Why Your Wi-Fi Router Doubles as an Apple AirTag
Researchers from the University of Maryland say they relied on publicly available data from Apple to track the location of billions of devices globally — including non-Apple devices like Starlink systems — and found they could use this data to monitor the destruction of Gaza, as well as the movements and in many cases identities of Russian and Ukrainian troops.
At issue is the way that Apple collects and publicly shares information about the precise location of all Wi-Fi access points seen by its devices. Apple collects this location data to give Apple devices a crowdsourced, low-power alternative to constantly requesting global positioning system (GPS) coordinates.
Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
Though a revered tactician and chooser of promising start-ups, Altman had developed a reputation for favoring personal priorities over official duties and for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the start-ups he was supposed to nurture, said two of the people, as well as an additional person, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe private deliberations. The largest of those priorities was his intense focus on growing OpenAI, which he saw as his life’s mission, one person said.
A separate concern, unrelated to his initial firing, was that Altman personally invested in start-ups he discovered through the incubator using a fund he created with his brother Jack — a kind of double-dipping for personal enrichment that was practiced by other founders and later limited by the organization.
“It was the school of loose management that is all about prioritizing what’s in it for me,” said one of the people.
I only now learned about this from Helen Toner's newly-released interview about Altman's firing from OpenAI in November. From The Verge:
Toner says that one reason the board stopped trusting Altman was his failure to tell the board that he owned the OpenAI Startup Fund; another was how he gave inaccurate info about the company’s safety processes “on multiple occasions.” Additionally, Toner says she was personally targeted by the CEO after she published a research paper that angered him. “Sam started lying to other board members in order to try and push me off the board,” she says.
After two executives spoke directly to the board about their own experiences with Altman, describing a toxic atmosphere at OpenAI, accusing him of “psychological abuse,” and providing evidence of Altman “lying and being manipulative in different situations,” the board finally made its move.
Perhaps not the guy we want in charge of safety at one of the largest AI companies, given that the employees in charge of safety have been leaving in droves. From Vox:
If you’ve been following the saga on social media, you might think OpenAI secretly made a huge technological breakthrough. The meme “What did Ilya see?” speculates that Sutskever, the former chief scientist, left because he saw something horrifying, like an AI system that could destroy humanity.
But the real answer may have less to do with pessimism about technology and more to do with pessimism about humans — and one human in particular: Altman. According to sources familiar with the company, safety-minded employees have lost faith in him.
“It’s a process of trust collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one,” a person with inside knowledge of the company told me, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Not many employees are willing to speak about this publicly. That’s partly because OpenAI is known for getting its workers to sign offboarding agreements with non-disparagement provisions upon leaving. If you refuse to sign one, you give up your equity in the company, which means you potentially lose out on millions of dollars.
Just what we want: an artificial intelligence company motivated by profit that creates something truly dangerous and disruptive, run by a guy like Altman.
Here are two fun excerpts from his Wikipedia page:
He is an apocalypse preparer. Altman said in 2016: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."
and
In 2021, Altman's sister Annie wrote on Twitter accusing Sam of "sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, and financial abuse".
To wake up early—earlier the dogs and cats—and sip my morning coffee. To sit quietly with friends, unafraid of the silence. Plenty of warm showers and hot springs. A few old Star Wars toys laying around—cheap pieces of plastic that bring me joy. Spirited conversation, sometimes political.
A home in a quiet town, away from the noise of the culture. A place to retreat to retreat to when everything else becomes too much — the din of relations, the screeches of polity, the frantic need to make money.
A table, preferably in the garage, upon which to make models. Trains, ships, planes... little things to glue and paint while deep in thought. A garden with wild sprinklers.
Books, but not too many. Too many can erode my focus.
A home near the mountains, visible from my window. The promise of an adventure, of a journey into the great interior. Capable hiking boots — the kind that can take me anywhere. A mechanic or two as kind and thoughtful and thorough as those I now have.
Companionship, but not too much of it. Too much can erode my focus.
Neighbors that talk politics. Neighbors that bring over vegetables. Neighbors that play with my dogs.
Dogs. Many, many dogs.
A tent at the edge of things, from which I can look down and observe. Too close and my sanity frays, but from a tent on the edge of things, I can have space to make sense of it all.
The grace to forgive those I do not understand.
The grace to forgive myself.
Past reads: Toward the Queerest Insurrection by The Mary Nardini Gang 📚
What a bunch of gibberish nonsense.
I used to find this stuff appealing, but now I think it to be tantamount to nihilism.
Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules
The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device but is a significant decision in an unsettled area of the law.
More important than ever:
How to quickly disable Face ID and Touch ID on iPhone (and iPad)
Grindr’s Plan to Squeeze Its Users
Grindr plans to boost revenue by monetizing the app more aggressively, putting previously free features behind a paywall, and rolling out new in-app purchases, employees say. The company is currently working on an AI chatbot that can engage in sexually explicit conversations with users, Platformer has learned. According to employees with knowledge of the project, the bot may train in part on private chats with other human users, pending their consent.
I remember the very early days of Grindr. I had one of the only smartphones in my part of the state, and the nearest fellow user was nearly 250 miles away. Chatting with other gay men was fun and refreshing.
Much has changed in the intervening 15 years. Dating (or hookup) apps have become vast wastelands of algorithmic sameness. People on these apps look, act, talk, and behave in eerily similar ways, not unlike how every young person now dresses like an "influencer." (I refuse to use that word without quotation marks.)
These apps gave us corrosion sold as connection. I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's thoughts on entertainment, about always wondering what's on the other channel, wondering if there's something better to be watching. Shopping around (because that's precisely what these apps are: shopping) is so damn easy.
Contentment is hard when you think there's always something better just around the corner.
Bomb First, Ask Questions Later
That’s precisely when you don’t go to war: when your emotions are in hyper-drive. But if you do go to war in such an emotionally fraught moment, when every reservist and IDF soldier is understandably filled with shock and anger, you have to be extra-extra-careful to lay out and enforce clear rules of warfare. You have to over-emphasize the need for restraint, the vital importance of distinguishing between terrorists and bystanders, if you aren’t going to blunder into self-defeating war crimes — as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the torture sites set up by Bush and Cheney.
Netanyahu’s government, of course, did the opposite.
My post from October 13, 2023:
Israel is in an impossible position. Many Palestinians want Israel wiped off the map because Israel forced them out of their ancestral homeland, land they had lived on for hundreds or thousands of years. Much of this Palestinian anger has become entangled with some truly wretched antisemitism, yes, but I cannot in good faith say that Palestinians hate Jews for the same reasons the Nazis did. Yes, some Palestinians do, and certainly the government of Iran does, but many Palestinians just want to go home, in the same way so many Native Americans want their ancestral homeland back, a cause toward which I am sympathetic. (Though remember, Native Americans can travel freely off the reservations and throughout the United States, whereas almost all Palestinians are forbidden from traveling into Israel — or from leaving Palestine at all. They are confined, unable to leave.)
But if Israel uses the attack of last weekend to slaughter Palestinians indiscriminately, it will (if it hasn’t already, in the eyes of many) lose the moral high ground. It will lose, if it hasn’t already, the goodwill and support of so many people around the world.
House Votes to Extend—and Expand—a Major US Spy Program
Section 702 permits the US government to wiretap communications between Americans and foreigners overseas. Hundreds of millions of calls, texts, and emails are intercepted by government spies each with the “compelled assistance” of US communications providers.
The government may strictly target foreigners believed to possess “foreign intelligence information,” but it also eavesdrops on the conversations of an untold number of Americans each year. (The government claims it is impossible to determine how many Americans get swept up by the program.) The government argues that Americans are not themselves being targeted and thus the wiretaps are legal. Nevertheless, their calls, texts, and emails may be stored by the government for years, and can later be accessed by law enforcement without a judge’s permission.
Rich Americans get second passports, citing risk of instability
Wealthy U.S. families are increasingly applying for second citizenships and national residences as a way to hedge their financial risk, according to a leading law firm.
The wealthy are building these “passport portfolios” — collections of second, and even third or fourth, citizenships — in case they need to flee their home country.
The super-rich make contingency plans when revolution (via warfare or taxation) is nigh.
This is a bellwether.
Visual explainers on AI progress and its risks.
The truth about ‘white rural rage’
Instead of threats to democracy, or rebellious politics, or reflexive anger, we keep finding something different: pride in rural living, a sense of communal belonging, a shared fate that intertwines the economic well-being of rich and poor in rural communities. Yes, there are resentments, especially towards government officials and experts. But resentment is not a stereotype. It’s a motivation, a story.
Still, rageful stereotypes sell better than complex backstories. And they’re easier for our political and media ecosystems to make sense of. Reference some data point about QAnon conspiracies in the heartlands, and you’ll raise more money from nervous liberals in the city (who just so happen to live next to three times as many conspiracy believers). Lash out against the xenophobia in small towns, and you’ll mobilise your city voters to the polls. Rage draws clicks. It makes a splash.
However, unlike rage, which is explosive and directed towards immediate targets, scholars have shown that resentment in rural areas emanates from a sense of enduring injustice and marginalisation. It is not primarily about anger towards specific groups such as black Americans, immigrants, or LGBT individuals. Instead, resentment or grievance is a deeper, more persistent feeling that arises from real and perceived slights against rural communities. These include economic policies that have devastated local industries, a lack of investment in rural infrastructure and education, and a sense of cultural dismissal from urban-centric media and politics.
I’m currently reading White Rural Rage and boy, do I have thoughts. It’s clearly written by two people who do not live in rural spaces, but about people that do.
Thoughts to come.
Turchin's terrifying predictions
For graduates it has become a game of ‘musical chairs’ where you pay a huge sum to buy a ticket to play the game (University costs), but the number of chairs (graduate level jobs) remain the same. As the number of players increases year on year, massively in just a few decades, supply way exceeds demand. So graduates have to up their game and pay for another even more expensive ticket to get a Masters. Even worse, those who go on to do PhDs find there are no academic jobs available, as again supply has exceeded demand for many years. Graduates in the social sciences and humanities are particularly vulnerable but Turchin’s point is that, for a rapidly increasing graduate population there is a precarious future and lots of debt. This may be exacerbated by AI, as it eats into cognitive work, so has that group as its sweet spot.
This frustrated aspirant class, for Turchin, is dangerous. Always isolated from working class people, they have little in common with the non-graduate class or ideas like collective bargaining and trade unions. They have the time and support from their propertied parents to become activists and protestors and often pick up causes on campus around cancel culture, climate change, transgender issues and social justice. Poverty is not the problem, recognition of identity is.
I find myself in this "precariat" class. Most of my friends are in this group, too. We went to college with the promise it would lead to better jobs, higher wages, more social mobility, yet most of my friends are burdened with crippling debt.
I'm an anomaly. Early investments in the market have stablilized my economic position, and while I have no debt, financially, I'm solidly lower-middle class. But I own my home and have non-essential assets I could sell in an emergency. I live on less than $25k a year, but without debt, this is not diffcult.
I've watched identity politics take hold in my cohort. It captured me for a time, too, and I'm sure still animates me in some ways. I'm embarrassed by my participation in this push to focus so intently on identity, and I'm horrified at how so many of my contemporaries still behave. Compassion for others — those of a different class, gender, or belief — has disappeared in the face of a relentless focus on our differences. Tellingly, so many people closest to my ideological home — liberal, (ex?)Democrat, progressive — have adopted the worst habits of the political opposition. They've become closed off to new perspectives, refusing to engage with the ideas of a person on the basis of their gender, their race, their class. Worse, they still claim to be liberal, though this behavior is the antithesis of liberalism.
What is worrying is how easily we all march lock-step into the future, even when the signs of discontent are ringing in our ears. We are like those cartoon figures who run off the edge of the cliff and hang smiling in mid-air, before the fall. We don't adjust or adapt, we simply behave according to the groupthink of the socio-economic group we find ourselves in. The trick is to sit back, look, listen and read people like Turchin. You don't have to agree with him but it is voices like his that at least provide substance to predictions, not about 10nyears [sic] from now but next year!
This is a pretty damn salient analogy. Our current system of capitalism heavily favors those with capital, i.e. shareholders. If you have money in the stock market, you're the beneficiary of capitalism. Instead of money going to the employees of a company, that money is funneled to those that own stock in said company, i.e. "maximizing shareholder value." Those at the top make more and more off the labor of the working class.
This system has to change for our culture to avoid a painful (and maybe bloody) revolution. Wealth being funneled to the upper classes needs to be given to the working class, as they rightly deserve. It is, after all, their labor. But politically, this redistribution of wealth has been branded a handout, welfare, socialism. Tellingly, Republicans have convinced their own working-class constituents to vote against their best interest by making "socialism" such a toxic word.
These days, nuance has no place in America. That has something to do with our media and something to do with our level of education. It's remarkably difficult to explain the financial system or the stock market, and attempting to explain the nuances of capitalism, socialism, and how the two are blended to form a more equal, fair, just society is near impossible. Dependent on their political affiliation, people are triggered by the mere mention of either word and conversations about the nuances of policy become impossible.
We are in real trouble.
An Idyll on the Shores of a Toxic Lake
…people who live in Bombay Beach stay because the town offers a tight-knit community in the midst of catastrophe. Though its residents contend with environmental adversity on a daily basis, they’re also demonstrating how to navigate the uncertain future we all face — neglect, the fight for scarce resources, destruction of home, the feeling of having no place to go. They are an example of how people can survive wild climate frontiers together.
Bombay Beach. Butte. The San Luis Valley. Rock Springs. Where they go, so go we all.
Jedi Knight (Plus, Notes on an Expanded Universe) via Hacker News
Even when it was no better than it ought to have been, however, there was a freewheeling joy to the early Expanded Universe which is poignant to look back upon from the perspective of these latter days of Star Wars, when everything about the franchise is meticulously managed from the top down. The Expanded Universe, by contrast, was a case of by the fans, for the fans. With new movies the stuff of dreams only, fans painted every corner of the universe in vivid colors of their own, then thrilled as this content appeared in actual book and comic stores with the actual Star Wars logo on the front of it. The Expanded Universe could be cheesy, but it was never cynical. One could argue that it felt more like Star Wars — the original Star Wars of simple summertime fun, the one that didn’t take itself so gosh-darn seriously — than anything that has appeared under the name since 1998.
I couldn't have written it better myself.
Students of history like to say that every golden age carries within it the seeds of its demise. That rings especially true when it comes to the heyday of the Expanded Universe: the very popularity of the many new Star Wars novels, comics, and games reportedly did much to convince George Lucas that it might be worth returning to Star Wars himself. And because Lucas was one of the entertainment world’s more noted control freaks, such a return could bode no good for this giddy era of fan ownership.
We can pin the beginning of the end down to a precise date: November 1, 1994, the day on which George Lucas sat down to start writing the scripts for what would become the Star Wars prequels, going so far as to bring in a film crew to commemorate the occasion. “I have beautiful pristine yellow tablets,” he told the camera proudly, waving a stack of empty notebooks in front of its lens. “A nice fresh box of pencils. All I need is an idea.” Four and a half years later, The Phantom Menace would reach theaters, inaugurating for better or for worse — mostly for the latter, many fans would come to believe — the next era of Star Wars as a media phenomenon.
And then, eventually, came the sale to Disney, which in its quest to own all of our childhoods turned Star Wars into just another tightly controlled corporate property like any of its others. The Expanded Universe was officially put out of its misery in 2014, a decade and a half past its golden age. It continues to exist today only in the form of a handful of characters, Grand Admiral Thrawn among them, who have been co-oped by Disney and integrated into the official lore.