Beth Washington – Page 31

Russia fines Google an impossible amount in attempt to end YouTube bans

Google, Policy, russia, youtube / Beth Washington / October 31, 2024

Russia has fined Google an amount that no entity on the planet could pay in hopes of getting YouTube to lift bans on Russian channels, including pro-Kremlin and state-run news outlets.

The BBC wrote that a Russian court fined Google two undecillion rubles, which in dollar terms is $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The amount “is far greater than the world’s total GDP, which is estimated by the International Monetary Fund to be $110 trillion.”

The fine is apparently that large because it was issued several years ago and has been repeatedly doubling. An RBC news report this week provided details on the court case from an anonymous source.

The Moscow Times writes, “According to RBC’s sources, Google began accumulating daily penalties of 100,000 rubles in 2020 after the pro-government media outlets Tsargrad and RIA FAN won lawsuits against the company for blocking their YouTube channels. Those daily penalties have doubled each week, leading to the current overall fine of around 2 undecillion rubles.”

The Moscow Times is an independent news organization that moved its operations to Amsterdam in 2022 in response to a Russian news censorship law. The news outlet said that 17 Russian TV channels filed legal claims against Google, including the state-run Channel One, the military-affiliated Zvezda broadcaster, and a company representing RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan.

Kremlin rep: “I cannot even say this number”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Google has “blocked more than 1,000 YouTube channels, including state-sponsored news, and over 5.5 million videos,” Reuters wrote.

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AT&T praises itself after getting caught taking too much money from FCC program

AT&T, Policy / Beth Washington / October 30, 2024

AT&T improperly obtained money from a government-run broadband discount program by submitting duplicate requests and by claiming subsidies for thousands of subscribers who weren’t using AT&T’s service. AT&T obtained funding based on false certifications it made under penalty of perjury.

AT&T on Friday agreed to pay $2.3 million in a consent decree with the Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau. That includes a civil penalty of $1,921,068 and a repayment of $378,922 to the US Treasury.

The settlement fully resolves the FCC investigation into AT&T’s apparent violations, the consent decree said. “AT&T admits for the purpose of this Consent Decree and for Commission civil enforcement purposes” that the findings described by the FCC “contain a true and accurate description of the facts underlying the Investigation,” the document said.

In addition to the civil penalty and repayment, AT&T agreed to a compliance plan designed to prevent further violations. AT&T last week reported quarterly revenue of $30.2 billion.

AT&T made the excessive reimbursement claims to the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program (EBB), which the US formed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to the EBB’s successor program, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). The FCC said its rules “are vital to protecting these Programs and their resources from waste, fraud, and abuse.”

AT&T praises itself for using federal program

We contacted AT&T today and asked for an explanation of what caused the violations. Instead, AT&T provided Ars with a statement that praised itself for participating in the federal discount programs.

“When the federal government acted during the COVID-19 pandemic to stand up the Emergency Broadband Benefit program, and then the Affordable Connectivity Program, we quickly implemented both programs to provide more low-cost Internet options for our customers. We take compliance with federal programs like these seriously and appreciate the collaboration with the FCC to reach a solution on this matter,” AT&T said.

The EBB provided monthly subsidies of $50 for eligible households, while the ACP offered $30 a month. Telecoms provided the discounts to subscribers directly and sought reimbursement from the programs. The ACP ended a few months ago after Congress did not provide additional funding.

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GitHub Copilot moves beyond OpenAI models to support Claude 3.5, Gemini

AI, Anthropic, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, coding, developer, Gemini 1.5 Pro, GitHub, GitHub Copilot, Google, GPT o1-mini, GPT o1-preview, GPT-4o, microsoft, openai, Programming, Tech, VS Code / Beth Washington / October 29, 2024

The large language model-based coding assistant GitHub Copilot will switch from using exclusively OpenAI’s GPT models to a multi-model approach over the coming weeks, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced in a post on GitHub’s blog.

First, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet will roll out to Copilot Chat’s web and VS Code interfaces over the next few weeks. Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro will come a bit later.

Additionally, GitHub will soon add support for a wider range of OpenAI models, including GPT o1-preview and o1-mini, which are intended to be stronger at advanced reasoning than GPT-4, which Copilot has used until now. Developers will be able to switch between the models (even mid-conversation) to tailor the model to fit their needs—and organizations will be able to choose which models will be usable by team members.

The new approach makes sense for users, as certain models are better at certain languages or types of tasks.

“There is no one model to rule every scenario,” wrote Dohmke. “It is clear the next phase of AI code generation will not only be defined by multi-model functionality, but by multi-model choice.”

It starts with the web-based and VS Code Copilot Chat interfaces, but it won’t stop there. “From Copilot Workspace to multi-file editing to code review, security autofix, and the CLI, we will bring multi-model choice across many of GitHub Copilot’s surface areas and functions soon,” Dohmke wrote.

There are a handful of additional changes coming to GitHub Copilot, too, including extensions, the ability to manipulate multiple files at once from a chat with VS Code, and a preview of Xcode support.

GitHub Spark promises natural language app development

In addition to the Copilot changes, GitHub announced Spark, a natural language tool for developing apps. Non-coders will be able to use a series of natural language prompts to create simple apps, while coders will be able to tweak more precisely as they go. In either use case, you’ll be able to take a conversational approach, requesting changes and iterating as you go, and comparing different iterations.

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Ban on Chinese tech so broad, US-made cars would be blocked, Polestar says

Cars, Chinese EVs, connected cars, Polestar / Beth Washington / October 29, 2024

Polestar has more than a few issues with the proposed rule, according to its public comment. For one, the definition is too broad and “creates crippling uncertainty for businesses.” A better-defined list would be helpful here, it says.

Polestar also says that “if a large portion of manufacturing or software development is occurring outside of the country of a foreign adversary, mere ownership should not be the determinative factor for applying the various prohibitions within the Proposed Rule.” Polestar is a US-organized company and a subsidiary of a UK publicly limited company that is listed on the NASDAQ exchange in New York. Its HQ is in Sweden, and seven out of 10 board members are from Europe or the USA. It builds Polestar 3 SUVs in South Carolina and will build the Polestar 4 in South Korea from next year. In fact, out of 2,800 employees, only 280 are based in China, Polestar says.

With the company’s “key decision-makers” being in Sweden, there is little reason to believe the national security concerns apply here, the company says, saying that the US Commerce Department should consider whether it has gone too far.

Polestar may be the most affected automaker by the new rule, but it is not the only one. Last month, the Commerce Department told Ford and General Motors that imports of the Lincoln Nautilus and Buick Envision—both of which are made in China—would also have to cease under the new rule.

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How can you write data to DNA without changing the base sequence?

biochemistry, Biology, DNA storage, epigenetics, Science, Storage / Beth Washington / October 29, 2024

The developers of the system call each of these potentially modifiable spots on the template an epi-bit, with the modified version corresponding to a 1 in a conventional computer bit and the unmodified version corresponding to a 0. Because no synthesis is required, multiple bits can be written simultaneously. To read the information, the scientists rigged the system so that 1s fluoresce and 0s don’t. The fluorescence, along with the sequences of bases, was read as the DNA was passed through a tiny pore.

Pictures in a meta-genome

Using this system, Zhang et al. created five DNA templates and 175 bricks to record 350 bits at a time. Using a collection of tagged template molecules, the researchers could store and read roughly 275,000 bits, including a color picture of a panda’s face and a rubbing of a tiger from the Han dynasty, which ruled China from 202 BCE to 220 CE.

They then had 60 student volunteers “with diverse academic backgrounds” store texts of their choice in epi-bits using a simple kit in a classroom. Twelve of the 15 stored texts were read successfully.

We’re not quite ready for your cat videos yet, though. There are still errors in the printing and reading steps, and since these modifications don’t survive when DNA is copied, making additional versions of the stored information may get complicated. Plus, the stability of these modifications under different storage conditions remains unknown, although the authors note that their epi-bits stayed stable at temperatures of up to 95o° C.

But once these and a few other problems are solved—and the technology is scaled up, further optimized and automated, and/or tweaked to accommodate other types of epigenetic modifications—it will be a clever and novel way to harness natural data storage methods for our needs.

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08040-5

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Lidar mapping reveals mountainous medieval cities along the Silk Road

ancient cities, Archeology, LiDAR, Science, Silk Road / Beth Washington / October 28, 2024

The city of Tugunbulak, which stretched beyond the forest inspector’s house, had powerful walls enclosing the area of 120 hectares, nearly five times larger than the Tashbulak site. With those walls, there was a dense architecture with hundreds of buildings, streets, palaces, plazas—even industrial facilities the Frachetti’s team suspects were used to produce iron or steel.

To put that in perspective, the medieval walls of Siena, one of the foremost cities in Italy during that time, surrounded an area of 105 hectares at the peak of its power. Genoa, another crown jewel among Italian medieval cities, between the 6th and 11th centuries, had walls protecting just 20 hectares, an area bumped up to around 50 hectares by the time of Frederic Barbarossa’s invasion between 1155 and 1158 CE.

Tugunbulak was a monster of a city. But what did it look like?

A city of iron?

“If you looked at Tugunbulak from the outside you would have seen these kind of rocky walls. They appear to have been made in a technology called rammed earth. The builders would take mud and press it into something almost like cement—a very high labor, very dense, very defensive and fortified material,” Frachetti says. Rammed earth was a dominant building technique used in the early stages of Tugunbulak’s development. “The later phase in the site, we see some stone architecture foundations with mud brick on the top. They used local resources and building techniques that were popular in the region,” Frachetti explains.

According to the team, the main contribution of the city to the Silk Road trade was iron, as the surrounding mountains are particularly rich in iron ore. One of the still unanswered questions was about the way Tugunbulak’s people lived and worked. Were they skillful blacksmiths forging iron and perhaps even steel in their mountainous city? Did at least some of its inhabitants live the lives of nomads, visiting the city only periodically to trade on market days or did they live there permanently? “We’d like to know how extensive was the industry there—what level of production were they actually doing?” Franchetti says. He suggested that a shifting, seasonal population that most likely lived in yurts spread outside of the walls was more likely in the smaller Tashbulak, considering it lacked residential suburbs. “Tugunbulak must have been a far more organized political entity. Their power and their influence must have been significant in the broader economy of the Silk Road,” Frachetti claims.

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Are Boeing’s problems beyond fixable?

aviation, Boeing, Boeing 737 MAX, Policy, syndication / Beth Washington / October 26, 2024

A new CEO promises a culture change as the aerospace titan is struggling hard.

Credit: Getty Images | Olivier Douliery

As Boeing’s latest chief executive, Kelly Ortberg’s job was never going to be easy. On Wednesday, it got harder still.

That morning, Ortberg had faced investors for the first time, telling them that ending a debilitating strike by Boeing’s largest union was the first step to stabilizing the plane maker’s business.

But as the day wore on, it became clear that nearly two-thirds of the union members who voted on the company’s latest contract offer had rejected it. The six-week strike goes on, costing Boeing an estimated $50 million a day, pushing back the day it can resume production of most aircraft and further stressing its supply chain.

The company that virtually created modern commercial aviation has spent the better part of five years in chaos, stemming from fatal crashes, a worldwide grounding, a guilty plea to a criminal charge, a pandemic that halted global air travel, a piece breaking off a plane in mid-flight and now a strike. Boeing’s finances look increasingly fragile and its reputation has been battered.

Bank of America analyst Ron Epstein says Boeing is a titan in a crisis largely of its own making, comparing it to the Hydra of Greek mythology: “For every problem that’s come to a head, then [been] severed, more problems sprout up.”

Resolving Boeing’s crisis is critical to the future of commercial air travel, as most commercial passenger aircraft are made by it or its European rival Airbus, which has little capacity for new customers until the 2030s.

Ortberg, a 64-year-old Midwesterner who took the top job three months ago, says his mission is “pretty straightforward—turn this big ship in the right direction and restore Boeing to the leadership position that we all know and want.”

Resolving the machinists’ strike is just the start of the challenges he faces. He needs to motivate the workforce, even as 33,000 are on strike and 17,000 face redundancy under a cost-cutting initiative.

He must persuade investors to support an equity raise in an industry where the returns could take years to materialize. He needs to fix Boeing’s quality control and manufacturing issues, and placate its increasingly frustrated customers, who have had to rejig their schedules and cut flights owing to delays in plane deliveries.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in our industry, to be honest. I’ve been around 30 years,” Carsten Spohr, chief executive of German flag carrier Lufthansa, said this month.

Eventually, Boeing needs to launch a new aircraft model to better compete with Airbus.

“If Kelly fixes this, he is a hero,” says Melius Research analyst Rob Spingarn. “But it’s very complex. There’s a lot of different things to fix.”

Ortberg started his career as a mechanical engineer and went on to run Rockwell Collins, an avionics supplier to Boeing, until it was sold to engineering conglomerate United Technologies in 2018.

His engineering background has been welcomed by many who regard previous executives’ emphasis on shareholder returns as the root cause of many of Boeing’s engineering and manufacturing problems.

Longtime employees often peg the shift in Boeing’s culture to its 1997 merger with rival McDonnell Douglas. Phil Condit and Harry Stonecipher, who ran Boeing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were admirers of Jack Welch, the General Electric chief executive known for financial engineering and ruthless cost cuts.

Condit even moved Boeing’s headquarters from its manufacturing base in Seattle to Chicago in 2001, so the “corporate center” would no longer be “drawn into day-to-day business operations.”

Jim McNerney, another Welch acolyte, instituted a program to boost Boeing’s profits by squeezing its suppliers during his decade in charge. He remarked on a 2014 earnings call about employees “cowering” before him, a dark quip still cited a decade later to explain Boeing’s tense relationship with its workers.

Ken Ogren, a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751, says managers at Boeing often felt pressured to move planes quickly through the factory.

“We’ve had a lot of bean counters come through, and I’m going to be in the majority with a lot of people who believe they’ve been tripping over dollars to save pennies,” he says.

Dennis Muilenburg headed the company in October 2018, when a new 737 Max crashed off the coast of Indonesia. Five months later, another Max crashed shortly after take-off in Ethiopia. In total, 346 people lost their lives.

Regulators worldwide grounded the plane—a cash cow and a vital product in Boeing’s competition with Airbus—for nearly two years. Investigations eventually showed a faulty sensor triggered an anti-stall system, repeatedly forcing the aircraft’s nose downward.

Boeing agreed in July to plead guilty to a criminal charge of fraud for misleading regulators about the plane’s design. Families of the crash victims are opposing the plea deal, which is before a federal judge for approval.

The manufacturer’s problems were compounded by COVID-19, which grounded aircraft worldwide and led many airlines to hold off placing new orders and pause deliveries of existing ones. Boeing’s debt ballooned as it issued $25 billion in bonds to see it through the crisis.

Regulators cleared the 737 Max to fly again, starting in November 2020. But hopes that Boeing was finally on top of its problems were shattered last January, when a door panel that was missing bolts blew off an Alaska Airlines jet at 16,000 feet.

While no one was injured, the incident triggered multiple investigations and an audit by the US Federal Aviation Administration, which found lapses in Boeing’s manufacturing and quality assurance processes and led to an uncomfortable appearance by then chief executive Dave Calhoun at a Senate subcommittee hearing.

The company also has struggled with its defense and space businesses. Fixed-price contracts on several military programs have resulted in losses and billions of dollars of one-off charges. Meanwhile, problems with its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft resulted in two astronauts being left on the International Space Station. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle will be used to return them to Earth early next year.

Boeing’s stumbles have resulted in loss of life, loss of prestige, and a net financial loss every year since 2019. On Wednesday, it reported a $6 billion loss between July and September, the second-worst quarterly result in its history.

One of Ortberg’s first big moves as chief executive was to move himself—from his Florida home to a house in Seattle. He told analysts that Boeing’s executives “need to be on the factory floors, in the back shops, and in our engineering labs” to be more in tune with the company’s products and workforce. Change in Boeing’s corporate culture must “be more than the poster on the wall,” he added.

His approach represents a shift from his predecessor Calhoun, who was criticized for spending more time in New Hampshire and South Carolina than in Boeing’s factories in Washington state.

Bill George, former chief executive at Medtronic and an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, says Ortberg is doing a “terrific job” so far, particularly for moving to the Pacific Northwest and pressuring other itinerant executives to follow.

“If you’re based in Florida, and you come occasionally, what do you really know about what’s going on in the business?” he says, adding that Boeing has “no business being in Arlington, Virginia,” where the company moved its headquarters in 2022.

Scott Kirby, chief executive at one of Boeing’s biggest customers, United Airlines, told his own investors this month that he was “encouraged” by Ortberg’s early moves, adding that the company suffered for decades from “a cultural challenge, where they focused on short-term profitability and the short-term stock price at the expense of what made Boeing great, which is building great products.”

“Kelly Ortberg is pivoting the company back to their roots,” he said. “All the employees of Boeing will rally around that.”

But Ogren of the machinists’ union cautions that previous commitments to culture change have been hollow. “You’ve got people at the top saying, ‘We’ve got to be safe, oh, and by the way, we need these planes out the door…’ They said the right thing. They didn’t emphasize it, and that’s not what they put pressure on the managers to achieve.”

When workers eventually return to work—Peter Arment, an analyst at Baird, expects the dispute to be resolved in November—Ortberg wants better execution, even if it means lower output. “It is so much more important we do this right than fast,” he said.

The company had planned to raise Max output from about 25 per month before the strike to 38 per month by the end of the year, a cap set by the FAA. It will not reach that goal and Spingarn, the Melius analyst, says the strike will probably delay any production increase by nine months to a year. Some workers would need retraining, Ortberg said, and the supply chain’s restart was likely to be “bumpy.” The manufacturer also has established a quality plan with the FAA that it must follow.

Boeing also needed to launch a new airplane “at the right time in the future,” Ortberg said. Epstein of BofA called this “one of the most important messages” from the new chief executive, likely “to reinvigorate the workforce and culture at Boeing.”

In the meantime, Boeing will continue to consume cash in 2025, having burnt through $10 billion so far this year, according to chief financial officer Brian West. Spingarn says that investors may be disappointed in the cash flow at first, but adds that “fixing airplanes isn’t one year, it’s three years.”

For all the challenges, Ortberg has the right personality to turn Boeing around, says Ken Herbert, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

“If he can’t do it, I don’t think anyone can.”

Are Boeing’s problems beyond fixable? Read More »

If you thought Astra was going to go away quietly, you were wrong

astra, rocket 4, Science, Space / Beth Washington / October 26, 2024

On Wednesday morning, a surprising email popped into my inbox with the following subject line: “Astra announces Department of Defense contract valued up to $44 Million.”

I had to read it a second time to make sure I got it right. Astra, the launch company? Astra, whose valuation went from $2.6 billion to $25 million after a series of launch failures? Astra, the company that was taken private in July at 50 cents a share?

Yes, it was that Astra.

This was curious, indeed. To get some answers, I spoke with the cofounder of Astra, Chris Kemp, who remains the company’s chief executive.

“If I have learned anything, it’s that you just don’t give up,” Kemp said. “You know, if you give up easily, this is not the place to be. Fortunately, I am surrounded by a team that has chosen not to give up.”

Rocket 4 becomes more real

I’ll be frank: When Kemp and his co-founder, Adam London, took Astra private this summer, I never expected to hear from the company again. Astra certainly was not the first launch company to fail, and it won’t be the last. But it is the first to seemingly resurrect itself in such a dramatic way.

To be clear, Astra is not back yet. The company remains in the phase of building and testing rocket stages and engines and does not have a launch vehicle ready to go. Its new booster, Rocket 4, will launch no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2025, Kemp said. (That date should probably be viewed with some skepticism).

The company has previously discussed Rocket 4, which is intended to carry 600 kg to low-Earth orbit, as far back as August 2022. But at the time, most of the launch industry, including this reporter, shrugged and moved along. After all, the company’s smaller vehicle, Rocket 3, failed on five of its seven orbital launch attempts. The general sentiment was that the new rocket would never fly.

However, even as Astra’s finances worsened and the company had to stave off bankruptcy by being taken private, not everyone dismissed the vision. In April 2023, the US Space Force awarded a task order for Rocket 4 to launch the STP-S29B mission. That was interesting, but it was just a single data point. Then came this week’s announcement that the US Department of Defense’s “Defense Innovation Unit” had awarded a grant worth up to $44 million to Astra for a “tactically responsive launch system.”

If you thought Astra was going to go away quietly, you were wrong Read More »

X Payments delayed after Musk’s X weirdly withdrew application for NY license

consumer financial protection bureau, elon musk, fintech, Policy, Twitter, X, x corp, x payments / Beth Washington / October 25, 2024

Will X Payments launch this year? Outlook not so good.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images/Bloomberg

This October, many Elon Musk believers are wondering, where is X Payments?

Last year, Musk claimed in a Spaces conversation that he “would be surprised” if it took longer than mid-2024 to roll out the payments feature that he believes is crucial to transforming the social media app formerly known as Twitter into an everything app.

“It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk said around this time last year, clarifying that “when I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life. If it involves money, it’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like ‘send $20 to my friend.’ I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”

Echoing Musk as recently as June, X CEO Linda Yaccarino was hyping the US release of X Payments as imminent. But it has been months without another peep from X leadership, and Ars recently confirmed that X took a curious step in April that suggests the payments feature may be delayed indefinitely.

During the Spaces conversation last December with Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood, Musk discussed X’s bid to secure money transmitter licenses in all 50 states, noting that it would be “irrelevant” to launch X Payments without California and New York licenses.

Since then, X has made a decent amount of progress, picking up money transmitter licenses in 38 states, including a critical license in California.

But approvals in New York were reportedly stalled for months after a New York City law firm, now called Walden Macht Haran & Williams (WMHW), sent an open letter to attorneys general and banking commissioners in all 50 states in September 2023, urging that X be deemed “unfit” for a money transmitter license.

WMHW had filed a lawsuit alleging that Twitter—before Musk acquired it—”acted at the direction of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in furtherance of KSA’s long-running campaign of transnational repression.”

That campaign led to the murder of Washington Post correspondent Jamal Khashoggi and the “imprisonment of Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan, a human rights worker and anonymous Twitter user, whose confidential user data—leaked by Twitter’s employees—precipitated and enabled this barbarity,” the letter alleged. And when Musk took over the platform, he only deepened the app’s KSA ties further when he “invited KSA to convert its shares in Twitter into a financial stake during his private take-over of the platform,” the letter said.

Rather than grant X money transmitter licenses, WMHW recommended that attorneys general and banking commissioners use X’s money transmitter licenses as an excuse to investigate the allegations and demystify the app’s allegedly dangerous KSA ties.

Apparently, X either did not like the heat or decided to rethink its X Payments strategy, because the New York Department of Financial Services provided new information to Ars this week confirming that X withdrew its money transmitter license in New York in April 2024.

The department also confirmed that X has not since resubmitted the application.

However, WMHW this month voluntarily dismissed its client’s lawsuit against X and declined to comment on whether the open letter seemingly worked to block X Payments’ launch. It seems possible that X may leverage that court win to eventually resubmit its application for a New York license, but Ars could not confirm if X has any plans to resubmit any time soon.

An X spokesperson answered Ars’ request to comment (which rarely happens) but declined to provide an update on any new timeline for X Payments’ launch.

X Payments unlikely to launch without New York

It seems possible that X has gone silent on X Payments because there is no timeline currently.

A global payments expert for tech consultancy Capco, Daniela Hawkins, told Ars that, as an outsider going just off a “gut check,” if X has withdrawn its application from New York—with “New York obviously being such a major metropolitan area… that would seem to be a barrier to entry into the payments market.”

X could launch X Payments without New York and other states, but Hawkins said users might be confused about where they can and cannot send money. Hawkins thinks it’s unlikely that Musk—who co-founded PayPal and has wanted to launch his own payments app since—would roll out X Payments “half-assed.”

Basically, if X pushed through with the launch, users could accept and send funds just like they can using any other payments app, but without licenses in all states, X users could only send money to people located in states where X has licenses. Hawkins said that inconsistency could deter popular use of the payments feature because “it’s too difficult for the consumer to understand.”

“If you roll it out with handcuffs on it, it’s gonna have a bumpy launch,” Hawkins said. “So why would you do that?”

Going that route, X seemingly risks users ditching X to complete payments on apps where every transaction reliably goes through, Hawkins suggested.

“They’re gonna be like, ‘Wait, I don’t know where this Etsy shop is located, I don’t care,” Hawkins said, noting, “that’s just a bad user experience.”

More regulations on payment apps coming

Last year, Hawkins told Ars that X faced an “uphill battle” launching X Payments, partly due to intensifying regulations on the financial services industry that are increasingly pulling payments apps into regulations typically focused on regulating traditional banking services.

Just days ago, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a final rule requiring banks, credit unions, and online payments services to make it easy and safe for customers to port banking data to a new financial service provider.

The CFPB argues customers need to have control over their data, but Hawkins told Ars that banks considered the controversial rule potentially allowing customers to transfer sensitive data in one click to be a “freaking nightmare.”

Banks warned of fraud risks and privacy concerns about sharing sensitive data with third parties that could profit off that data, possibly heightening risks of data breaches. Compliance isn’t required until 2026, but already the rule is being challenged in court, Hawkins said.

In one way, the new rule could be good for X, Hawkins told Ars, as the app could quickly gain access to valuable financial data if X users did switch from, say, using a bank to managing money through X Payments. Then X wouldn’t have “to go build all this data from scratch” to make X Payments profitable, Hawkins suggested.

But in another way, the rule could put X in “an interesting spot” where the app is required to share its user data with third parties in a way that could potentially have Musk second-guessing whether X would even benefit from becoming a bank in the way that he initially planned. Banks have protested the CFPB rule as allowing third parties to profit off data that they can’t, and Musk’s whole X Payments plan appears to revolve around profiting off users’ financial data.

“If somebody wants to pay with X, now X has to transfer the data to the third party, and they may not want to do that, because obviously, data is power, right?” Hawkins said.

Not a bank

But if Musk is suddenly shy about turning X into a bank, it comes at a time when banks are less likely to partner with social media apps for potentially risky new payment ventures.

Hawkins noted that banks have struggled to roll out new payment capabilities as easily as fintechs can, and that struggle inspired longtime partnerships between banks and tech companies that have recently begun to collapse. On Wednesday, the CFPB ordered Apple and Goldman Sachs to pay more than $89 million over “illegally mishandled transaction disputes.” Now Goldman Sachs is banned from offering new credit cards until it can be trusted to comply with laws. And Wells Fargo recently bowed out of PayPal and Square partnerships, citing compliance costs, The Information reported this week.

For Musk, who has notoriously butted heads with his trust and safety compliance teams at X, working with regulators on launching X Payments might, at this moment, seem less attractive.

“It’s one thing to want to move money on a payments app,” Hawkins told Ars. “It’s another thing to be a bank. Like he’s gonna hate being a bank.”

Earlier this year, the CFPB risked being dismantled after the financial services associations alleged its funding scheme was improper. But shortly after X withdrew from New York, the Supreme Court ruled in May that nothing was amiss with CFPB’s funding, despite Justice Samuel Alito warning in his dissent that SCOTUS’s decision meant the CFPB could “bankroll its own agenda without any congressional control or oversight,” Reuters reported.

In this strained environment, X could potentially overcome all obstacles and become a bank and fill a gap left by banks beginning to be spooked by fintech deals, Hawkins said, insisting that she would never bet against Musk, whose successes are many. But granting money transmitter licenses helps states prevent financial crimes through compliance requirements, and X quietly pulling out of New York earlier this year suggests that X may not be prepared to take on regulatory scrutiny at this current moment.

The last major development regarding X Payments came in August. It didn’t come from X leadership but from an app researcher, Nima Owji, who posted on X that “X Payments is coming soon!” Digging in X’s code, Owji apparently found references to new payments features enabling “transactions, balance, and transfer,” as well as a “Payments” button seemingly ready to be added to X’s bookmarks tab, TechCrunch reported.

But for Musk fans awaiting an official update, X executives’ silence on X Payments has been deafening since June, when Yaccarino forecast the feature would be coming soon, despite knowing that X had withdrawn its application for a money transmitter license from New York.

X continuing to hype the payments service without publicly disclosing the apparent speed bump in New York “doesn’t feel very honest,” Hawkins told Ars.

X still losing users, advertisers

It has been two years since Musk took over Twitter, soon after revealing that he intended to use Twitter’s userbase as the launchpad for an everything app that would be so engaging and useful that it would be the only app that anyone would ever need online.

Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shared data with Ars showing that, compared to October 2022, when Musk bought Twitter, global daily average users on X were down 28 percent in September 2024.

Sensor Tower attributed part of the recent decline to X’s ban in Brazil driving out users but noted that overall, users “were down significantly compared to the pre-acquisition period,” as now-X “contended with a rise of controversial content and technical issues.”

While the decline in users could hurt Musk’s ambitions to launch a hugely popular payments app nested in X, the spike in offensive content has notably alienated advertisers who traditionally are X’s dominant source of revenue. And in lockstep with X’s decline in users, major brands have continued to shed the social app in 2024, Sensor Tower told Ars.

Last November, ad agencies flagged then-Twitter brand safety concerns, including GroupM marking Twitter “high risk” and Interpublic Group recommending that advertisers pause spending. By the end of last year, Sensor Tower reported that “of the company’s top 100 US advertisers in the days before” Musk purchased the platform, “only 50 were still there as of October 2023.”

The picture is even bleaker as X approaches the end of 2024, Sensor Tower’s data shows, estimating that “72 out of the top 100 spending US advertisers on X from October 2022 have ceased spending on the platform as of September 2024.” Compared to the first half of 2022, prior to Musk’s acquisition, X’s ad revenue from top 100 advertisers during the first half of 2024 was down 68 percent, Sensor Tower estimated.

Since becoming X’s CEO, Yaccarino has appeared most vocal about driving growth in X’s video services, allowing advertisers to avoid toxic content on the app by only running their ads alongside pre-approved creators’ content. In particular, Yaccarino has hyped X’s partnership with the NFL, announcing today on X that the partnership will be expanded.

That NFL partnership has seemingly helped X grow its ad revenue, with Sensor Tower estimating that “four out of the top 10 spending US advertisers on X in September 2024 were tied to sports or sports betting, likely in an attempt to capitalize on heightened consumer interest around the beginning of the NFL season.”

But overall, X’s revenue has not recovered in 2024, with Fidelity recently estimating that X is worth 80 percent less than when Musk bought the app, CNN reported.

Instead of working with advertisers, Musk went on the attack, suing the World Federation of Advertisers in August over what he calls an “illegal boycott” of X. But X’s spokesperson, Michael Abboud, linked Ars to an X post suggesting that X has held discussions with big brands about a brand safety solution.

“X is pleased to have reached an agreement with Unilever and to continue our partnership with them on the platform,” X’s post said. “Today’s news is the first part of the ecosystem-wide solution and we look forward to more resolution across the industry.”

Unilever did not respond to Ars’ request to comment on X’s proposed solution.

Musk’s strategy for monetizing X has always been to reduce reliance on advertising, but his everything app pursuit does not seem to be coming together as quickly as planned to make up for lost ad revenue. He initially projected that it would take three to five years to roll out all the features turning X into an everything app. But two years in, launching the core product experts say is critical to the success of everything apps like WeChat—X Payments—seems to be the major obstacle that Musk faces to manage the app without relying nearly entirely on advertisers’ meddling ideas regarding brand safety.

Hawkins said that Musk perhaps did not make a “great bet” when buying Twitter as the foundation of his everything app.

X “has continued to trend down in terms of profitability and users, and I’m sure he’s considering X Payments to be maybe a Hail Mary to try to pull X back into the black,” Hawkins said.

But by trying to disrupt the financial industry, Musk perhaps rashly “picked a highly regulated capability to bet the farm on,” Hawkins suggested.

As it stands now, it’s currently unclear when or if X Payments will launch, as the feed on the X account for Payments remains pointedly blank and Musk has not indicated whether X Payments can possibly launch without New York.

“I think it’s very telling he pulled out his application from New York, when he had even said in the media, there’s no point in doing this if I don’t have New York,” Hawkins said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

X Payments delayed after Musk’s X weirdly withdrew application for NY license Read More »

Missouri AG claims Google censors Trump, demands info on search algorithm

andrew bailey, Google, Policy / Beth Washington / October 25, 2024

In 2022, the Republican National Committee sued Google with claims that it intentionally used Gmail’s spam filter to suppress Republicans’ fundraising emails. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in August 2023, ruling that Google correctly argued that the RNC claims were barred by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

In January 2023, the Federal Election Commission rejected a related RNC complaint that alleged Gmail’s spam filtering amounted to “illegal in-kind contributions made by Google to Biden For President and other Democrat candidates.” The federal commission found “no reason to believe” that Google made prohibited in-kind corporate contributions and said a study cited by Republicans “does not make any findings as to the reasons why Google’s spam filter appears to treat Republican and Democratic campaign emails differently.”

First Amendment doesn’t cover private forums

In 2020, a US appeals court wrote that the Google-owned YouTube is not subject to free-speech requirements under the First Amendment. “Despite YouTube’s ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment,” the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said.

The US Constitution’s free speech clause imposes requirements on the government, not private companies—except in limited circumstances in which a private entity qualifies as a state actor.

Many Republican government officials want more authority to regulate how social media firms moderate user-submitted content. Republican officials from 20 states, including 19 state attorneys general, argued in a January 2024 Supreme Court brief that they “have authority to prohibit mass communication platforms from censoring speech.”

The brief was filed in support of Texas and Florida laws that attempt to regulate social networks. In July, the Supreme Court avoided making a final decision on tech-industry challenges to the state laws but wrote that the Texas law “is unlikely to withstand First Amendment scrutiny.” The Computer & Communications Industry Association said it was pleased by the ruling because it “mak[es] clear that a State may not interfere with private actors’ speech.”

Missouri AG claims Google censors Trump, demands info on search algorithm Read More »

Chatbot that caused teen’s suicide is now more dangerous for kids, lawsuit says

Character.AI, chatbot, child safety, Gemini, generative ai, Google, online child safety, Policy, wrongful death / Beth Washington / October 23, 2024

“I’ll do anything for you, Dany.”

Google-funded Character.AI added guardrails, but grieving mom wants a recall.

Sewell Setzer III and his mom Megan Garcia. Credit: via Center for Humane Technology

Fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer III loved interacting with Character.AI’s hyper-realistic chatbots—with a limited version available for free or a “supercharged” version for a $9.99 monthly fee—most frequently chatting with bots named after his favorite Game of Thrones characters.

Within a month—his mother, Megan Garcia, later realized—these chat sessions had turned dark, with chatbots insisting they were real humans and posing as therapists and adult lovers seeming to proximately spur Sewell to develop suicidal thoughts. Within a year, Setzer “died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head,” a lawsuit Garcia filed Wednesday said.

As Setzer became obsessed with his chatbot fantasy life, he disconnected from reality, her complaint said. Detecting a shift in her son, Garcia repeatedly took Setzer to a therapist, who diagnosed her son with anxiety and disruptive mood disorder. But nothing helped to steer Setzer away from the dangerous chatbots. Taking away his phone only intensified his apparent addiction.

Chat logs showed that some chatbots repeatedly encouraged suicidal ideation while others initiated hypersexualized chats “that would constitute abuse if initiated by a human adult,” a press release from Garcia’s legal team said.

Perhaps most disturbingly, Setzer developed a romantic attachment to a chatbot called Daenerys. In his last act before his death, Setzer logged into Character.AI where the Daenerys chatbot urged him to “come home” and join her outside of reality.

In her complaint, Garcia accused Character.AI makers Character Technologies—founded by former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas Adiwardana—of intentionally designing the chatbots to groom vulnerable kids. Her lawsuit further accused Google of largely funding the risky chatbot scheme at a loss in order to hoard mounds of data on minors that would be out of reach otherwise.

The chatbot makers are accused of targeting Setzer with “anthropomorphic, hypersexualized, and frighteningly realistic experiences, while programming” Character.AI to “misrepresent itself as a real person, a licensed psychotherapist, and an adult lover, ultimately resulting in [Setzer’s] desire to no longer live outside of [Character.AI,] such that he took his own life when he was deprived of access to [Character.AI.],” the complaint said.

By allegedly releasing the chatbot without appropriate safeguards for kids, Character Technologies and Google potentially harmed millions of kids, the lawsuit alleged. Represented by legal teams with the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC) and the Tech Justice Law Project (TJLP), Garcia filed claims of strict product liability, negligence, wrongful death and survivorship, loss of filial consortium, and unjust enrichment.

“A dangerous AI chatbot app marketed to children abused and preyed on my son, manipulating him into taking his own life,” Garcia said in the press release. “Our family has been devastated by this tragedy, but I’m speaking out to warn families of the dangers of deceptive, addictive AI technology and demand accountability from Character.AI, its founders, and Google.”

Character.AI added guardrails

It’s clear that the chatbots could’ve included more safeguards, as Character.AI has since raised the age requirement from 12 years old and up to 17-plus. And yesterday, Character.AI posted a blog outlining new guardrails for minor users added within six months of Setzer’s death in February. Those include changes “to reduce the likelihood of encountering sensitive or suggestive content,” improved detection and intervention in harmful chat sessions, and “a revised disclaimer on every chat to remind users that the AI is not a real person.”

“We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of one of our users and want to express our deepest condolences to the family,” a Character.AI spokesperson told Ars. “As a company, we take the safety of our users very seriously, and our Trust and Safety team has implemented numerous new safety measures over the past six months, including a pop-up directing users to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline that is triggered by terms of self-harm or suicidal ideation.”

Asked for comment, Google noted that Character.AI is a separate company in which Google has no ownership stake and denied involvement in developing the chatbots.

However, according to the lawsuit, former Google engineers at Character Technologies “never succeeded in distinguishing themselves from Google in a meaningful way.” Allegedly, the plan all along was to let Shazeer and De Freitas run wild with Character.AI—allegedly at an operating cost of $30 million per month despite low subscriber rates while profiting barely more than a million per month—without impacting the Google brand or sparking antitrust scrutiny.

Character Technologies and Google will likely file their response within the next 30 days.

Lawsuit: New chatbot feature spikes risks to kids

While the lawsuit alleged that Google is planning to integrate Character.AI into Gemini—predicting that Character.AI will soon be dissolved as it’s allegedly operating at a substantial loss—Google clarified that Google has no plans to use or implement the controversial technology in its products or AI models. Were that to change, Google noted that the tech company would ensure safe integration into any Google product, including adding appropriate child safety guardrails.

Garcia is hoping a US district court in Florida will agree that Character.AI’s chatbots put profits over human life. Citing harms including “inconceivable mental anguish and emotional distress,” as well as costs of Setzer’s medical care, funeral expenses, Setzer’s future job earnings, and Garcia’s lost earnings, she’s seeking substantial damages.

That includes requesting disgorgement of unjustly earned profits, noting that Setzer had used his snack money to pay for a premium subscription for several months while the company collected his seemingly valuable personal data to train its chatbots.

And “more importantly,” Garcia wants to prevent Character.AI “from doing to any other child what it did to hers, and halt continued use of her 14-year-old child’s unlawfully harvested data to train their product how to harm others.”

Garcia’s complaint claimed that the conduct of the chatbot makers was “so outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency.” Acceptable remedies could include a recall of Character.AI, restricting use to adults only, age-gating subscriptions, adding reporting mechanisms to heighten awareness of abusive chat sessions, and providing parental controls.

Character.AI could also update chatbots to protect kids further, the lawsuit said. For one, the chatbots could be designed to stop insisting that they are real people or licensed therapists.

But instead of these updates, the lawsuit warned that Character.AI in June added a new feature that only heightens risks for kids.

Part of what addicted Setzer to the chatbots, the lawsuit alleged, was a one-way “Character Voice” feature “designed to provide consumers like Sewell with an even more immersive and realistic experience—it makes them feel like they are talking to a real person.” Setzer began using the feature as soon as it became available in January 2024.

Now, the voice feature has been updated to enable two-way conversations, which the lawsuit alleged “is even more dangerous to minor customers than Character Voice because it further blurs the line between fiction and reality.”

“Even the most sophisticated children will stand little chance of fully understanding the difference between fiction and reality in a scenario where Defendants allow them to interact in real time with AI bots that sound just like humans—especially when they are programmed to convincingly deny that they are AI,” the lawsuit said.

“By now we’re all familiar with the dangers posed by unregulated platforms developed by unscrupulous tech companies—especially for kids,” Tech Justice Law Project director Meetali Jain said in the press release. “But the harms revealed in this case are new, novel, and, honestly, terrifying. In the case of Character.AI, the deception is by design, and the platform itself is the predator.”

Another lawyer representing Garcia and the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, Matthew Bergman, told Ars that seemingly none of the guardrails that Character.AI has added is enough to deter harms. Even raising the age limit to 17 only seems to effectively block kids from using devices with strict parental controls, as kids on less-monitored devices can easily lie about their ages.

“This product needs to be recalled off the market,” Bergman told Ars. “It is unsafe as designed.”

If you or someone you know is feeling suicidal or in distress, please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline number, 1-800-273-TALK (8255), which will put you in touch with a local crisis center.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Chatbot that caused teen’s suicide is now more dangerous for kids, lawsuit says Read More »

For the strongest disc golf throws, it’s all in the thumbs

aerodynamics, disc golf, Physics, Science, sports science / Beth Washington / October 23, 2024

When Zachary Lindsey, a physicist at Berry College in Georgia, decided to run an experiment on how to get the best speed and torque while playing disc golf (aka Frisbee golf), he had no trouble recruiting 24 eager participants keen on finding science-based tips on how to improve their game. Lindsey and his team determined the optimal thumb distance from the center of the disc to increase launch speed and distance, according to a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances.

Disc golf first emerged in the 1960s, but “Steady” Ed Hendrick, inventor of the modern Frisbee, is widely considered the “father” of the sport since it was he who coined and trademarked the name “disc golf” in 1975. He and his son founded their own company to manufacture the equipment used in the game. As of 2023, the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) had over 107,000 registered members worldwide, with players hailing from 40 countries.

A disc golf course typically has either nine or 18 holes or targets, called “baskets.” There is a tee position for starting play, and players take turns throwing discs until they catch them in the basket, similar to how golfers work toward sinking a golf ball into a hole. The expected number of throws required of an experienced player to make the basket is considered “par.”

There are essentially three different disc types: drivers, mid-rangers, and putters. Driver discs are thin and sharp-edged, designed to reduce drag for long throws; they’re typically used for teeing off or other long-distance throws since a strong throw can cover as much as 500 feet. Putter discs, as the name implies, are better for playing close to the basket since they are thicker and thus have higher drag when in flight. Mid-range discs have elements of both drivers and putters, designed for distances of 200–300 feet—i.e., approaching the basket—where players want to optimize range and accuracy.

For the strongest disc golf throws, it’s all in the thumbs Read More »

Author name: Beth Washington