In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering barriers to spying activities that currently require human labor.
In the piece, Schneier notes that the existing landscape of electronic surveillance has already transformed the modern era, becoming the business model of the Internet, where our digital footprints are constantly tracked and analyzed for commercial reasons. Spying, by contrast, can take that kind of economically inspired monitoring to a completely new level:
"Spying and surveillance are different but related things," Schneier writes. "If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did."
According to a post on Hacker News, the "23andMe Team" notified users in an email that "important updates were made to the Dispute Resolution and Arbitration section" of 23andMe's terms of service on November 30. This was done, 23andMe told users, "to include procedures that will encourage a prompt resolution of any disputes and to streamline arbitration proceedings where multiple similar claims are filed."
In the email, 23andMe told users that they had 30 days to notify the ancestry site that they disagree with the new terms. Otherwise, 23andMe users "will be deemed to have agreed to the new terms." The process for opting out is detailed in the site's terms of service, instructing users to send written notice of their decision to opt out in an email to arbitrationoptout@23andme.com.
Google is dealing with its second "lost data" fiasco in the past few months. This time, it's Google Drive, which has been mysteriously losing files for some people. Google acknowledged the issue on November 27, and a week later, it posted what it called a fix.
It doesn't feel like Google is describing this issue correctly; the company still calls it a "syncing issue" with the Drive desktop app versions 84.0.0.0 through 84.0.4.0. Syncing problems would only mean files don't make it to or from the cloud, and that doesn't explain why people are completely losing files. In the most popular issue thread on the Google Drive Community forums, severalusersdescribespreadsheets and documents going missing, which all would have been created and saved in the web interface, not the desktop app, and it's hard to see how the desktop app could affect that. Many users peg "May 2023" as the time documents stopped saving. Some say they've never used the desktop app.
Drive has multiple ways of syncing files, which complicates any explanation or diagnosis of what's going on. The most suspect mode in the whole fiasco is the default "file streaming," mode which is actually cloud-first. Files get removed from your computer and stored in the cloud, saving space and leaving only a web link in their place. Perhaps a "syncing" issue could remove files from your computer before uploading (that still doesn't explain the claims of missing web documents, though).
While it may be the reason behind tires skidding, pipes bursting, and closed roads making traffic a nightmare, ice doesn’t always form as easily as it seems. It often gets an assist from proteins made by fungi.
Never mind the common thinking that ice forms at 0° C (32° F). Though this is water’s freezing point, pure water will only freeze when temperatures plummet as low as minus 46° C (minus 50.8° F). So why does it usually freeze at zero anyway? Organisms such as bacteria, insects, and fungi produce proteins known as ice nucleators (non-protein nucleators can also be of abiotic origin). These proteins can kick-start the formation, or nucleation, of ice at higher temperatures than pure water would freeze at.
While the exact reason fungi make these proteins remains unknown, researchers Valeria Molinero of the University of Utah and Konrad Meister of Boise State University led a study that has revealed more about how fungal ice nucleators can both promote and hold back ice formation more efficiently than those of many other life-forms.
Enlarge / City workers unload a truck containing pallets of bottled water to distribute during a water filter distribution event on October 26, 2021 in Hamtramck, Michigan. The state Department of Health and Human Services has begun distributing water filters and bottled water to residents due to elevated levels of lead found in the drinking water due to old and un-maintained water pipes in the city. (credit: Getty | Matthew Hatcher)
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed a stricter rule on lead in drinking water that would require that all lead service lines in the country be replaced within 10 years, and would lower the current lead action level in drinking water from 15 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion.
More than 9.2 million American households have water connections that include lead piping, according to the White House. Lead moves from the pipes into the water when the plumbing experiences corrosion, which is most severe when the water is acidic or has low mineral content. There is no safe level of lead, which is a toxic metal with wide-ranging health effects, including neurotoxic effects. In children, lead exposure can damage the brain and nervous system, slow development, lower IQ, and cause learning, behavioral, speech, and hearing problems. In adults, it can increase the risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems, and kidney damage.
The EPA estimates that the rule will generate between $9.8 billion to $34.8 billion in economic benefits each year based on health improvement, including higher IQs in children, healthier newborns, lower cardiovascular risks in adults, and a reduction in care for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Usually inflation is more of a slow thing that you don’t notice so much until you think back to the time when a burger was only a dollar. Prices increased much faster over the past few years though. For Bloomberg, Reade Pickert and Jennah Haque zoom in on the everyday items that are noticeably more expensive. Basically everything.
I just wrapped up travel in a high cost of living area. The sticker shock on a simple grocery bill was brutal.
There is an ice-skating rink on the White House’s South Lawn for the first time in 43 years this holiday season. First Lady Jill Biden unveiled the rink last night, after revealing the executive mansion’s decorations earlier this week. In 1980, former President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter also erected an ice rink […]
A mine warning sign is seen in the area where demining takes place, Kharkiv Region, north-eastern Ukraine. | Vyacheslav Madiyevskyi / Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Ukraine is staring down a massive humanitarian challenge — now and into the future.
The sign is red, marked with a skull and crossbones and a warning: “Danger mines!” In parts of Ukraine that were contested or controlled by Russian forces, these are reminders that even in territory Ukraine has defended or retaken, the land itself is not fully liberated from war.
Russia’s full-scale invasion has made Ukraine one of the most mined countries in the world. In less than two years, the conflict has potentially created one of the largest demining challenges since World War II.
This includes anti-tank mines, which target vehicles — though if triggered, they do not distinguish between a battle tank and a school bus. There are also anti-personnel mines, which are intended to kill or hurt people, and more makeshift explosives, like booby traps, that serve similar aims. Unexploded artillery and cluster munitions also litter the landscape. Both sides have been firing off tens of thousands of rounds of artillery each day. Even if only a small percentage of those are duds, they can still detonate, maim, and kill, sometimes long after the fighting.
About 174,000 square kilometers of Ukraine is suspected to be contaminated with mines and unexploded ordnance, called UXOs. It is an area about the size of Florida, about 30 percent of Ukraine’s territory. This estimate accounts for land occupied by Russia since its full-scale invasion, along with recaptured areas, everywhere from the Kharkiv region in the east to areas around Kyiv, like Bucha. According to Human Rights Watch, mines have been documented in 11 of Ukraine’s 27 regions.
Source: State Emergency Service of Ukraine, https://mine.dsns.gov.ua/Map of Ukrainian territories that could potentially be contaminated by explosive objects as of April 2023.
Still, the 174,000 square kilometer figure is likely an overestimate, experts and international deminers say. Russia would not have the time, ability, or need to mine every inch of contested land. But until deminers or officials can confirm areas suspected of contamination free from it, the outcomes look the same. That land is off-limits.
“For every football pitch that is contaminated, there’s probably 100 football pitches that are not,” said Paul Heslop, chief technical adviser and program manager for mine action at the United Nations Development Program in Ukraine. “The humanitarian impact comes from the land that is contaminated because obviously you don’t get hurt if you walk through a minefield that isn’t a minefield,” Heslop added. “But the economic impact, and perhaps the social impact, and the impact on the global economy, on global food security, is coming from the 100 minefields that are not minefields.”
What is known — that Ukraine is heavily mined and polluted by unexploded remnants of war — and what is not — where, exactly, these dangers exist — are twin problems Ukraine faces. It takes resources, people, and time to declare places largely free from hazards.
And, right now, a lot of Ukrainian land is still inaccessible, under Russian control or too close to the front lines. That makes it unsafe for humanitarian deminers and vulnerable to recontamination. In the areas deminers can access, it takes even more resources and time to map those locations and then undertake the meticulous and perilous process of clearing mines and returning the land, fully, back to Ukraine.
But until either happens, it deepens and compounds the crisis for Ukrainian civilians in wartime. If a power station is suspected of being mined, technicians might not be able to quickly restore electricity if it goes out. An ambulance might have to take a longer route to the hospital to avoid particular roads.
The scale of the problem is so vast in Ukraine and the resources so finite — even with increasing international assistance and support — that authorities must prioritize. What can’t be investigated or cleared immediately may get cordoned off and marked with a warning sign.
Even when the guns have stopped firing, said Erik Tollefsen, head of the Weapon Contamination Unit at the International Committee of the Red Cross, “the land mines remain active.”
This is a long-term challenge. Deminers are still clearing mines and cluster munitions from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia used by Americans in the Vietnam War. Farmers in Belgium and France, even now, find unexploded World War I shells buried in fields.
Ukraine already had demining operations ongoing before Russia’s full-scale invasion, to find ordnance from World War II and from Russia’s 2014 incursion. Deminers in Ukraine are still finding munitions from the WWII era now, as they begin, bit by bit, to rescue territory from the ongoing war.
Why Ukraine may be one of the biggest clearance challenges since World War II
The front line in the Ukraine war may be the the most heavily mined terrain on the planet. Russian troops built a formidable defensive belt, laid and relaid, that stymied Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
The Ukrainian front line extends hundreds of miles, a daunting minefield. But the boundaries are clear and have been largely static, especially in the past year. Deminers know mines will be found here when the war ends.
The challenge exists when mines are not placed in patterns or appropriately mapped (as militaries are supposed to do), and instead are laid haphazardly or in a rush — or with the intention of terrorizing, as Russia has done in its withdrawal from parts of Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities have reportedly found mines in refrigerators or in toys. Russian troops have planted booby traps or grenades rigged with tripwires, making them even trickier to remove. Retreating Russian forces have booby trapped the bodies of dead soldiers. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of mining the bodies of people killed.
“The Russians are incredibly crafty when it comes to placing booby traps, and they do it to catch out the unwary,” said Col. Bob Seddon, former head of bomb disposal in the British Army. “It’s not always to catch out the military that we’ve seen. In some of the villages and towns that the Russians have abandoned, they have left booby traps in civilian dwellings to catch out civilians returning.”
Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images
A deminer of the charitable fund Demining of Ukraine uses a metal detector to search for mines in the field near the town of Derhachi, Kharkiv region, on October 1, 2023.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images
A Ukrainian poster warning of booby traps left behind by Russian invasion forces after they retreated from this Donbas city last October is stuck to the boarded door of an administration building in Lyman, Ukraine, on April 24, 2023.
Mines are only one slice of the larger problem of UXO contamination. “It’s the artillery shells, and then it’s everything that is used in the course of the battle and is potentially hazardous because it’s explosive, and it hasn’t already exploded,” said Suzanne Fiederlein, director of the Center for International Stabilization and Recovery at James Madison University. Cluster munitions, which the US started sending to Ukraine this summer, release dozens of bomblets when fired, which scatter about and don’t always immediately explode as they should. But these cluster bombs, along with other kinds of artillery, can still be triggered later, detonating if they’re just slightly disturbed or picked up or moved.
“Just everywhere you can imagine, these things are just lying in wait,” said Col. Matt Dimmick (Ret.), Europe Regional Program Manager for Spirit of America, describing the aftermath of combat.
How to demine Ukraine
Military deminers and combat engineers must clear mines quickly, often under fire, so troops can advance. It is not about removing every single explosive, but instead creating a safe path to breach defensive lines.
[In the video above, the Ukrainian band Океан Ельзи has made a music video for its song “I’m going home” that follows the training and journey of a deminer.]
Humanitarian demining and clearance operate under a different set of rules. The standard is clear everything, with as much confidence as possible. Ukraine also has its own national mine action standards, developed from its robust experience of clearing ordnance from World War II and the 2014 conflict in the Donbas.
The first step is determining where the mine or ordnance contamination might be. Right now, Ukraine is working with that wide, wide net — basically, anywhere Russian troops entered or held — and needs to whittle away from there. The process begins with a nontechnical survey, which is a kind of fact-finding mission. Some places are easy to pinpoint: If active fighting occurred or a land mine or bomb goes off, it is a pretty sure sign the land is hazardous.
It can also mean scouring social media posts and local news reports. “This is people with binoculars, people going out with rudimentary search equipment to try and determine where the limits of explosive ordnance contamination exist,” Seddon said.
Teams will interview locals, the mayor, policemen, or even the military to try to gather more information. Satellite imagery helps, as do evolving technologies like drones and thermal imaging.
As the potential contaminated area narrows, the techniques become more precise: teams on the ground using metal detectors or dogs. (Patron is Ukraine’s official mine-sniffing mascot.) The goal of all of this is to reduce and reduce the area to what actually needs to be cleared to finally allow teams to go in and start to remove the mines.
Except, right now in Ukraine, not every mine and unexploded ordnance can be removed. It is an active conflict, and an overhead strike or heavy shelling can recontaminate the land almost instantly. Ukraine does not have the resources, equipment, or people to remove every land mine right now.
Ihor Bezkaravainyi, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Economy who oversees land mine clearance, said Ukraine is prioritizing “demining for civilian needs.” The aim is to make the land as usable and as safe as possible until everything can be cleared at a later time. “We can’t demine all dangerous parts of Ukraine at the same time,” he said.
Critical infrastructure is Ukraine’s top priority, such as roads, electricity lines, gas and water pipes, and power stations. So is civilian safety, making sure people can return to schools or hospitals safely. Then comes areas that intersect with Ukraine’s economy, specifically the grain fields that underpin the country’s agricultural sector.
This kind of mine clearance is what Heslop called “outcomes driven.” Full clearance — that is, removing every single mine — is not feasible with stretched resources and a fluid conflict. Instead, deminers may clear an area around a power station so workers can access it for necessary repairs and maintenance, but marking off the rest for future operations. Teams might remove mines so a farmer can plant at least some of his acreage, but not all of it. In a war, those are the trade-offs Ukraine has to make.
“We cleared this area and the power transformer was installed and 5,000 people got electricity. We cleared this area and a bridge was rebuilt, which took down the travel time to a hospital from four hours to 15 minutes,” Heslop said.
“Every task we do — because we’ve got so few people at the moment — has to have impact, has to have a positive outcome, has to be helping Ukraine in some way,” he added.
This is a long-term challenge for Ukraine, one that gets worse the longer the war goes on
Ryan Hendrickson, a retired Green Beret for the US Army Special Forces and founder of Tip of the Spear Landmine Removal, has been working with a team with on mine clearance in Ukraine. He said in early 2022, when Russia started leaving places like Bucha and Irpin to focus on the Donbas, people slowly started returning to their homes. It reminded him a bit of the aftermath of a hurricane or flood: people returning to see what’s left.
Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy / Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images
An EOD expert remotely removes a mine as a consolidated squad of the Explosives Service of Ukraine carries out demining works in Kharkiv Region, northeastern Ukraine, October 24, 2023.
As they returned, so did the risks of land mines and other munitions buried among the ruins. The fear is that people, lives already disrupted by war, cannot wait for demining operations. Residents want to restart and rebuild, so they will move and sort through the rubble themselves. Farmers want to plow their fields, and so they’ll rig up makeshift machines to try to pull mines up themselves.
“People just can’t wait for the scarce resource, the clearance resources, so they take matters into their own hands, and perhaps put themselves at risk, but they need to pay the bills and feed their families,” Alex van Roy, of the Fondation Suisse de Déminage (FSD), said.
Education and awareness campaigns attempt to mitigate this risk. In Ukraine, announcements warning of land mines broadcast on the radio and blast out across social media. Animated ads run on trains, especially important to warn any Ukrainians who may be newly returning to their homes. Kids get coloring books, warning them not to touch things that look like mines. Patron, Ukraine’s mine-sniffing dog, visits schools and stars in music videos. Teams go door to door. There are murals everywhere. “It looks like propaganda, but we need to do it because it’s simple rules, and all Ukrainians must know about it,” Bezkaravainyi said.
[Patron’s theme song is shown in the video above.]
These tools fill the gaps until Ukraine can scale up, which can probably only happen on a large scale when the fighting ends. The US has pledged more than $182 million for humanitarian demining efforts, and other international donors and organizations are dedicating resources there. Ukrainian groups and figures sometimes crowdfund on social media, like Ukrainian comedian Mark Kutsevalov, who is raising money for demining equipment, documenting his efforts on Instagram.
Ukraine’s deep experience with demining has also become something of a hindrance, as rules put in place to protect safety procedures and processes add to the bureaucracy and red tape. Officials in Ukraine are aware of these challenges, but changing the laws requires acts of Parliament. Some of it, too, is Ukraine’s desire to show its population that demining is a priority and that the government is capable of delivering to its population.
This is a problem for Ukraine now, as the war, and if and when the fighting ends. This isn’t a new lesson of conflict; the world’s experiences with the long-tail dangers to civilians from mines and artillery led to global conventions banning anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions. But the efforts to protect civilians, in the near- and long-term, often collide with the realities of the battlefield. Militaries use land mines because, on the battlefield, they believe they work in combat.
But the weapons themselves do not discriminate between tank or ambulance, soldier or civilian. Which means, in Ukraine, some cities and towns exist in a precarious limbo, free of Russian occupation, but not its remnants. “I used to go here before February 24. I could go over here,” Hendrickson said, describing the frustration of some Ukrainian communities. “Why can’t I go there now? Why is there red tape and a mine sign in front of this? I want my land back. I want my home back. I want — boom.”
Translation and additional reporting by Olena Lysenko.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Manuel Augusto Moreno)
Google has agreed to pay Canadian news businesses $100 million a year to comply with the country's Online News Act, despite previously saying it would remove Canadian news links from search rather than make the required payments.
Google and government officials agreed to a deal that lets Google negotiate with a single news collective and reduce its overall financial obligation. Facebook owner Meta is meanwhile holding firm in its opposition to payments.
"Google will contribute $100 million in financial support annually, indexed to inflation, for a wide range of news businesses across the country, including independent news businesses and those from Indigenous and official-language minority communities," Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge said in a statement today.
A chemical manufacturing facility in Wisconsin has drawn the ire of the Food and Drug Administration for making hand sanitizer with the same equipment it uses to make products with toxic industrial solvents and chemicals, such as automotive brake parts cleaner. The practice is a clear violation of manufacturing standards and could lead to harmful cross-contamination, the FDA said.
The agency sent a warning letter dated October 26 to the maker of the hand sanitizer, Brenntag Great Lakes, LLC, in Wisconsin. The letter, which redacted the name of the hand sanitizer, stated that the agency had found "significant violations" in an inspection in the spring and that the company's responses since then were "inadequate."
Toxic hand sanitizers became an alarming problem in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for the germ-fighting gels skyrocketed and manufacturers rushed products to market. Hundreds of products that flooded the market were found to contain methanol, a toxic alcohol that can cause harm via inhalation, ingestion, and skin absorption. Use of the products leads to poisoning, blindness, and even death, the FDA reported.
On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman has officially returned to the ChatGPT-maker as CEO—accompanied by Mira Murati as CTO and Greg Brockman as president—resuming their roles from before the shocking firing of Altman that threw the company into turmoil two weeks ago. Altman says the company did not lose a single employee or customer throughout the crisis.
"I have never been more excited about the future. I am extremely grateful for everyone’s hard work in an unclear and unprecedented situation, and I believe our resilience and spirit set us apart in the industry," wrote Altman in an official OpenAI news release. "I feel so, so good about our probability of success for achieving our mission."
In the statement, Altman formalized plans that have been underway since last week: ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and economist Larry Summers have officially begun their tenure on the "new initial" OpenAI board of directors. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo is keeping his previous seat on the board. Also on Wednesday, previous board members Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner officially resigned. In addition, a representative from Microsoft (a key OpenAI investor) will have a non-voting observer role on the board of directors.
The US could be up to two decades away from maintaining its own domestic chips supply chain, Nvidia Corp.'s CEO, Jensen Huang, told an audience gathered in New York for the New York Times’s DealBook conference.
Nvidia is a giant in the semiconductor industry, and Huang said his company's success depends on "myriad components that come from different parts of the world," Bloomberg reported. "Not just Taiwan," Huang said, where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing company makes the world's most advanced semiconductor technology.
“We are somewhere between a decade and two decades away from supply chain independence,” Huang said. “It’s not a really practical thing for a decade or two.”
Widely accepted wisdom has it that electric vehicles are easier to maintain than those with internal combustion powertrains. It seems intuitive—EVs have many fewer moving parts than cars that have to detonate small quantities of hydrocarbon fuel thousands of times a minute. But the data don't really bear out the idea. In fact, according to data collected by Consumer Reports, EVs are significantly less reliable than conventionally powered cars.
CR is known for buying cars for its own test fleet, but for its annual auto reliability survey, the organization cast a wider net. Specifically, it gathered data from 330,000 owners of vehicles from model year 2000 onwards, and it uses that survey data to generate reliability scores for each vehicle and model year.
The results are a little inconvenient for the EV evangelist. EVs had 79 percent more reliability problems than a gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicle, on average. Plug-in hybrids fared even worse; these had 146 percent more issues on average than the conventional alternative. But simpler not-plug-in hybrids bucked this trend, with 26 percent fewer reliability problems than conventionally powered vehicles.
Enlarge / Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (Left) and Debbie Stabenow (Right) don't exactly see eye to eye on the auto industry's transition to electric vehicles. (credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
The new and somewhat-complicated rules governing which cars do or don't qualify for the new clean vehicle tax credit look like they might get tweaked a little in the near future.
Before, the tax credit was linked to the battery-storage capacity of a plug-in hybrid or battery-electric vehicle. But the Inflation Reduction Act changed that—now a range of conditions must be met, including final assembly in North America and an annually increasing percentage of locally sourced minerals and components within that battery pack.
On the one hand, the domestic sourcing requirements are beneficial because they are stimulating the development of local battery mineral refining and manufacturing here in the United States, adding well-paying jobs in the process. But the new rules have also significantly reduced the number of EVs that qualify.
Enlarge / The Ekobot autonomous weeding robot roving around an onion field in Sweden. (credit: Ekobot AB)
Anybody who has pulled weeds in a garden knows that it's a tedious task. Scale it up to farm-sized jobs, and it becomes a nightmare. The most efficient industrial alternative, herbicides, have potentially devastating side effects for people, animals, and the environment. So a Swedish company named Ekobot AB has introduced a wheeled robot that can autonomously recognize and pluck weeds from the ground rapidly using metal fingers.
The four-wheeled Ekobot WEAI robot is battery-powered and can operate 10–12 hours a day on one charge. It weighs 600 kg (about 1,322 pounds) and has a top speed of 5 km/h (2.5 mph). It's tuned for weeding fields full of onions, beetroots, carrots, or similar vegetables, and it can cover about 10 hectares (about 24.7 acres) in a day. It navigates using GPS RTK and contains safety sensors and vision systems to prevent it from unintentionally bumping into objects or people.
To pinpoint plants it needs to pluck, the Ekobot uses an AI-powered machine vision system trained to identify weeds as it rolls above the farm field. Once the weeds are within its sights, the robot uses a series of metal fingers to quickly dig up and push weeds out of the dirt. Ekobot claims that in trials, its weed-plucking robot allowed farmers to grow onions with 70 percent fewer herbicides. The weed recognition system is key because it keeps the robot from accidentally digging up crops by mistake.
Sam Altman, the poster boy for AI, was ousted from his company OpenAI. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The alternative — a mass exodus of OpenAI’s top talent to Microsoft — would have been worse.
The seismic shake-up at OpenAI — involving the firing and, ultimately, the reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman — came as a shock to almost everyone. But the truth is, the company was probably always going to reach a breaking point. It was built on a fault line so deep and unstable that eventually, stability would give way to chaos.
That fault line was OpenAI’s dual mission: to build AI that’s smarter than humanity, while also making sure that AI would be safe and beneficial to humanity. There’s an inherent tension between those goals because advanced AI could harm humans in a variety of ways, from entrenching bias to enabling bioterrorism. Now, the tension in OpenAI’s mandate appears to have helped precipitate the tech industry’s biggest earthquake in decades.
On Friday, the board fired Altman over an alleged lack of transparency, and company president Greg Brockman then quit in protest. On Saturday, the pair tried to get the board to reinstate them, but negotiations didn’t go their way. By Sunday, both had accepted jobs with major OpenAI investor Microsoft, where they would continue their work on cutting-edge AI. By Monday, 95 percent of OpenAI employees were threatening to leave for Microsoft, too.
Late Tuesday night, OpenAI announced, “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board.”
As chaotic as all this was, the aftershocks for the AI ecosystem might have been scarier if the shake-up had ended with a mass exodus of OpenAI employees,as it appeared poised to do a few days ago. A flow of talent from OpenAI to Microsoft would have meant a flow from a company that had been founded on worries about AI safety to a company that can barely be bothered to pay lip service to the concept.
So at the end of the day, did OpenAI’s board make the right decision when it fired Altman? Or did it make the right decision when it rehired him?
The answer may well be “yes” to both.
OpenAI’s board did exactly what it was supposed to do: Protect the company’s integrity
OpenAI is not a typical tech company. It has a unique structure, and that structure is key to understanding the current shake-up.
The company was originally founded as a nonprofit focused on AI research in 2015. But in 2019, hungry for the resources it would need to create AGI — artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical system that can match or exceed human abilities — OpenAI created a for-profit entity. That allowed investors to pour money into OpenAI and potentially earn a return on it, though their profits would be capped, according to the rules of the new setup, and anything above the cap would revert to the nonprofit. Crucially, the nonprofit board retained the power to govern the for-profit entity. That included hiring and firing power.
The board’s job was to make sure OpenAI stuck to its mission, as expressed in its charter, which states clearly, “Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity.” Not to investors. Not to employees. To humanity.
The charter also states, “We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions.” But it also paradoxically states, “To be effective at addressing AGI’s impact on society, OpenAI must be on the cutting edge of AI capabilities.”
This reads a lot like: We’re worried about a race where everyone’s pushing to be at the front of the pack. But we’ve got to be at the front of the pack.
Each of those two impulses found an avatar in one of OpenAI’s leaders. Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and top AI researcher, reportedly worried that the company was moving too fast, trying to make a splash and a profit at the expense of safety. Since July, he’s co-led OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team, which aims to figure out how to manage the risk of superintelligent AI.
Altman, meanwhile, was moving full steam ahead. Under his tenure, OpenAI did more than any other company to catalyze an arms race dynamic, most notably with the launch of ChatGPT last November. More recently, Altman was reportedly fundraisingwith autocratic regimes in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia so he could spin up a new AI chip-making company. That in itself could raise safety concerns, since such regimes might use AI to supercharge digital surveillance or human rights abuses.
We still don’t know exactly why the OpenAI board fired Altman. The board has said that he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Sutskever, who spearheaded Altman’s ouster, initially defended the move in similar terms: “This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity,” he told employees at an all-hands meeting hours after the firing. (Sutskever later flipped sides, however, and said he regretted participating in the ouster.)
“Sam Altman and Greg Brockman seem to be of the view that accelerating AI can achieve the most good for humanity. The plurality of the[old]board, however, appears to be of a different view that the pace of advancement is too fast and could compromise safety and trust,” said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.
“I think that the board made the only decision they felt like they could make” in firing Altman, AI expert Gary Marcus told me. “I think they saw something from Sam that they thought they could not live with and stay true to their mission. So in their eyes, they made the right choice.”
Before OpenAI agreed to reinstate Altman, Kreps worried that“the board may have won the battle but lost the war.”
In other words, if the board fired Altman in part over concerns that his accelerationist impulse was jeopardizing the safety part of OpenAI’s mission, it won the battle, in that it did what it could to keep the company true to the mission.
But had the saga ended with the coup pushing OpenAI’s top talent straight into the arms of Microsoft, the board would have lost the larger war — the effort to keep AI safe for humankind. Which brings us to …
The AI risk landscape would probably be worse if Altman had stayed fired
Altman’s firing caused an unbelievable amount of chaos. According to futurist Amy Webb, the CEO of the Future Today Institute, OpenAI’s board had failed to practice “strategic foresight” — to understand how its sudden dismissal of Altman might cause the company to implode and might reverberate across the larger AI ecosystem. “You have to think through the next-order implications of your actions,” she told me.
It’s certainly possible that Sutskever did not predict the threat of a mass exodus that could have ended OpenAI altogether. But another board member behind the ouster, Helen Toner — whom Altman had castigated over a paper she co-wrote that appeared to criticize OpenAI’s approach to safety — did understand that was a possibility. And it was a possibility she was prepared to stomach, if that was what would best safeguard humanity’s interests — which, remember, was the board’s job. She said that if the company was destroyed as a result of Altman’s firing, that could be consistent with its mission, the New York Times reported.
However, once Altman and Brockman announced they were joining Microsoft and the OpenAI staff threatened a mass exodus, too, that may have changed the board’s calculation: Keeping them in house was arguably better than this new alternative. Sending them straight into Microsoft’s arms would probably not bode well for AI safety.
After all, Microsoft laid off its entire AI ethics team earlier this year. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella teamed up with OpenAI to embed its GPT-4 into Bing search in February, he taunted competitor Google: “We made them dance.” And upon hiring Altman, Nadella tweeted that he was excited for the ousted leader to set “a new pace for innovation.”
Pushing out Altman and OpenAI’s top talent would have meant that “OpenAI can wash its hands of any responsibility for any possible future missteps on AI development but can’t stop it from happening,” Kreps said. “The developments show just how dynamic and high-stakes the AI space has become, and that it’s impossible either to stop or contain the progress.”
Impossible may be too strong a word. But containing the progress would require changing the underlying incentive structure in the AI industry, and that has proven extremely difficult in the context of hyper-capitalist, hyper-competitive, move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley. Being at the cutting edge of tech development is what earns profit and prestige, but that does not lend itself to slowing down, even when slowing down is strongly warranted.
Under Altman, OpenAI tried to square this circle by arguing that researchers need to play with advanced AI to figure out how to make advanced AI safe — so accelerating development is actually helpful. That was tenuous logic even a decade ago, but it doesn’t hold up today, when we’ve got AI systems so advanced and so opaque (think: GPT-4) that many experts say we need to figure out how they work before we build more black boxes that are even more unexplainable.
OpenAI had also run into a more prosaic problem that made it susceptible to taking a profit-seeking path: It needed money. To run large-scale AI experiments these days, you need a ton of computing power — more than 300,000 times what you needed a decade ago — and that’s incredibly expensive. So to stay at the cutting edge, it had to create a for-profit arm and partner with Microsoft. OpenAI wasn’t alone in this: The rival company Anthropic, which former OpenAI employees spun up because they wanted to focus more on safety, started out by arguing that we need to change the underlying incentive structure in the industry, but it ended up joining forces with Amazon.
Given all this, is it even possible to build an AI company that advances the state of the art while also truly prioritizing ethics and safety?
“It’s looking like maybe not,” Marcus said.
Webb was even more direct, saying, “I don’t think it’s possible.” Instead, she emphasized that the government needs to change the underlying incentive structure within which all these companies operate. That would include a mix of carrots and sticks: positive incentives, like tax breaks for companies that prove they’re upholding the highest safety standards; and negative incentives, like regulation.
In the meantime, the AI industry is a Wild West, where each company plays by its own rules. OpenAI lives to play another day.
Update, November 22, 11:30 am ET: This story was originally published on November 21 and has been updated to reflect Altman’s reinstatement at OpenAI.
Enlarge / Google is looking pretty dilapidated these days. (credit: Aurich Lawson)
Chrome's new adblock-limiting extension plan is still on. The company paused the rollout of the new "Manifest V3" extension format a year ago after an outcry over how much it would damage some of Chrome's most popular extensions. A year later, Google is restarting the phase-out schedule, and while it has changed some things, Chrome will eventually be home to inferior filtering extensions.
Google's blog post says the plan to kill Manifest V2, the current format for Chrome extensions, is back on starting June 2024. On that date (we'll be on "Chrome 127" by then), Google will turn off Manifest V2 for the pre-stable versions of Chrome—that's the Beta, Dev, and Canary channels. Google says, "Manifest V2 extensions [will be] automatically disabled in their browser and will no longer be able to install Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store."
The timeline around a stable channel rollout is worded kind of strangely. The company says: "We expect it will take at least a month to observe and stabilize the changes in pre-stable before expanding the rollout to stable channel Chrome, where it will also gradually roll out over time. The exact timing may vary depending on the data collected, and during this time, we will keep you informed about our progress." It's unclear what "data" Google is concerned with. It's not the end of the world if an extension crashes—it turns off and stops working until the user reboots the extension. Maybe the company is concerned about how many people Google "Firefox" once their ad-blocker stops working.
Sam Altman is back at OpenAI. What happens to its safety mission?
So, OpenAI had a weird week. The hottest company in tech just saw the removal, replacement, and reinstatement of its superstar CEO, Sam Altman in the span of five days. It also saw, as a result of that Altman drama, the removal and replacement of most of its board of directors. In the middle of this, almost every OpenAI employee threatened to quit, the company cycled through two interim CEOs, Microsoft set up a new Altman-led AI arm of its own, and we all faced the very real possibility that the $80 billion company behind ChatGPT would completely implode.
And we still don’t really know why.
The chaos started on November 17, when the OpenAI board announced Altman’s termination, kicking off several days of negotiations to bring him back, as was the desire of the company’s employees and its main investor, Microsoft. On November 22, OpenAI announced that Altman would indeed be returning as CEO, and most of the board that voted to fire him was being replaced.
This is not, suffice to say, how CEO firings traditionally play out. But OpenAI isn’t a traditional company. It became a Silicon Valley success story in a time when the industry was seen as largely stagnant. In the past year, thousands have been laid off at tech companies that have only ever known growth. Then along came generative AI and ChatGPT, new technology that is cool and exciting to everyone from the average consumer to one of the most valuable companies in the world. One of them, Microsoft, eagerly hitched its wagon to OpenAI and to Altman, who became the poster boy of the billion-dollar AI revolution.
OpenAI, as the leading developer of the technology that could shape how (or if) we live in the future, was shaping up to be one of the most important companies in the world. For a few days there, it looked like we were witnessing the effective end of that company. Now, however, order seems to have been restored.
That still leaves some big questions unanswered. Again, we still don’t know why OpenAI’s previous board made the extreme decision to remove Altman — nor do we know if their concerns with Altman were alleviated before he came back. And now that there’s a new board in place, one that includes a former Meta executive and a former treasury secretary, it’s hard to predict exactly what OpenAI does next.
Why did Sam Altman get fired?
The short answer: It’s still unclear. Altman seems to have no idea what happened, and the board has said very little, publicly, about its reasoning beyond that it didn’t trust Altman anymore. It’s also, reportedly, refused to say much privately. It appears there were fundamental differences between the (now former) board’s vision for AI, which included carrying out that mission of safety and transparency, and Altman’s vision, which, apparently, was not that.
How did Altman come back when the board was so determined to get rid of him?
Well, that board no longer exists, for one. As part of the deal to bring Altman back, most of its members were replaced, presumably with people Altman wants to be there and who share his vision. Those new members are former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor, who will serve as its chair, and economist Larry Summers. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo will remain on, the only member of the previous board to stick around. As this was described by OpenAI as an ”initial” board, we will almost certainly get a few additions in time. Including, perhaps, Altman, who was on OpenAI’s original board, and someone from Microsoft.
Departing board members are Ilya Sutskever, who co-founded OpenAI and is it chief scientist, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley; and Helen Toner, Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s director of strategy and foundational research grants. Toner, reportedly, had an especially frosty relationship with Altman because she co-authored a research paper that he saw as critical of OpenAI. Toner’s public comment so far is that she’s looking forward to getting some sleep.
More than a fewpeoplehavenoted that, aside from Sutskever (who made his change of heart known and still works at OpenAI), the only board members who were removed happen to be women — and they’ve been replaced with two white men. The optics aren’t great here, but, again, we’ll likely get additional members soon who may well be people who aren’t white men.
Perhaps more importantly, as far as Altman and the investors who pushed for the board to be revamped are concerned, is that the board is now made up of people with tech board and business experience. D’Angelo and Taylor both were chief technology officers at Facebook, for one, and Taylor was the chair of Twitter’s board until Elon Musk took over. As for Summers, he’s currently the director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard, where he’s previously served as its president, and has held prominent positions in the Clinton (secretary of the treasury) and Obama (director of the National Economic Council) administrations. He’s also seen as someone who is very tech-business-friendly and would never dream of putting safety before profit.
How did Sam Altman, the boy wonder of AI, become a controversial figure?
Before Altman headed up OpenAI, he was the CEO of the influential startup accelerator Y Combinator, so he was well known in certain Silicon Valley circles. Altman was also a co-founder of OpenAI, and as the company started to be seen as the leader of a new technological revolution, he put himself forward as its youthful, press-friendly ambassador. As CEO, he went on an AI world tour, rubbing elbows with and winning over world leaders and telling various governments, including Congress and the Biden administration, how best to regulate this transformative technology — in ways that were very much advantageous to OpenAI and therefore Altman.
Altman often says that his company’s products could contribute to the end of humanity itself. Not many CEOs (at least, of companies that don’t make weapons) humblebrag about how potentially dangerous their business’s products are. That could be seen as a CEO being refreshingly honest, even if it makes his company look bad. It could also be seen as a CEO saying that his company is one of the most important and powerful things in the world, and you should trust him to lead it because he cares that much about all of us.
If you see generative AI as an enormously beneficial tool for humanity, you’re probably a fan of Altman. If you’re concerned about how the world will change when generative AI starts to replace human jobs and presumably becomes more and more powerful, you may not like Altman very much.
Simply put, Altman has made himself the face of AI, and people have responded accordingly.
And how did OpenAI get to be such a big deal?
OpenAI was founded in 2015, but it’s never been your average Silicon Valley startup. For one, it had the backing of many prominent tech people, including Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk, who is also credited as being one of its co-founders. Second, OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. Its mission was not to move as quickly as possible to make as much money as possible, but rather to research and develop a technology with enormous transformative potential that therefore needed to be done safely, responsibly, and transparently: AI with the ability to learn and think for itself, also known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. In order to do so, the company would need to develop generative AI, or AI that can learn from massive amounts of data and generate content upon request.
A few years later, OpenAI needed money. Altman took over as CEO in 2019. Around that time, it established a “capped profit” arm, allowing investors to get up to 100 times a return on what they put into it. The rest of the profit — if there was any — would go back into OpenAI’s nonprofit. The company was still governed by a board of directors charged with carrying out that nonprofit mission, but the board was pretty much the only thing left of OpenAI’s nonprofit origins.
OpenAI released some of its generative AI products into the world in 2022, giving everyone a chance to experiment with them. People were impressed, and OpenAI was seen as the leader in a burgeoning industry. Thanks to $13 billion of investments from Microsoft, OpenAI has been able to develop and market its services, giving Microsoft access to the new technologies along the way. Microsoft pinned a large part of its future on AI, and with its investment in OpenAI, established a partnership with the most prominent and seemingly advanced company in the field. And OpenAI’s valuation grew by leaps and bounds.
Meanwhile, Altman emerged as the leader of the AI movement because he was the head of the leading AI company, a role he has embraced. He has extolled the virtues of AI (and OpenAI) to world leaders. He says regulation is important, lest his company become too powerful (only to balk when regulation actually happens). And along the way, he has become one of the most powerful people in tech, if not beyond. Which is part of why his abrupt termination as CEO of OpenAI was such a shock.
If Altman was otherwise so popular, what was the OpenAI board so upset about?
Removing Altman could have amounted to a huge, potentially company-destroying deal, so you’d think there’d be a very good reason the OpenAI board decided to do it. It has yet to tell us what that reason is.
The board has the authority to remove its CEO with a majority vote. Altman and OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman were on that board — Brockman was its chair — but clearly not involved in the vote for their own ouster from it.
The board said in a statement that its decision was the result of a “deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that [Altman] was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
So, yeah, that’s a little vague. For what it’s worth, Emmett Shear, who briefly served as OpenAI’s interim CEO during all of this, tweeted that “the board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.”
We do have some reporting that Altman and the board hadn’t gotten along for a while now, much of this due to the release and massive success of ChatGPT. OpenAI suddenly became one of the hottest tech companies and moved quickly to capitalize on that. That’s what a for-profit startup does — not a nonprofit, which, again, OpenAI supposedly was.
Altman hasn’t said anything publicly about why he was removed, and it’s beyond belief that he had no idea that there were tensions. Brockman, who resigned in solidarity with Altman, said that he and Altman were “shocked and saddened.” Presumably, more will come out in time about the board’s reasoning for firing Altman. According to the New York Times, there will be an “independent investigation” into Altman as part of the former board’s deal to bring him back.
Given OpenAI’s mission to develop safe and responsible AI, there are fears that Altman was driving the development of unsafe and irresponsible AI and that the board felt it had to put a stop to it. But, again, we don’t yet know if those fears are founded.
What happened after Altman got fired? OpenAI got a new CEO and everyone was happy?
During the five days when Altmas was not CEO, OpenAI actually got two interim CEOs and, it seems, almost no one was happy about any of it.
When the board announced Altman’s departure, it said that chief technology officer Mira Murati would be its interim CEO. In the next few days, many of OpenAI’s employees openly revolted, and the board was reported to be desperately trying to get Altman back, with Microsoft very much pressuring them to do so. But then Shear, who is Twitch’s co-founder and former CEO, announced that he was OpenAI’s CEO. Not Murati, and not Altman.
It didn’t seem like he’d have much to oversee, with most of OpenAI’s employees threatening to quit if Altman and Brockman weren’t reinstated and the current board didn’t leave. Murati was the first signee. Several prominent OpenAI employees also tweeted that “OpenAI is nothing without its people,” which Altman quote-tweeted with a single heart. Sutskever was also a signatory of the letter. He has since tweeted that “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions.” (Which earned him a three-heart quote tweet from Altman — no hard feelings!)
With Altman back at the helm, it appears that most of the order has been restored. Brockman is also back and tweeted a photo of himself with many OpenAI employees, all looking quite happy about everything.
How did the rest of Silicon Valley respond to the drama? Do people still think Altman should be running OpenAI?
Sam Altman is a very wealthy, very well-connected entrepreneur-turned-investor who was also running the most exciting tech startup in years. So it’s not surprising that once the news of his firing broke, the tech industry’s narrative quickly became one about the OpenAI board’s ineptitude, not any of his shortcomings.
But there is a world beyond the tech industry, and not everyone in it is behind Altman. You won’t hear many people defending the board out loud since it’s much safer to support Altman. But writer Eric Newcomer, in a post he published November 19, took a stab at it. He noted, for instance, that Altman has had fallouts with partners before — one of whom was Elon Musk — and reported that Altman was asked to leave his perch running Y Combinator.
“Altman had been given a lot of power, the cloak of a nonprofit, and a glowing public profile that exceeds his more mixed private reputation,” Newcomer wrote. “He lost the trust of his board. We should take that seriously.”
What was Microsoft’s response to all this? Did they really offer Altman a job?
Microsoft has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI, and a big part of its future direction is riding on OpenAI’s success. OpenAI’s complete implosion would be a very bad development for that future.
When it seemed that talks between Altman and OpenAI had broken down, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted that the company was still very confident in OpenAI and its new leadership, but that it was also starting a “new advanced AI research team” headed up by — you guessed it — Sam Altman. He added that Brockman and unnamed “colleagues” were also on board.
But Nadella also made it very clear, in multipleinterviews, that he was open to (and would prefer) Altman to return to running OpenAI — and that he wasn’t very happy with its board, which didn’t consult with nor give Microsoft a heads up about its plans, let alone tell its partner and main investor why it made that decision. And Altman tweeted that “satya and my top priority remains to ensure openai continues to thrive.”
With Altman back at OpenAI, it looks like Microsoft’s new AI research team won’t need to go forward. He tweeted that his return to OpenAI was done “w satya’s support.”
What does all this mean for AI safety?
That kind of depends on what OpenAI had in the works and Altman’s plans for it, doesn’t it? Maybe Altman and OpenAI figured out the artificial general intelligence puzzle and the board thought it was too powerful to release so they canned him. Maybe it had nothing to do with OpenAI’s tech at all and more to do with the unresolvable conflict between a nonprofit’s mission and an executive’s quest to build the most valuable company in the world — a conflict that got worse and worse as OpenAI and Altman got bigger and bigger. And which, in the end, Altman won.
If nothing else, this whole debacle serves as a reminder that the safety of products shouldn’t be left to the businesses that put them out into the world, which are generally only interested in safety when it makes them money or stops them from losing it. Housing that mission within a safety-focused nonprofit will only work as long as the nonprofit doesn’t stop the company from making money. And remember, OpenAI isn’t the only company working on this technology. Plenty of others that are very much not nonprofits, like Google and Meta, have their own generative AI models.
Governments around the world are trying to figure out how best to regulate AI. How safe this technology is will largely rely on if and how they do it. It won’t and shouldn’t depend on one man (read: Altman) who says he has the world’s best interests at heart and that we should trust him.
Update, November 22, 12:30 pm ET: This story was originally published on November 20 and has been updated to include news of Altman’s reinstatement and more details about his ouster and return.
Various forms of heat pumps—refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters—are estimated to consume about 30 percent of the world's electricity. And that number is almost certain to rise, as heat pumps play a very large role in efforts to electrify heating to reduce the use of fossil fuels.
Most existing versions of these systems rely on the compression of a class of chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons, gasses that were chosen because they have a far smaller impact on the ozone layer than earlier refrigerants. Unfortunately, they are also extremely potent greenhouse gasses, with a short-term impact several thousand times that of carbon dioxide.
Alternate technologies have been tested, but all of them have at least one major drawback in comparison to gas compression. In a paper released in today's issue of Science, however, researchers describe progress on a form of heat pump that is built around a capacitor that changes temperature as it's charged and discharged. Because the energy spent while charging it can be used on discharge, the system has the potential to be highly efficient.
One of the world’s most active ransomware groups has taken an unusual—if not unprecedented—tactic to pressure one of its victims to pay up: reporting the victim to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The pressure tactic came to light in a post published on Wednesday on the dark web site run by AlphV, a ransomware crime syndicate that’s been in operation for two years. After first claiming to have breached the network of the publicly traded digital lending company MeridianLink, AlphV officials posted a screenshot of a complaint it said it filed with the SEC through the agency’s website. Under a recently adopted rule that goes into effect next month, publicly traded companies must file an SEC disclosure within four days of learning of a security incident that had a “material” impact on their business.
“We want to bring to your attention a concerning issue regarding MeridianLink's compliance with the recently adopted cybersecurity incident disclosure rules,” AlphV officials wrote in the complaint. “It has come to our attention that MeridianLink, in light of a significant breach compromising customer data and operational information, has failed to file the requisite disclosure under item 1.05 of form 8-K within the stipulated four business days, as mandated by the new SEC rules.”
The Federal Communications Commission today approved rules that prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services, rejecting fervent opposition from Internet service providers and Republicans. The broadband industry is likely to sue the FCC in an attempt to block the rules.
The digital discrimination rules were approved in a 3-2 party-line vote. "Under these rules, the FCC can protect consumers by directly addressing companies' policies and practices if they differentially impact consumers' access to broadband Internet access service or are intended to do so, and by applying these protections to ensure communities see equitable broadband deployment, network upgrades, and maintenance," an FCC announcement today said.
The rules and a related complaint process will ensure that the FCC "can investigate possible instances of discrimination of broadband access, work with companies to solve problems, facilitate mediation, and, when necessary, penalize companies for violating the rules," the agency also said.
This week, some of the biggest tech companies found out that Section 230 immunity doesn't shield them from some of the biggest complaints alleging that social media platform designs are defective and harming children and teen users.
On Tuesday, US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that discovery can proceed in a lawsuit documenting individual cases involving hundreds of children and teens allegedly harmed by social media use across 30 states. Their complaint alleged that tech companies were guilty of negligently operating platforms with many design defects—including lack of parental controls, insufficient age verification, complicated account deletion processes, appearance-altering filters, and requirements forcing users to log in to report child sexual abuse materials (CSAM)—and failed to warn young users and their parents about those defects.
Defendants are companies operating "the world’s most used social media platforms: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Snapchat." All of these companies moved to dismiss the multi-district litigation entirely, hoping that the First Amendment and Section 230 immunity would effectively bar all the plaintiffs' claims—including, apparently, claims that companies ignored addressing when moving to dismiss.
Enlarge / Histological section of an artery suffering from atherosclerosis (credit: James Cavallini/Getty Images)
In a small initial test in people, researchers have shown that a single infusion of a novel gene-editing treatment can reduce cholesterol, the fatty substance that clogs and hardens arteries over time.
The experiment was carried out in 10 participants with an inherited condition that causes extremely high LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol levels, which can lead to heart attack at an early age. Despite being on cholesterol-lowering medications, the volunteers were already suffering from heart disease. They joined a trial in New Zealand and the United Kingdom run by Verve Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based biotech company.
Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors' websites removed from search results. Over the past few years, the foreign defendants "created at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party website URLs," said Google's lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Another 500,000 URLs were also targeted, according to Google. "To date, Defendants' scheme has forced Google to investigate and respond to fraudulent takedown requests targeting more than 117,000 third-party website URLs, as well as takedown requests targeting more than half a million additional third-party URLs that are likely fraudulent based on preliminary investigation," the lawsuit said.
Google filed the lawsuit against Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Thien, who are both said to live in Vietnam, and 20 defendants whose identities are unknown. Google alleged that the defendants "appear to be connected with websites selling printed t-shirts, and their unlawful conduct aims to remove competing third-party sellers from Google Search results."
Enlarge / A file photo of Tropical Storm Fiona as seen in a satellite image from 2022. (credit: Getty Images)
On Tuesday, the peer-reviewed journal Science published a study that shows how an AI meteorology model from Google DeepMind called GraphCast has significantly outperformed conventional weather forecasting methods in predicting global weather conditions up to 10 days in advance. The achievement suggests that future weather forecasting may become far more accurate, reports The Washington Post and Financial Times.
In the study, GraphCast demonstrated superior performance over the world's leading conventional system, operated by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In a comprehensive evaluation, GraphCast outperformed ECMWF's system in 90 percent of 1,380 metrics, including temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction, and humidity at various atmospheric levels.
And GraphCast does all this quickly: "It predicts hundreds of weather variables, over 10 days at 0.25° resolution globally, in under one minute," write the authors in the paper "Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting."
Enlarge / Students decide between Lunchables and a walking taco during lunch at Pembroke Elementary School on Thursday September 7, 2023, in Pembroke, NC. (credit: Getty | Matt McClain)
Such warning or limits would mark the first time that Americans would be advised to consider not just the basic nutritional components of foods, but also how their foods are processed.
Ultra-processed foods have garnered considerable negative attention in recent years. Dozens of observational studies have linked the food category to weight gain, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases, the Post notes. A small but landmark randomized controlled study in 2019, led by the National Institutes of Health's nutrition expert, Kevin Hall, found that when inpatient trial participants received diets with ultra-processed foods, they ate roughly 500 extra calories a day compared to a control group of inpatient participants who were served a diet that was matched in macronutrients but did not include ultra-processed foods.
We just got done noting how pretty much all of the criticism of the Sprint T-Mobile merger by economists and consumer advocates wound up being true. The deal has resulted in more than 10,000+ eliminated jobs, steady price hikes, annoying new fees, a weaker T-Mobile brand, and a lower quality product overall. It also clearly distracted T-Mobile from competent network security.
But Verizon and AT&T customers are also pissed, and are part of a new lawsuit against T-Mobile arguing that the merger raised prices for everybody due to the reduction in overall wireless market competition. A federal judge in Chicago last week ruled that plaintiffs made some decent points and the lawsuit should be allowed to proceed:
“U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin in a 41-page ruling on Thursday said the plaintiffs “plausibly” argued that higher prices “flowed directly” from the $26 billion merger.”
The important time to protect consumers is before these kinds of competition-eroding deals are approved, but that very clearly didn’t happen here. Trump regulators at the FCC didn’t even bother to read about the deal’s impact before approving it. Trump “antitrust enforcers” at the FTC actively helped T-Mobile avoid regulatory scrutiny on their personal time, you know, like antitrust enforcers do.
T-Mobile’s response to the lawsuit was expected: to deny everything and insist the U.S. wireless sector is secretly super competitive:
Attorneys for T-Mobile called the lawsuit “unprecedented,” and said the plaintiffs’ damages were “speculative.”
“If plaintiffs are unhappy with Verizon and AT&T, there is a remedy available in the highly competitive market that wireless consumers enjoy today — they should switch to T-Mobile, not sue it,” attorneys for T-Mobile told the court.
The harms of mindless consolidation are not theoretical. They’re clearly documented. Yet we’re dedicated to ignoring those harms because such consolidation is hugely profitable for a handful of over-compensated executives and a few key investors (sometimes). Rinse, wash, repeat, with nobody responsible for the end result getting within a thousand miles of introspection or accountability.
I’d not expect much from the suit in terms of reform. Any payout will be a tiny fraction of the financial harm caused. The real fix lies in more stringent merger review and well funded and staffed regulators; concepts defenders of a broken but profitable status quo have no real interest in.
Enlarge / We have no idea what's going to be in the movie, but likely this is the height of the romance. (credit: Nintendo)
Sony and Nintendo haven't collaborated on much of anything since the Nintendo PlayStation went awry. But Sony's film division is putting its money together with its console semi-rival to produce a live-action The Legend of Zelda film.
Details are scant beyond a Nintendo press release and Hollywood reporting by Deadline. The director is Wes Ball, director of the Maze Runner film trilogy, and the writer is Derek Connolly, who wrote the Jurassic World trilogy and was tagged to work on a putative Metal Gear film.
The film will be produced by Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto and Avi Arad, the founder of Marvel's film arm, Marvel Studios, who later produced Marvel and other IP-based films for Sony, including Uncharted and the Spider-Man and X-Men films. Arad, Deadline reports, was "a lynchpin" to finalizing a film that has long been in the works. Arad is also reportedly involved in the gestating MetalGear film.
President Joe Biden, right, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear at a briefing at a local elementary school, on response efforts to flooding in Kentucky, in August 2022. | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Democrats had a good night. So did abortion rights. Glenn Youngkin, not so much.
The 2023 general election on Tuesday, November 7, featured only a grab-bag group of contests, but there was one clear overall theme in the results: Democrats did well.
Gov. Andy Beshear (D) won reelection in deep-red Kentucky. Democrats held onto the Virginia state Senate and took over the Virginia state House, blocking Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s hopes of passing conservative policies (and perhaps his ambitions in national politics). Meanwhile, Ohio voters enshrined the protection of abortion rights in the state constitution and legalized recreational cannabis.
Strangely, all this happened while President Joe Biden has been getting some of his worst polling numbers yet. As in the 2022 midterms, though, national dissatisfaction with Biden did not lead to a red wave sweeping out Democrats across the country or to wins for conservative policy proposals in ballot initiatives.
If you’re looking for tea leaves about how 2024 will go, don’t get carried away. Many of these outcomes were driven by local personalities, issues, and circumstances. And they took place in so few states that the results hardly present a clear picture of where opinion in the country is, or where it will be next year. But wins are wins, and Democrats got some significant ones on Tuesday.
Winner: Democrats
Michael Swensen/Getty Images
Incumbent Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear speaks to the press and supporters on his last campaign stop before the election, on November 6, 2023, in Louisville, Kentucky.
Democrats had about as good a night on Tuesday as they could have reasonably expected.
Gov. Beshear’s reelection in Kentucky proves that Democrats can still win in Trump country, especially if they happen to be the son of a popular former governor. Though Republicans won the other statewide races on the ballot in Kentucky, Beshear beat back the candidacy of Daniel Cameron, who had been hyped as a Republican rising star, to win a second term.
The other governor’s race on the ballot was in Mississippi, where Brandon Presley (D) put forth a surprisingly strong challenge to Gov. Tate Reeves (R) in this red state but ultimately conceded the race late Tuesday night.
Then, in Virginia, Democrats swept into control of both sides of the state’s General Assembly, prevailing in an expensive contest against Gov. Youngkin and Virginia Republicans. Legislative races in the other states on the ballot this year — New Jersey, Louisiana, and Mississippi — appeared to show little change. A Democrat won in Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court race as well, preserving the party’s 5-2 majority in a court that heard many election-related challenges in 2020.
This wasn’t a blue wave sweeping the nation, exactly. And the margins of key Virginia races looked more similar to 2021’s than 2020’s (when Biden won the state big). But considering how the incumbent president’s party usually suffers in off-year elections, and how bad Biden’s national numbers have been, Democrats should be pretty pleased with these outcomes.
Winner: Abortion rights
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Tuesday was an excellent night for supporters of abortion rights — again.
Their biggest victory was in the ballot referendum in Ohio, which both codified abortion access up to the point when a fetus is viable and made clear abortions would be permitted even after viability if a doctor deems it necessary to protect a patient’s health. Ohio Republicans had previously passed a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, but it had been blocked in court, with the state Supreme Court hearing arguments about it in September. Now that’s off the table.
But abortion rights were a major theme in Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky and Youngkin’s attempt to flip the state legislature in Virginia, as well as in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court race. In election after election and referendum after referendum in the post-Dobbs era, voters have made clear — even in many red states — that they are not enthusiastic about major abortion restrictions.
Yet Republicans remain beholden to right-wing voters and activists demanding such restrictions — and it keeps backfiring on them in elections.
Loser: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin
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Glenn Youngkin, governor of Virginia, speaks during a “Get Out the Vote” rally in Richmond, Virginia, on November 5, 2023.
Every so often this year, a story would pop up claiming that Youngkin was consideringchallengingDonald Trump in the GOP presidential primary. However, these stories usually claimed Youngkin would wait to make up his mind until after his state’s legislative elections, in which he was hoping to wrest control of the state Senate from Democrats. Big wins for Virginia Republicans, the theory went, would prove Youngkin was a political powerhouse who could win nationally too.
This never made a ton of sense, both because there are such things as ballot deadlines that would make the timing extremely difficult, and because national GOP voters have been quite loyal to Trump. More likely, Youngkin hoped that full control of Virginia’s government could let him pass laws like a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, making himself a champion of the right and positioning him well for the 2028 presidential race. He made no secret of his abortion policy — hoping that he could show Republicans how to run on the issue and win.
But he didn’t win. Republicans fell short of retaking the state Senate and they lost control of the House of Delegates, likely in part because Democrats campaigned on abortion. Those wins will prevent Youngkin from using the legislature to cozy up to the national right. And Youngkin won’t get another shot — Virginia governors can’t run for reelection. So while it may be too sweeping to say his presidential ambitions have been squashed, they’ve certainly taken a serious hit.
Winner: Joe Biden
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President Joe Biden speaks at Tioga Marine Terminal on October 13, 2023, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Biden was not on the ballot in any state this year, and it would be a mistake to think that Tuesday’s results have any real connection to how he’ll do in 2024.
But, as mentioned above, the president has been dogged by a series of brutal polls of late showing him trailing Donald Trump nationally and in most battleground states.
Democrats and political analysts have hotly debated what to make of these polls, with some arguing that they show Biden is a badly flawed candidate who might put Trump back into the White House if he persists in running again. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod tweeted this weekend that Biden needed to consider whether it would be “wise” for him to run again. Recent news reports spoke of some Democrats’ “worry,” “frustrations,” and “panic.”
But others have argued that these polls tell us little of value. After all, they’re being taken a year in advance of the election at a time when Biden’s likely opponent, Trump, has had a relatively minor (for him) role in the news cycle. Such a panic occurred before the 2022 midterms, they point out, and yet Democrats did better than expected there. Biden’s numbers will likely recover once the choice is clearly framed for voters as Biden or Trump, the argument goes.
Democrats’ wins Tuesday will likely ease some of the pressure on Biden, feeding a sense in the party that, regardless of what the polls say, Democrats’ strategy and coalition turn out to be solid when people actually vote.
Now, it’s not clear whether that inference would actually be correct. I said just a few paragraphs ago that it would be a mistake to connect these races to 2024, which will feature a very different electorate. (It’s possible that Democrats are now the party that is structurally advantaged in non-presidential-year elections, since they now do so well among college-educated voters, who are more likely to vote consistently.) And even if Biden’s party does well now, it’s still possible that he himself is a uniquely vulnerable candidate, either due to his age or his record in office.
Still, winning is better than losing. So regardless of what the future holds, Biden has good reason to be happy about Tuesday’s results.
Update, November 8, 9 am ET: This post has been updated to reflect the Virginia House of Delegates results.
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