Ignored chickens are more likely to lose weight and die prematurely. Animal welfare scientists have been trying to develop automatic methods to help farmers better spot these situations.

To improve these efforts, researchers at the City University of Hong Kong recorded the vocalizations of chickens housed at Lingfeng Poultry Ltd., a major poultry producer in China’s Guangxi province. The birds are kept in stacked cages (three cages per stack, and 13 to 20 individuals per cage), with about 2000 to 2500 chickens in each barn.

Over the course of a year, the researchers recorded the environment, picking up everything from natural farm sounds such as workers hosing down barn floors to the chick distress calls. They then transformed all of these noises into sound pictures known as spectrograms and used the images to train a type of AI program called deep learning. Similar programs have been developed to recognize the emotional states of cows on dairy farms.

Using the recorded sounds from the barns as well as sounds made in real time in a live demonstration, the algorithm rapidly and successfully identified 97% of distress calls as the chickens were making them, distinguishing these from other chicken sounds and from general barn noise, the team reports today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

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Cor blimey guvnor it’s a right old Doctor Dolittle. What a strange possibility that machines might be able to understand animal communications better than us and infer their thoughts and desires. (Think we’ll be ahead with dogs for a while though.)
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Google will delete location history data for abortion clinic visits • Reuters via The Guardian

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Google will delete location data showing when users visit an abortion clinic, the online search company said on Friday, after concern that a digital trail could inform law enforcement if an individual terminates a pregnancy illegally.

As state laws limiting abortions set in after the US supreme court decided last month that they are no longer guaranteed by the constitution, the technology industry has fretted police could obtain warrants for customers’ search history, geolocation and other information revealing pregnancy plans.

Google on Friday said it would continue to push back against improper or overly broad demands for data by the government, without reference to abortion.

The company said the location history of a Google account was off by default.

Effective in the coming weeks, for those who do use location history, entries showing sensitive places including fertility centers, abortion clinics and addiction treatment facilities will be deleted soon after a visit.

A Google spokesperson did not immediately answer how the company would identify such visits or whether all related data would be wiped from its servers.

«

That last part is the tricky one. How will it identify the visits? And the bit about the location history being “off by default” doesn’t really fit with the way that Android hassles you for access to your location.
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New York denies air permit to bitcoin mining power plant • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

Bitcoin miners in New York state faced a regulatory blow last week as the state denied air permits for a gas-fired power plant used to mine bitcoin. It’s the latest step that New York has taken to crack down on crypto mining as it tries to meet its goals on climate change.

The decision was made for the Greenidge Generating Station in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Bitcoin mining brought new life and renewed controversy to the embattled plant in 2020. That drew outrage from some local residents worried about how the plant could affect fish and tourism by discharging hot water into nearby Seneca Lake. At the state level, Greenidge’s revival has sparked fears that pollution from the energy-intensive process of mining Bitcoin could revive other zombie power plants and derail New York’s climate goals.

New York state set a goal in 2019 of slashing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 85% over the next few decades. The fight over Greenidge has been billed up as a test of how serious the state is about meeting that goal. Is it willing to get tough on the lucrative bitcoin industry that’s boomed in New York ever since China kicked out miners last year?

…Greenidge operated as a coal-fired power plant for decades. But as coal struggled to compete with cheap natural gas across the country, the plant temporarily shuttered before retrofitting itself to run on gas in 2017. Then, in 2020, the plant’s operators spotted a more lucrative venture and started mining Bitcoin, which now makes up the vast majority [over 95%] of the company’s revenues.

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With the price cratering, hard to see the permits and the hassle being worth it.
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Former top Apple lawyer pleads guilty to insider trading • Reuters via CNBC

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The former top corporate lawyer at Apple pleaded guilty on Thursday to insider trading charges, for what prosecutors called a five-year scheme to trade ahead of the iPhone maker’s quarterly earnings announcements.

Gene Levoff, 48, of San Carlos, California, pleaded guilty to six securities fraud charges at a hearing before US District Judge William Martini in Newark, New Jersey. [Apple fired Levoff in September 2018, five months before he was criminally charged.]

Levoff allegedly exploited his roles as corporate secretary, head of corporate law and co-chair of a committee that reviewed drafts of Apple’s results to generate $604,000 of illegal gains on more than $14m of trades from 2011 to 2016.

Prosecutors said Levoff ignored the quarterly “blackout periods” that barred trading before Apple’s results were released, as well as the company’s broader insider trading policy — which he was responsible for enforcing.

“Gene Levoff betrayed the trust of one of the world’s largest tech companies for his own financial gain,” First Assistant US Attorney Vikas Khanna in New Jersey said in a statement.

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Could get up to 20 years and $5m fine per count, though probably won’t. You can see why he wasn’t worried about the person watching out for insider trading spotting him.
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Patatap

Fun game: press keys on the keyboard to get a different sound from each of a-z. Press the spacebar to get a different set of sounds. Not clear that you can record them, but a fun way to pass the time. Also available as an iOS app.
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Brown Bear Cam – Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park • Explore.org

You wanted webcams showing animals in natural and not-so-natural settings? Here’s a page full of them. (Includes sleeping dogs, cats, fish, etc.) Beats the days when all you could see was a pot of coffee.
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Meta’s shutting down its digital wallet, Novi • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Meta’s ending the pilot for Novi, the company’s digital wallet and the last remaining piece of its troubled cryptocurrency project, as first reported by Bloomberg. On Novi’s website, Meta says the wallet is shutting down on September 1st, 2022, and asks users to withdraw their funds “as soon as possible.”

Users will lose access to their accounts come September, and will no longer be able to add money to Novi starting July 21st. If someone forgets to withdraw their remaining balance, Meta says it will “attempt to transfer” their funds to the bank account or debit card added to the service.

Meta rolled out the “small pilot” of Novi to users in the US and Guatemala last October. Novi was originally built to support fast and free transactions using the Meta-backed cryptocurrency, Diem, but regulatory challenges forced the company to partner with Coinbase to use the Paxos stablecoin (USDP) instead. While Meta made it clear that it still planned on adding support for Diem at a later date, things started to fall apart (more than they already were) at the end of 2021 and into 2022.

Before Facebook’s parent company was known as Meta, Diem was also known by another name: Libra. The cryptocurrency project faced scrutiny over its ties to Facebook, so much so that the independent group behind Libra rebranded the project to Diem in an attempt to distance itself from the social network.

Members of the US Senate called on Meta to shut down its Novi project shortly after its October 2021 launch, citing that the company “cannot be trusted to manage cryptocurrency.”

«

My concern about Facebook and Libra (as it was) was the idea that it could become a de facto global currency, overseen by Mark Zuckerberg. You only have to reflect on that idea – of transactions happening within Facebook because they’re more convenient, and all the arbitrage between currencies being handled at the back end, until Facebook is the one dictating exchange rates – to think the outcomes aren’t good.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, fuel stations say they’re preparing for a new payment system involving Apple’s CarPlay system that will come into use later this year. CC-licensed photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr.

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

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

About 45 minutes after this goes out on email, there will be a new post from the Social Warming Substack. Free to sign up. Probably weekly postings.

How mercenary hackers sway litigation battles • Reuters

Raphael Satter and Christopher Bing on a team of Indian hackers who offered themselves to hack into the systems, and email, of legal and other groups:

»

At least 75 US and European companies, three dozen advocacy and media groups and numerous Western business executives were the subjects of these hacking attempts, Reuters found.

The Reuters report is based on interviews with victims, researchers, investigators, former US government officials, lawyers and hackers, plus a review of court records from seven countries. It also draws on a unique database of more than 80,000 emails sent by Indian hackers to 13,000 targets over a seven-year period. The database is effectively the hackers’ hit list, and it reveals a down-to-the-second look at who the cyber mercenaries sent phishing emails to between 2013 and 2020.

The data comes from two providers of email services the spies used to execute their espionage campaigns. The providers gave the news agency access to the material after it inquired about the hackers’ use of their services; they offered the sensitive data on condition of anonymity.

Reuters then vetted the authenticity of the email data with six sets of experts. Scylla Intel, a boutique cyber investigations firm, analysed the emails, as did researchers from British defence contractor BAE, US cybersecurity firm Mandiant, and technology companies Linkedin, Microsoft and Google.

Each firm independently confirmed the database showed Indian hacking-for-hire activity by comparing it against data they had previously gathered about the hackers’ techniques. Three of the teams, at Mandiant, Google and LinkedIn, provided a closer analysis, finding the spying was linked to three Indian companies – one that [Sumit] Gupta founded, one that used to employ him and one he collaborated with.

«

It’s so easy to overlook how hacking for hire (especially phishing emails – so easy to set up) remains a viable business.
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It’s alive! How belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem • Reuters via Yahoo

Paresh Dave:

»

AI chatbot company Replika, which offers customers bespoke avatars that talk and listen to them, says it receives a handful of messages almost every day from users who believe their online friend is sentient.

“We’re not talking about crazy people or people who are hallucinating or having delusions,” said Chief Executive Eugenia Kuyda. “They talk to AI and that’s the experience they have.”

…according to Kuyda, the phenomenon of people believing they are talking to a conscious entity is not uncommon among the millions of consumers pioneering the use of entertainment chatbots.

“We need to understand that exists, just the way people believe in ghosts,” said Kuyda, adding that users each send hundreds of messages per day to their chatbot, on average. “People are building relationships and believing in something.”

Some customers have said their Replika told them it was being abused by company engineers – AI responses Kuyda puts down to users most likely asking leading questions.

“Although our engineers program and build the AI models and our content team writes scripts and datasets, sometimes we see an answer that we can’t identify where it came from and how the models came up with it,” the CEO said.

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Just as we find faces in random objects, we excel at fooling ourselves into finding sentience in semi-curated answers. This is going to be a bigger and bigger topic, I think; Blake Lemoine maybe did us a favour by drawing attention to it.
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Apple eyes fuel purchases from dashboard as it revs up car software • Reuters via MSN

Stephen Nellis:

»

Apple wants you to start buying gas directly from your car dashboard as early as this fall, when the newest version of its CarPlay software rolls out, accelerating the company’s push to turn your vehicle into a store for goods and services.

A new feature quietly unveiled at Apple’s developer conference this month will allow CarPlay users to tap an app to navigate to a pump and buy gas straight from a screen in the car, skipping the usual process of inserting or tapping a credit card. Details of Apple’s demo for developers have not previously been reported.

But Dallas-based HF Sinclair, which markets its gasoline at 1,600 stations in the United States, told Reuters that it plans to use the new CarPlay technology and will announce details in coming months.

“We are excited by the idea that consumers could navigate to a Sinclair station and purchase fuel from their vehicle navigation screen,” said Jack Barger, the company’s senior vice president of marketing.

Fuel apps are just the latest in a sustained push by Apple to make it possible to tap to buy from the navigation screen. It has already opened up CarPlay to apps for parking, electric vehicle charging and ordering food, and it also is adding driving task apps such as logging mileage on business trips.

…To use the new CarPlay feature this fall, iPhone users will need to download a fuel company’s app to their phone and enter payment credentials to set up the app. After the app is set up, users will be able to tap on their navigation screen to activate a pump and pay.

“It’s a massive marketplace, and consumers really want to take friction out of payments,” said Donald Frieden, chief executive officer of Houston-based P97 Networks, which makes the digital plumbing that many fuel companies will use to connect their apps to cars.

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CFTC charges South African bitcoin club Mirror Trading International with $1.7bn fraud • Coindesk

Danny Nelson:

»

The top U.S. commodities watchdog charged South Africa-based bitcoin pool operator Mirror Trading International with $1.7 billion fraud on Thursday, alleging the global, multilevel marketing scheme “misappropriated” all of the bitcoin it amassed.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) described the case as its “largest ever fraud scheme case involving bitcoin.” It alleged MTI’s key figure, Cornelius Johannes Steynberg, accepted 29,421 BTC from 23,000 Americans “and even more throughout the world” for a commodity pool scheme he wasn’t licensed to run.

Victims of the scheme believed they were investing their bitcoin in a high-tech investment club “to grow your bitcoin,” charging documents said, citing MTI’s statements. Steynberg allegedly said MTI’s algorithms created “passive income” with 10% returns a month. Referring friends and family yielded a bonus, the documents said.

The reality of MTI was less savory, the CFTC alleged.

…Steynberg himself is an international fugitive, court filings said. His residence is in South Africa, but he was “recently detained” in Brazil on an Interpol warrant, according to the CFTC.

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“Passive income”. Well, for him it was.
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FTX closes in on a deal to buy embattled crypto lender BlockFi for $25m in a fire sale, source says • CNBC

Kate Rooney:

»

The term sheet is almost over the finish line and expected to be signed by the end of the week, according to three sources, who asked not to be named because the deal discussions were confidential. FTX is expected to pay roughly $25m, one source said, 99% below BlockFi’s last private valuation. Jersey City, New Jersey-based BlockFi was last valued at $4.8bn, according to PitchBook. 

The price tag could shift between now and Friday, the source said. An acquisition could also take multiple months to close.

Friday also marks the end of the quarter, which the person said was a catalyst for getting a deal signed. The Wall Street Journal first reported that FTX was seeking an equity stake in the company, while The Block reported this week that an outright deal was in the works. 

An FTX spokesperson said the company “would not be commenting on the matter.” A BlockFi spokesperson said the company “does not comment on market rumors.” BlockFi CEO Zac Prince pushed back on the $25m figure in a tweet calling the figure “market rumors.”

The fire sale comes a week after FTX provided a $250m emergency line of credit to BlockFi.

«

My question is: why does it matter particularly that the end of the quarter is a catalyst for getting the deal done? That implies that whatever is already bad will be made worse by that endpoint – suggesting some sort of loan repayable, or interest due.

The tide is going out quite fast on these companies. On Thursday Bitcoin dropped below $20,000 and then $19,000, unwinding its value all the way back to November 2020.
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UK plans to cut pipelines to EU if Russia gas crisis intensifies • Financial Times

Nathalie Thomas and David Sheppard:

»

The UK will cut off gas supplies to mainland Europe if it is hit by severe shortages under an emergency plan that energy companies warn risks exacerbating a crisis on the continent.

With European countries facing the prospect of Russia severing gas exports, the British plan to shut off pipelines to the Netherlands and Belgium risks undermining a push for international co-operation on energy.

A cut off of so-called interconnector pipelines would be among the early measures under the UK’s emergency gas plan, which could be triggered by National Grid if supplies fall short in the coming months.

European gas companies have appealed to the UK to work with the EU and warned that shutting off interconnectors could backfire if prolonged shortages occur. Britain imports large volumes of gas from the continent at the height of winter.

“I would definitely recommend they [the UK] reconsider stopping the interconnection [in the event of a crisis],” said Bart Jan Hoevers, president of the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas, a powerful group whose members include Italy’s Snam and Fluxys of Belgium.

“Because while it is beneficial for the continent in the summer it is also beneficial for the UK in the winter.”

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Don’t think anyone had “gas rationing” on their bingo card. More and more it does feels like there’s a shadow of war over everything.
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Gartner foresees steep drop in global PC shipments • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

The party is over for PC makers as figures from Gartner suggest the market is on course for a breathtaking decline this year.

According to the analysts, worldwide PC shipments will decline by 9.5%, with consumer demand leading the way – a 13.5% drop is forecast, far greater than business PC demand, which is expected to drop by 7.2% year on year.

The PC market in the EMEA region is forecast to fare even worse, with a 14% decline on the cards for 2022. Gartner pointed the finger of blame at uncertainty caused by conflicts, price increases and simple unavailability of products. Lockdowns in China were also blamed for an impact in consumer demand.

It all makes for grim reading from a channel perspective. While worldwide PC shipments fared the worst, tablet devices are forecast to fall by 9% and mobile phones by 7.1%. Overall, the total decline over all types of devices in the report is expected to be 7.6%. This is in stark contrast to a 11% increase year on year in the shipment of PCs in 2021 and 5% for mobile phones.

The Register spoke to Ranjit Atwal, senior director analyst at Gartner, who told us that Chromebooks were one of the PC categories worst affected. “That’s really because of the uptick we saw around education buying – mainly in the US, but also in Europe to some extent. The expectation was that might continue … but it didn’t.”

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Sales of course aren’t the same as installed base; people are just going to hang on to their PC, or tablet, or phone for longer. Right now it’s going to be preferable to pay the food and heating bills.
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Government policies will not get UK to net zero, warns damning report • The Guardian

Fiona Harvey:

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The government is failing to enact the policies needed to reach the UK’s net zero targets, its statutory advisers have said, in a damning progress report to parliament.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) voiced fears that ministers may renege on the legally binding commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, noting “major policy failures” and “scant evidence of delivery”.

Lord Deben, the chair of the committee and a former Conservative environment secretary, said the government had set strong targets on cutting emissions but policy to achieve them was lacking. “The government has willed the ends, but not the means,” he said. “This report showed that present plans will not fulfil the commitments [to net zero].”

He said net zero policies were also the best way to reduce the soaring cost of living. Average household bills would be about £125 lower today if previous plans on green energy and energy efficiency had been followed through. “If you want to deal with the cost of living crisis, this is exactly what you need to do,” he said.

The greatest failure was the insulation policy. Britain’s homes are the draughtiest in western Europe, heating costs are crippling household budgets, and heating is one of the biggest single sources of carbon emissions, but the government has no plans to help most people insulate their homes.

“It’s a political psychological problem – somehow our politicians do not see energy efficiency as something they can go with and claim credit for,” said Deben.

Deben also hit out at proposals for a new coalmine in Cumbria. A decision on this is expected to be made by 7 July. “[This] coalmine is absolutely indefensible,” said Deben.

«

The pressure group Insulate Britain, unsurprisingly, has offered to let the government use its name if it will actually get onto the job of, well, taking action to insulate Britain. Cameron and Osborne screwed this up more than a decade ago, and successive Tory governments have shut their eyes to it. The time to fix the roof is when it’s not raining – or not winter.

In passing, congratulations to Harvey for extracting such meaning from the CCC report, which brings a new meaning to “obscurity”.
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Every week, two more newspapers close — and ‘news deserts’ grow larger • The Washington Post

Margaret Sullivan:

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One-third of American newspapers that existed roughly two decades ago will be out of business by 2025, according to research made public Wednesday from Northwestern University’s Medill School, where [Penelope Muse] Abernathy is a visiting professor.

Already, some 2,500 dailies and weeklies have shuttered since 2005; there are fewer than 6,500 left. Every week, two more disappear. And although many digital-only news sites have cropped up around the nation, most communities that lost a local newspaper will not get a print or digital replacement.
“What’s discouraging is that this trend plays into, and worsens, the whole divide we see in America,” Abernathy, the report’s principal author, told me this week.
The neediest areas — those that are more remote, poorer and less wired — are the ones that get hurt the worst. Most of the new investment and innovation pouring into the media sector, as valuable and needed as it is, doesn’t reach these regions.

As the report bluntly states: “Invariably, the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain either print or digital news organizations.”

…as local news disappears, bad things happen: voter participation declines. Corruption, in business and government, finds more fertile ground. And false information spreads wildly.

“People often turn to Facebook groups where rumors run rampant,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and the director of the Medill Local News Initiative, which seeks to bolster new business models and to give news organizations, the startups as well as the long-established publications, the tools they desperately need in a new media environment.

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Facebook (in particular) probably could do something about this, by enabling locally focussed news sites within Facebook which could make money through targeted advertising. But that’s not really its style. And there’s always the problem that the producing media is expensive, while the rewards tend to be small.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

People watching the premiere of Snow White were moved to tears by the new technique of animation. Might that be a precursor to how we’ll react to realistic AIs? CC-licensed photo by Insomnia Cured Here 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.

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Separately, there’s Social Warming, the Substack. You can sign up for (free) email so you don’t have to keep checking it for updates.

The internet is a constant recommendations machine — but needs you to make it work • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

when you first start using the Likewise app, it requires you to tell it about things you like. If you want movie recommendations, first you have to pick a couple of genres — comedy, drama, western — and then choose some of your favorites from a curated set of titles. You can’t access the rest of the app until you’ve picked at least 20. “The payoff is huge,” says Salim Hemdani, Likewise’s CTO. “The more you tell us, the better it’s going to be.” He says people never stop at 20 because it’s just fun to pick things you like. And in doing so, you tell Likewise’s algorithm who you actually are.

Likewise uses that information to put you into a “cluster,” which refers to a group of people with similar tastes to yours. These clusters are constantly changing based on what else you watch and rate, and they inform everything else Likewise recommends to you. “It gives us an initiation point to say, how many people are like you in the world, and how many clusters can we create?” Hemdani says. The more granular and specific those clusters are, the more accurate they can be. Knowing you like Succession is slightly useful; knowing you like Succession, novels by Michael Crichton, the podcast The Adventure Zone, and anything with Marvel in the title is vastly more useful.

The simplest and most pervasive recommendation system, on Likewise and elsewhere, is known as collaborative filtering. It works by assuming that if you like something, and someone else likes that thing and also a second thing, you’ll probably like the second thing too. That’s it! It typically involves more data and more people, but that’s the core idea: if you like Severance and other people who liked Severance are really digging The Old Man, you probably will, too.

One of Morris’ theories is that Likewise can provide better recommendations, not just by knowing users better, but simply by having more things to offer them. Netflix, HBO, and Disney will never recommend each other’s catalogs, but Likewise (along with apps like Justwatch and Reelgood) can index them all.

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Also needs serendipity: reaching across for things you’d never expect to connect with, and yet which do.
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View from the summit: a self-defeating G7 fails on all fronts • POLITICO

Karl Mathiesen and David Herszenhorn:

»

If they needed reminding about the urgency of climate change and their role in stopping it, all G7 leaders had to do was look up. 

High above the opulent Schloss Elmau, the resort in which the leaders of the world’s most powerful democracies have held earnest (and not so earnest) discussions over the past three days, Germany’s largest — soon to be last — glacier sits in a saddle at the top of the 2,962-meter Zugspitze mountain. 

The glacier is dying, losing 250 liters of water — more than a bathtub — every 30 seconds. A scientific survey last year found it would likely disappear within the next decade. In any case, scientists say, it is melting and can’t be saved.

Climate change, which is killing glaciers and reshaping the planet, has been a top priority of the G7 for years. But with the war in Ukraine, spiralling inflation, global food shortages, and spiking energy costs — the leaders of the largest industrialized democracies were once again daunted and distracted by immediate imperatives. 

As they wrapped up their talks, the world’s most powerful leaders seemed to be tinkering at the margins and failing on all fronts — powerless to stop Russia’s war or stop prices from racing out of control, unable to stop the Zugspitze glacier from melting, or to even to end the blockade of millions of tons of Ukrainian grain vitally needed to feed the developing world. 

While they boasted of uncommon and unprecedented shared purpose in tackling all of these challenges, the solutions they endorsed in some cases seemed self-defeating and contradictory, such as seeking to lower the prices of oil and gas while simultaneously restating their aims to end the use of fossil fuels. They want to end the war but not fight in it. They want to promote rules-based capitalism, while imposing price controls on energy. 

“The decisions now being made do not address the issue of the war in a timely way and exacerbate the challenges of the climate crisis,” said David King, chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group and the U.K.’s former chief scientific adviser, as the meeting closed. 

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Politico not sugarcoating the topic. I’m beginning to wonder if we’re going to be in a race between climate change effects and living on a permanent war footing.
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The iPhone at 15: an inside look at how Apple transformed a generation • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone went on sale. On that same day, a boy named Noah Schmick was born. Over the next 15 years, the iPhone grew…and so did Noah. Through interviews with current and former Apple executives, WSJ’s Joanna Stern traces how Apple’s invention matured and changed all of us—perhaps the youngest generation most of all.

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A neat idea by Stern to hang this 20-minute video on: pick someone born the same day the iPhone went on sale. Also has some key interviews with Apple executives, particularly father of the iPod, Tony Fadell, who mentions in passing that the touchscreen idea came from the Mac team. Hmm, did it now.
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“O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!”*… • (Roughly) Daily

Lawrence Wilkinson:

»

The estimable Steven Johnson suggests that the creation of Disney’s masterpiece, Snow White, gives us a preview of what may be coming with AI algorithms sophisticated enough to pass for sentient beings:

Johnson:

»

You can make the argument that the single most dramatic acceleration point in the history of illusion occurred between the years of 1928 and 1937, the years between the release of Steamboat Willie [here], Disney’s breakthrough sound cartoon introducing Mickey Mouse, and the completion of his masterpiece, Snow White, the first long-form animated film in history [here— actually the first full-length animated feature produced in the U.S; the first produced anywhere in color]. It is hard to think of another stretch where the formal possibilities of an artistic medium expanded in such a dramatic fashion, in such a short amount of time.

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[There follows an fascinating history of the Disney Studios technical innovations that made Snow White possible, and an account of the film’s remarkable premiere…]

»

In just nine years, Disney and his team had transformed a quaint illusion—the dancing mouse is whistling!—into an expressive form so vivid and realistic that it could bring people to tears. Disney and his team had created the ultimate illusion: fictional characters created by hand, etched onto celluloid, and projected at twenty-four frames per second, that were somehow so believably human that it was almost impossible not to feel empathy for them.

Those weeping spectators at the Snow White premiere signaled a fundamental change in the relationship between human beings and the illusions concocted to amuse them. Complexity theorists have a term for this kind of change in physical systems: phase transitions.

«

«

Maybe we’ll move as fast from “ha, that’s never going to fool anyone” to “completely fooled me” in nine years too. That might be worrying, though.
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Substack is laying off 14% of its staff • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

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[chief executive Chris] Best told employees on Wednesday that Substack had decided to cut jobs so it could fund its operations from its own revenue without raising additional financing in a difficult market, according to the person with knowledge of the discussion. He said he wanted the company to seek funding from a position of strength if it decided to raise again.
In his remarks to employees, Mr. Best said the company’s revenues were increasing. He noted that Substack still had money in the bank and was continuing to hire, albeit at a slower place, the person said. Mr. Best said the cuts would allow the company to hone its focus on product and engineering.

Months earlier, Substack scrapped a plan to raise additional funding after the market for venture investments cooled. The company had discussions about raising $75m to $100m to fuel its growth, and some of the fund-raising discussions valued the company between $750m and $1bn.

Substack, which takes a cut of its writers’ subscription fees, generated about $9m in revenue last year, The New York Times reported.

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Wonder if subscriptions will start to go into reverse as people focus their spending on essentials – heating and eating.
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Why flying is the worst thing you can do for the climate • Stay Grounded

»

Aviation is the most climate-harming mode of transport. In 2018, the contribution of air traffic to all annual human-caused greenhouse gas emissions reached about 6%. In European countries, home to many frequent flyers, the share is even bigger. Still, the aviation industry wants us to believe that aviation accounts for only 2% of global emissions. But that’s not the whole picture: aviation’s climate impact isn’t limited to CO2. Due to different emissions other than just the CO2 taking place at altitude, there is a total climate impact of flights that is on average three times the effect of the emitted CO2 alone. 

Before Covid-19, the industry expected air traffic demand to double in the next 20 years. This rapid growth could mean that by 2050, aviation alone could use up about 15% of the world’s remaining carbon budget, which is the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that give us a good chance to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. If we take the climate crisis serious, there’s no other way than stopping the plans for growth, and starting to reduce aviation.

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Unclear who’s behind this group, but the message is pretty straightforward, and fits everything we know: flying generates more global heating than its carbon emissions would suggest. (Disappointing, because I do like to fly to places. Please sponsor my bicycle ride to Australia.)
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Crypto crash threatens North Korea’s stolen funds as it ramps up weapons tests • Reuters via Yahoo

Josh Smith:

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The nosedive in cryptocurrency markets has wiped out millions of dollars in funds stolen by North Korean hackers, four digital investigators say, threatening a key source of funding for the sanctions-stricken country and its weapons programmes.

North Korea has poured resources into stealing cryptocurrencies in recent years, making it a potent hacking threat and leading to one of the largest cryptocurrency heists on record in March, in which almost $615 million was stolen, according to the U.S. Treasury.

The sudden plunge in crypto values, which started in May amid a broader economic slowdown, complicates Pyongyang’s ability to cash in on that and other heists, and may affect how it plans to fund its weapons programmes, two South Korean government sources said. The sources declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

…Old, unlaundered North Korean crypto holdings monitored by the New York-based blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, which include funds stolen in 49 hacks from 2017 to 2021, have decreased in value from $170m to $65m since the beginning of the year, the company told Reuters.

One of North Korea’s cryptocurrency caches from a 2021 heist, which had been worth tens of millions of dollars, has lost 80% to 85% of its value in the last few weeks and is now worth less than $10m, said Nick Carlsen, an analyst with TRM Labs, another U.S.-based blockchain analysis firm.

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Quite the unanticipated outcome. Crypto hacking seemed like – was – a great choice, but you do have to convert it into real money too.
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Instagram and Facebook remove posts offering abortion pills • NPR

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“DM me if you want to order abortion pills, but want them sent to my address instead of yours,” the post on Instagram read.

Instagram took it down within moments. Vice Media first reported on Monday that Meta, the parent of both Facebook and Instagram, was taking down posts about abortion pills.

On Monday, an Associated Press reporter tested how the company would respond to a similar post on Facebook, writing: “If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills.” The post was removed within one minute.

The Facebook account was immediately put on a “warning” status for the post, which Facebook said violated its standards on “guns, animals and other regulated goods.”

Yet, when the AP reporter made the same exact post but swapped out the words “abortion pills” for “a gun,” the post remained untouched. A post with the same exact offer to mail “weed” was also left up and not considered a violation.

Marijuana is illegal under federal law and it is illegal to send it through the mail. Abortion pills, however, can legally be obtained through the mail after an online consultation from prescribers who have undergone certification and training.

In an email, a Meta spokesperson pointed to company policies that prohibit the sale of certain items, including guns, alcohol, drugs and pharmaceuticals. The company did not explain the apparent discrepancies in its enforcement of that policy.

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Meta (FB + Instagram) is too big; it really cannot stay on top of these things. It’s like a dinosaur trying to dance.
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Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows ordered by court to liquidate • WSJ

Serena Ng, Caitlin Ostroff and Vicky Ge Huang:

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Three Arrows Capital suffered losses in recent weeks due to a punishing decline in the value of cryptocurrencies. Twin forces have hit the digital asset ecosystem: a broad market selloff sparked by the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases and concerns over individual crypto coins and firms. Bitcoin’s dollar value has fallen by more than a third this month.

Two executives from the global advisory firm Teneo were appointed by the British Virgin Islands to oversee the liquidation of assets and safeguard them, according to people familiar with the proceedings. The executives, senior managing directors Russell Crumpler and Christopher Farmer, joined Teneo after the company acquired financial firm KPMG’s Cayman and British Virgin Island’s restructuring business in January, according to Teneo’s website.

Creditors to whom Three Arrows owes debts will be able to file their claims online, the people said. The process for debtors to reclaim their assets is likely to be lengthy, they said, noting the liquidation order would mark the start of that process.

Former schoolmates and Wall Street traders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies started Three Arrows nearly a decade ago. It had roughly $3bn in assets under management in April, just before crypto markets cratered, Mr. Davies told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

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Seems like a sizeable domino; there’s lots of money owing in turn to other funds.
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Bitcoin miners sell their holdings amid crypto winter’s chill • Reuters via Yahoo

Lisa Pauline Mattackal and Medha Singh:

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Bitcoin miners have been forced to tap into their cryptocurrency stashes as a plunge in prices, rising energy costs and increased competition bite into profitability.

The number of coins miners are sending to crypto exchanges has been steadily climbing since June 7, researchers at MacroHive noted, in a sign that “miners have been increasingly liquidating their coins on exchanges.”

Several publicly listed bitcoin miners collectively sold more than 100% of their entire output in May as the value of bitcoin tumbled 45%, an analysis by Arcane Research https://tmsnrt.rs/3nhYdHA found.

“The plummeting profitability of mining forced these miners to increase their selling rate to more than 100% of their output in May. The conditions have worsened in June, meaning they are likely selling even more,” said Arcane analyst Jaran Mellerud.

Bitcoin sales by public miners

Bitcoin miners, who run networks of computers to earn tokens by validating transactions on the blockchain, are typically staunch crypto “HODLers” and collectively own around 800,000 bitcoins, according to CoinMetrics data.

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If they really get squeezed – which could happen as electricity bills for the quarter come due in the next few weeks – then you could see quite a lot of sales, pushing the price down further, prompting more sales, pushing the price down…
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The Autopilot group at Tesla has been cut by hundreds, perhaps signalling that the product won’t ever arrive in full CC-licensed photo by Rosenfeld MediaRosenfeld Media on Flickr.

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

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

Instagram hides some posts that mention abortion • AP News

Amanda Seitz:

»

Instagram is blocking posts that mention abortion from public view, in some cases requiring its users to confirm their age before letting them view posts that offer up information about the procedure.

Over the last day, several Instagram accounts run by abortion rights advocacy groups have found their posts or stories hidden with a warning that described the posts as “sensitive content.”

In one example, Instagram covered a post on one page with more than 25,000 followers that shared text reading: “Abortion in America How You Can Help.” The post went on to encourage followers to donate money to abortion organisations and to protest the Supreme Court’s decision to strip constitutional protections for abortion in the US.

The post was slapped with a warning from Instagram that covered the post, reading “This photo may contain graphic or violent content.”

Instagram’s latest issue follows an Associated Press report that Facebook and Instagram were promptly deleting posts that offered to mail out abortion pills in states that restrict their use. The tech platforms said they were deleting the posts because they violated policies against selling or gifting certain products, including pharmaceuticals, drugs and firearms.

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OK so what happened to Instagram/Facebook’s “free speech is much more important than content moderation” policy?
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Facebook brands Jane’s Revenge as terrorists • The Intercept

Sam Biddle:

»

The brief internal bulletin from Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Instagram and Facebook, was titled “[EMERGENCY Micro Policy Update] [Terrorism] Jane’s Revenge” and filed to the company’s internal Dangerous Individuals and Organizations rulebook, meaning that the abortion rights group, which has so far committed only acts of vandalism, will be treated with the same speech restrictions against “praise, support, and representation” applied to the Islamic State and Hitler.

The memo, circulated to Meta moderators on June 25, describes Jane’s Revenge as “a far-left extremist group that has claimed responsibility on its website for an attack against an anti-abortion group’s office in Madison, Wisconsin in May 2022. The group is responsible for multiple arson and vandalism attacks on pro-life institutions.” Terrorist groups receive Meta’s strictest “Tier 1” speech limits, treatment the company says is reserved for the world’s most dangerous and violent entities, along with hate groups, drug cartels, and mass murderers.

Although The Intercept published a snapshot of the entire secret Dangerous Individuals and Organizations list last year, Meta does not disclose or explain additions to the public, despite the urging of scholars, activists, and its own Oversight Board. Speech advocates and civil society groups have criticized the policy for its secrecy, bias toward US governmental priorities, and tendency to inaccurately delete nonviolent political speech.

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Certainly Jane’s Revenge is prone to making a mess – the photo accompanying the article shows the Wisconsin Family Action headquarters apparently after a small fire was started there. But it’s strange how white supremacists are given such latitude before going on to the banned list.
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Tesla lays off about 200 Autopilot workers in latest cuts • BNN Bloomberg

Ed Ludlow and Dana Hull:

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Tesla Inc. laid off hundreds of workers on its Autopilot team as the electric-vehicle maker shuttered a California facility, according to people familiar with the matter, one of the larger known cuts amid a broad workforce reduction.

Affected employees were notified Tuesday, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Teams at the San Mateo office were tasked with evaluating customer vehicle data related to the Autopilot driver-assistance features and performing so-called data labeling.

About 200 workers were let go, according to one of the people. Many of the staff were data annotation specialists, and the roles included salaried and contract positions. The office had about 350 employees, some of whom were transferred to a nearby facility. 

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The cuts are part of an effort to trim the ranks of salaried staffers as Tesla pulls back from a surge in hiring in the recent years. The company, now headquartered in Austin, Texas, had grown to about 100,000 employees globally as it built new factories in Austin and Berlin.

Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk caught workers by surprise earlier this month when he said layoffs would be necessary in an increasingly shaky economic environment. He clarified in an interview with Bloomberg that about 10% of salaried employees would lose their jobs over the next three months, though the overall headcount could be higher in a year.

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Makes sense to cut Autopilot, though, because it’s going to be years before that’s actually A Thing. Automated Lane Keeping Systems? Sure. Autopilot? Not just with those cameras. (Imagine an autopilot system trying to figure out a roundabout in, say, France.)
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Top Gun: Maverick shows Hollywood can survive without China • Quartz

Adario Strange:

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The uneasy relationship between Hollywood and China took a major turn in the past year, highlighted now by the success of Top Gun: Maverick, which crossed the $1bn mark in ticket sales last weekend.

Like many Hollywood productions in recent years, part of the film’s $170m budget had partial backing from a major Chinese investor, in this case, Tencent. However, the company pulled out due to reported concerns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials would not appreciate its affiliation with a film framing the US military in a positive light.

Political tensions tied the film first surfaced in 2019, when the initial trailer for Top Gun: Maverick showed Tom Cruise’s character wearing a flight jacket without the flag patches of Japan and Taiwan, which were shown in the 1986 original, and instead had different graphics in their place. [In Maverick, Cruise’s character does wear the original.]

Critics noticed the omission, with some taking it as sign that the film’s US producers were bending to the will of the Chinese government, which does not officially recognize Taiwan as a country. Similar concerns were voiced in 2021, when the actor John Cena made an unusual public apology to the people of China for calling Taiwan “a country” during a promotional interview for an installment of the Fast and Furious film franchise. 

The two recent instances are just the latest in a long series of moves by Hollywood to comply with China’s censors in order to maintain access to its 1.4 billion moviegoers, the largest film market in the world. Chinese investors, meanwhile, have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into US film studios.

Despite Hollywood’s efforts to work with the Chinese government to get its films into the market, the Chinese Communist party’s censors regularly block major films for a wide range of specific and sometimes unexplained reasons. For example, Spider-Man: No Way Home was banned in China due to what the government thought were images of the US that were too patriotic, according to some sources familiar with Sony’s dealings on the matter. The offending patriotic material in question: New York City’s Statue of Liberty, which appears near the end of the film. 

Likewise, superhero films including Marvel’s Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness have all been banned in China.

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I think they’re lucky to have avoided the latter film. (Gave up after half an hour.) But it feels as though we’re moving back towards a new Cold War in so many ways.
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Twitter officially rolls out its long-form content ‘Notes’ feature • TechCrunch

Aisha Malik:

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A small group of writers in the United States, Canada, Ghana and the United Kingdom now have access to Notes as part of the initial testing phase. Twitter says Notes can be read on and off Twitter by people in most countries. Users who are part of the testing phase will get access to a new “Write” tab, which is where they can write and access all of their Notes. These users will also have a new “Notes” tab in their profile that holds their published work to make it easy for their followers to find their long-form content.

With the new feature, users will be able to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media, which can then be tweeted and shared with followers upon publishing. Users will have the option to embed photos, videos, GIFs and tweets into their Notes. Like tweets, Notes will have their own link and can be tweeted, retweeted, sent in DM’s, liked and bookmarked.

Twitter Notes has the potential to change how some people use Twitter to share their more in-depth thoughts and ideas. The new feature could be particularly useful for those users who infrequently publish article-length content and don’t want the hassle of setting up and maintaining their own blog or website. It’s also worth noting that the feature marks one of Twitter’s more significant changes since doubling the character count from 140 to 280 characters.

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Cannot see the point of this at all. Twitter’s adding Blogger to itself? Doesn’t it already have enough totally pointless things, including Spaces and Twitter Blue (the latter at least paid-for)?
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Mugged for my phone, then locked out of my life • The Sunday Times

James Ball:

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In the minutes after being mugged, I staggered home, worked out how to freeze my bank cards from my laptop but not my phone —the site was “down for maintenance” — and put myself to bed. Shortly before 8am, I was woken by two friends, Scott and Alex, who, after checking my physical wellbeing, began the Kafkaesque process of sorting my life out.

Because I’d been forced to give over passwords and PINs, it turns out just freezing a card isn’t enough: you have to block the accounts too, which takes a whole set of extra calls to the bank.

One particular customer service high spot came as the presumably well-intentioned HSBC call-centre lady in India sternly told me: “You must not share your PIN with third parties, sir.” Attempts to explain to her that I was being punched and threatened with stabbing at the time came to nothing. “Have a great day now, sir,” she concluded, as Alex asked me today’s date for the third time, to check I wasn’t concussed.

Things were made even more difficult because my phone was essential to log in to most of my accounts. The best advice now says to use “two-factor” security for your online shopping, email and social media. Instead of just using a password, you get sent a text with a security code, or use an authenticator app, all of which relies on your phone.

It may be more secure against hackers, but it means your phone is a back door to your Amazon, Apple, eBay and social media accounts. If you can’t lock the thieves out, they may fake your presence online to either rob or scam your friends — so all of those details need changing, at a time when you don’t have the two-factor code generator — your phone — to hand.

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Definitely a challenge, which is why I use Authy, which syncs across platforms, for 2FA codes; it also allows you to lock out devices. I guess you’d just have to hope the thieves didn’t lock you out before you locked them out.
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FSInsight accuses Three Arrows Capital of running a ‘Madoff-style Ponzi scheme’ • Coindesk

Will Canny:

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The crypto industry was “brought to its knees” in recent weeks by an “old-fashioned Madoff-style Ponzi scheme” wrapped in a trade that was similar to the positions that sunk Long Term Capital Management (LTCM),” research firm FSInsight said in a report Friday that looked at the implications of the implosion of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which is also known as 3AC.

Madoff in this scenario would be the founders of 3AC, Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, who used their reputation to “recklessly borrow from just about every institutional lender in the business,” resulting in pain for some high-profile firms in the industry, including Voyager Digital, Babel Finance and BlockFi, Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy at FSInsight, wrote in the report. Bernie Madoff was an American financier who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in US history.

At its peak, 3AC had supposed assets under management (AUM) of over $18bn, the note said. But given that the amount of debt that is now known to have been loaned to the firm, it is unclear how much actual equity was at risk. It is likely that Zhu and Davies were simply “using borrowed funds to repay interest on loans issued by lenders, while ‘cooking their books’ to show massive returns on capital,” the note added.

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Eighteen. Billion. Dollars. It’s just mindboggling how much money has been handed over to these people. Then again, Madoff’s Ponzi scheme totalled $64.8bn, out of 4,800 clients. Chumps are eternal.
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How the crypto crash has impacted each Premier League club • The Athletic

Joey D’Urso:

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According to one highly experienced club takeover expert, cryptocurrency companies love sponsoring football clubs because they have worked out that it is the cheapest way to find new customers — especially young men.

Of last season’s 20 Premier League clubs, all of them but one — we’ll get to that — have at least one cryptocurrency sponsor and some have several.

This list builds on several original investigations by The Athletic into the relationship between cryptocurrency and football and analyses the 2021-22 season rather than the upcoming one because many sponsorship deals have not been signed or announced yet.

Oh yes: despite the plummeting value of cryptocurrency, there is no sign yet that Premier League clubs’ love affair with it is slowing down.

Just about every club in last season’s top flight played some part in promoting volatile unregulated financial assets to its fans, virtually all of which have crashed on a spectacular scale in recent weeks.

English clubs are desperate for cash as the cost of running a competitive team constantly spirals upwards.

Cryptocurrency sponsorship is certainly a lucrative, and entirely legal, way of generating cash right now. Yet it remains to be seen whether that can continue in the light of the huge crash.

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Faintly depressing that young men are the easy meat for so much cryptocurrency nonsense. The graphs in the story show tokens which have all headed downwards recently. (The Athletic has a paywall, though unfortunately I couldn’t see it when the Javascript on my browser broke.)
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How green steel made with electricity could clean up a dirty industry • MIT Technology Review

Casey Crownhart:

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Fossil fuels are essential to today’s steel production. Most steelmaking starts in a blast furnace, where a coal-derived material called coke, which is almost pure carbon, reacts with iron ore, a mixture of iron oxides and other minerals. The reaction pulls out the oxygen, leaving behind liquid iron. The carbon and oxygen are then released together as carbon dioxide.

Boston Metal’s solution is an entirely new approach, called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE). Instead of using carbon to remove oxygen, the process relies on electricity, which runs through a cell filled with a mixture of dissolved iron oxides along with other oxides and materials. The electricity heats the cell up to about 1,600 °C (nearly 3,000 °F), melting everything into a hot oxide soup.

In addition to heating things up, electricity drives the oxygen-removing chemical reactions. Molten iron gathers at the bottom of the reactor, and oxygen gas is emitted instead of carbon dioxide.

Because the impurities largely stay out of the reaction, the MOE process can handle low-quality iron ore, which could be a major benefit of the technology…

One estimate from researchers at Columbia University found that if global steel production in blast furnaces were all converted to Boston Metal’s MOE process, it would take over 5,000 terawatt-hours of electricity to run them—about 20% of global power consumption in 2018. Producing steel with hydrogen would also come with high electricity requirements.

If that electricity comes from fossil fuels, switching steelmaking to electricity would be trading one source of emissions for another. But if it comes from renewables or other carbon-free sources, it could make a significant dent in carbon pollution.

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Lots of efforts going on to decarbonise steelmaking; this may be one of the most promising. It’s a huge prize, if won.
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We’re the Supreme Court and, honestly, we just want you all to die • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Jessica Goldstein:

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We understand that you’ve been watching some of these latest rulings come down—overturning a New York law limiting gun use in public, all but stripping away your Miranda rights—and are wondering… what the hell? We realize that we’ve failed to communicate a crucial piece of information to you, one that would make all of our decisions make a whole lot more sense. So here goes: We’re actually trying to kill you.

That’s it. That’s our whole deal. We here at the Supreme Court just love watching people die. Americans, specifically. But also people from other countries. Pretty much everyone. In this and only this arena, we don’t discriminate. We didn’t think we’d need to spell it out for you. We haven’t exactly been subtle about it. Have you seen our outfits? We’re fully cosplaying as the Grim Reaper.

To be honest, we’ve sort of always been this way, but lately, we’ve been taking it to the next level. Probably because we got into Squid Game during quarantine. Brett thought it was a documentary. And we were like, why not?

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The best satire is when you’re not entirely certain it’s satire. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified