Lindsey

This blog was originally posted on Google for Developers.

As the saying goes, “home is where the heart is.” It’s where we spend the most time; it’s your space to be comfortable, where you can truly relax, connect and make memories. Our homes have gotten more helpful with connected products, such as a smart door lock or Nest thermostat. Despite this momentum, it's still too hard to develop for the home.

We are changing all of that. Building on the foundation of Matter, we've re-envisioned Google Home as a platform for developers - all developers, not just those that build smart home devices. Google Home is the destination to create innovative experiences for the home.

Today, we’re announcing the Home APIs and Home runtime. With the Home APIs, app developers can access over 600M devices, Google’s hubs and Matter infrastructure, and an automation engine powered by Google intelligence - all available on both Android and iOS. Here are five things to know:

1. Any developer can now build an experience that works with Google Home.

The home offers a unique opportunity for developers to create seamless and deeper relationships with users, but developing for the smart home is harder than it needs to be. Building for the smart home means integrations with many device makers, operating hubs and Matter fabrics, and operating automations engines driven by intelligent signals.

Whether you build an app specifically for smart home devices or build apps that have nothing to do with the smart home – like a fitness app or delivery app - the Home APIs will let you create app experiences that offer your customers delightful and differentiated experiences on both Android and iOS.

2. Access 600 million connected devices from your app

The new Device and Structure APIs let you access over 600M devices with a single integration. Control and manage the devices already connected to Google Home, such as Matter light bulbs or the Nest Learning Thermostat, whether at home, or on the go. You can build a complex app to manage any aspect of a smart home, or simply integrate with a smart device to solve pain points - like turning on the lights automatically before the food delivery driver arrives.

The Home APIs have been designed with privacy and security in mind, leveraging industry standard best practices. Users are always in control and need to explicitly grant access to their structure and smart home devices before an app can access it. And they can easily revoke access at any time from the Google Home app. To ensure quality experiences, developers who adopt the Home APIs must pass certification before launching their app.

The new Commissioning API lets you setup Matter devices in your app or the Home app or directly with Fast Pair on Android, without the need to create a new Matter fabric, saving you time and resources.

3. Automate with Google’s unique intelligence about the home

As people add more devices to their home, it becomes challenging to make them all work in unison. Over the past year, we have added new signals and allowed those with advanced skills to script their home using generative AI. With the new Automation API, you can create and manage home automations in your app, using Google Home’s new automation engine and intelligent signals.

Automations can be triggered by device signals from the home such as occupancy events from motion sensors, mode changes from appliances, or media events from a smart TV. For example, Yale is using the Automation API to turn on the foyer lights when the front door is unlocked at night. Automations can also use Google’s intelligence signals like home and away, which fuses together signals from devices across the home to create a more accurate presence detection.

4. Expanding hubs for Google Home to the TV

A hub for Google Home is a device that enables remote access and local control of their Matter devices across Wifi and Thread. The Home APIs use the network of hubs for Google Home to control Matter devices whether the user is in the home or away.

Later this year, we’re upgrading our hubs and introducing the Home runtime, so other devices, including Chromecast with Google TV, select panel TVs with Google TV running Android 14, or higher and eligible LG brand TVs will also become hubs for Google Home.

Home APIs make controlling lights and switches locally over a hub feel snappy. We are adopting these APIs in the Google Home app, and our early tests show device control operating up to three times faster than before. Developers using the Home APIs can see faster and more responsive local control in their apps as well.

5. Delightful new experiences from a diverse set of apps

We are working with a broad range of brands across lighting, security, automotive, energy, and entertainment to build seamless smart home experiences that help get more usefulness from the smart home.

Here are how some of our first partners are using the Home APIs:

ADT’s new Trusted Neighbor will revolutionize the universal practice of “giving a trusted neighbor a key to your home,” enabling users to easily grant secure and temporary access to their homes for neighbors, friends or helpers.

LG will enable millions of TVs to be hubs for Google Home, allowing seamless control of devices from any app built using Home APIs. You will also be able to use the ThinQ mobile app or the Home Hub on the LG TV to control devices.

Eve Systems will bring their experience to Android for the first time and build helpful automations like lowering the blinds when the temperature drops at night.

Google Pixel is bridging the digital and physical worlds so that bedtime mode can not only dim your screen, but can also automatically dim your bedroom lights, lower the shades and lock the front door.

And this is just the beginning. With the Home APIs, a workout app could keep you cool while you are burning calories by turning on the fan before you begin working out. Or a vacation rental app could make sure that the lights are on and the temperature is just right when a guest arrives. With the Home APIs, now anyone can bridge digital experiences and physical devices.

Sign Up to Build with the Home APIs

Do you have a great idea or feature that you'd like to build into your app with the Home APIs? Tell us about it and join the waitlist for access to the Home APIs or Home runtime. We will expand access on a rolling basis and the first apps built on the Home APIs will come to the Play Store and App Store starting this fall. Learn more about what’s included in the Home APIs from our I/O session on the Google Home Developer Center.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The Federal Trade Commission's Office of Technology has issued a warning to automakers that sell connected cars. Companies that offer such products "do not have the free license to monetize people’s information beyond purposes needed to provide their requested product or service," it wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. Just because executives and investors want recurring revenue streams, that does not "outweigh the need for meaningful privacy safeguards," the FTC wrote.

Based on your feedback, connected cars might be one of the least-popular modern inventions among the Ars readership. And who can blame them? Last January, a security researcher revealed that a vehicle identification number was sufficient to access remote services for multiple different makes, and yet more had APIs that were easily hackable.

Later, in 2023, the Mozilla Foundation published an extensive report examining the various automakers' policies regarding the use of data from connected cars; the report concluded that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy."

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Top: a look through the past 2,000 years of summertime temperatures, showing that 2023 is considerably warmer than anything earlier. Bottom: a bell curve of the typical temperatures, showing that the hot outliers are all recent years. (credit: Esper, Torbenson, and Büntgen)

Starting in June of last year, global temperatures went from very hot to extreme. Every single month since June, the globe has experienced the hottest temperatures for that month on record—that's 11 months in a row now, enough to ensure that 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 will likely be similarly extreme.

There's been nothing like this in the temperature record, and it acts as an unmistakable indication of human-driven warming. But how unusual is that warming compared to what nature has thrown at us in the past? While it's not possible to provide a comprehensive answer to that question, three European researchers (Jan Esper, Max Torbenson, and Ulf Büntgen) have provided a partial answer: the Northern Hemisphere hasn't seen anything like this in over 2,000 years.

Tracking past temperatures

Current temperature records are based on a global network of data-gathering hardware. But, as you move back in time, gaps in that network go from rare to ever more common. Moving backward from 1900, the network shrinks to just a few dozen land-based thermometers, almost all of them in Europe.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Wildfire smoke can be hazardous, but there’s a lot you can do to protect yourself.

Several US states are again experiencing an influx of wildfire smoke as Canada’s summer fire season gets underway. Due to the scale of the wildfires and natural weather patterns, enormous amounts of smoke are drifting southward — much like last year.

North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota are among the earliest states to receive air quality warnings this week. Those alerts are a signal that it’s unhealthy for people, particularly vulnerable populations like children and the elderly, to go outside due to the pollution in the air.

More US states and cities could see similar alerts over the coming months as scientists anticipate another intense Canadian wildfire season.

The greatest hazards of wildfire smoke come from fine particulate matter that it carries, like soot, also known as PM 2.5 for its size. Because they’re so small, these pollutants can travel into people’s lungs and bloodstreams, making breathing more difficult and exacerbating other health conditions from asthma to chronic pulmonary problems. Hazardous gasses and chemicals in the smoke like carbon monoxide and benzene can also endanger people’s health.

Health authorities encourage people to stay indoors if possible when they receive severe air quality warnings and to take serious precautions if they need to go outside. Below are some steps to keep in mind — and ways to protect yourself — while navigating this upcoming wildfire season.

Check the air quality index

The first step is checking the Air Quality Index, or AQI, which is run by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). People can visit AirNow.gov, and enter their location in order to see what the air quality is like in their neighborhood.

The AQI rates air quality on a scale of 0 to 500, with 0 being the least hazardous and 500 being the most. It also breaks the rating down into six color categories, with green representing the healthiest level of air quality and maroon representing the most dangerous. These calculations are based on the pollutants the EPA detects in the air, including the concentrations of ozone, particulate matter (PM 2.5), carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide.

Any rating of 50 or below indicates that the air is good quality, while any rating higher than 300 signals that the air poses a risk to everyone, according to the agency. The various categories in between those extremes detail who is more at risk as the air quality worsens: For example, sensitive groups could experience negative health effects once the AQI is higher than 100.

If an area experiences a heavy concentration of wildfire smoke, the state government typically issues an air quality warning to make people aware of the risks. In Minnesota this week, the state issued an air quality alert to signal that the air would reach the red AQI category — which is a rating between 151 to 200 — and be hazardous for all people.

Purchase an indoor air filter and recirculate air

When the local Air Quality Index indicates the outside air could be hazardous, people should stay indoors as much as they can.

“The outdoor levels are reduced by anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent just coming indoors,” Steven Chillrud, a research professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, told NY1 in 2023.

Experts urge people to close doors and windows to keep the smoke out. They should also put their air conditioning unit on the “recirculation” function if possible, so that it doesn’t bring in air from outside. People can even put wet towels under their windows and doors to provide another barrier to smoke coming in.

In addition, scientists say people can purchase portable HEPA air filters for their homes, which will further clean the air of particulate matter that might get inside a house or apartment.

Limit time and activity outside

For people who have to go outside, including for work and other urgent reasons, experts say they should try to limit their time outdoors. (Employers can help by curbing the amount of time employees need to spend outside or reschedule tasks.)

The American Lung Association encourages people to keep outdoor exposures to under 30 minutes if the AQI is high. “The chances of being affected by unhealthy levels of air pollution increase the longer a person is active outdoors and the more strenuous the activity,” the Association notes.

Per a CBS News report, people are safe to go outside if the AQI is 100 or below, but ratings higher than that could require more precautions.

Wear a mask

When the AQI is high, people can protect themselves by wearing a mask like a well-fitted KN95 or N95. Those can filter out some particulate matter, while a P100 mask is seen as the most effective option because it can keep out the finest particles. Cloth and surgical masks, however, won’t be as effective.

Individuals with heart and lung conditions should also be especially careful because they could experience the worst health effects from wildfire smoke.

“People with asthma and people who already have lung disease or underlying lung problems — it can exacerbate that, it can irritate that. And if the air quality is bad enough, it can even cause some symptoms of feeling unwell and respiratory symptoms in people who are healthy,” Stephanie Widmer, a member of ABC News’ Medical Unit, previously said.

Enlarge / Wegovy is an injectable prescription weight-loss medicine that has helped people with obesity. (credit: Getty | Michael Siluk)

A large, long-term trial of the weight-loss medication Wegovy (semaglutide) found that people tended to lose weight over the first 65 weeks on the drug—about one year and three months—but then hit a plateau or "set point." But that early weight loss was generally maintained for up to four years while people continued taking the weekly injections.

The findings, published Monday in Nature Medicine, come from a fresh analysis of data from the SELECT trial, which was designed to look at the drug's effects on cardiovascular health. The trial—a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial—specifically enrolled people with existing cardiovascular disease who also were overweight or obese but did not have diabetes. In all, the trial included 17,604 people from 41 countries. Seventy-two percent of them were male, 84 percent were white, and the average age was about 62 years old.

Last year, researchers published the trial's primary results, which showed that semaglutide reduced participants' risk of heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular-related deaths by 20 percent over the span of a little over three years.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, leaving the company, often to work at competitors.

The study (PDF), published this month by University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers and reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, says:

In this paper, we provide causal evidence that RTO mandates at three large tech companies—Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple—had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce. In particular, we find the strongest negative effects at the top of the respective distributions, implying a more pronounced exodus of relatively senior personnel.

The study looked at résumé data from People Data Labs and used "260 million résumés matched to company data." It only examined three companies, but the report's authors noted that Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX represent 30 percent of the tech industry's revenue and over 2 percent of the technology industry's workforce. The three companies have also been influential in setting RTO standards beyond their own companies. Robert Ployhart, a professor of business administration and management at the University of South Carolina and scholar at the Academy of Management, told the Post that despite the study being limited to three companies, its conclusions are a broader reflection of the effects of RTO policies in the US.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Back in December, at a wine-drenched Christmas party for a moms group in suburban Maryland, Jessica Jackson got vulnerable. It was deep in the night, and the women were discussing their difficulties—toddlers, divorces—when someone quoted a line from Mean Girls. It shook loose a secret. “Do you want to hear something that sounds like a lie but […]

The post The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic “Mean Girls” first appeared on Washingtonian.

Long before TikTok histrionics took root, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent numerous years freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei.

The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on Americans at a massive scale. Congress then proposed a solution: it would require that U.S. telecom operators (large and small) rip out all Huawei equipment from their networks at great expense, then replace it with usually more expensive alternatives.

So in early 2020 Congress passed the Secure And Trusted Communications Act effectively banning Huawei from U.S. telecom networks. Congress doled out $1.9 billion to rip out and replace Huawei gear, but it’s estimated to cost around $5 billion to actually complete the effort. But instead of finishing the job, the FCC last week politely pointed out that Congress did nothing.

The costs were significant, but especially for smaller telecoms which may now be forced to withdraw from the program, or shut their networks down entirely without additional funding, the FCC wrote:

“Several recipients have recently informed the Commission that they foresee significant consequences that could result from the lack of full funding, including having to shut down their networks or withdraw from the program. Because Reimbursement Program recipients serve many rural and remote areas of the country where they may be the only mobile broadband service provider, a shutdown of all or part of their networks could eliminate the only provider in some regions.”

So basically Congress freaked out about Huawei (without much public evidence), proposed a very expensive solution to address the problem, didn’t fully fund the program, then basically fell asleep. Their apathy and dysfunction now risks putting some smaller ISPs out of business; ISPs that may be the only broadband provider available in some rural markets. Impressive work all around.

This is all fairly ironic given the hysteria Republicans like the FCC’s Brendan Carr have had about TikTok. Carr has made quite a career showing up on cable news to gnash his teeth over a social media network his agency doesn’t have the authority to regulate. Yet he’s not been anywhere near as active in pushing for a solution for a huge problem impacting a sector he actually regulates.

In part because the work of actually doing a coherent job doesn’t much interest an ad-engagement chasing press. The actually daily nitty gritty details of coherent governance isn’t sexy, and (usually) doesn’t get you on cable TV.

It all aptly demonstrates the often-performative nature of Congress’ hysteria over China. They’ll thrash and flail over some perceived Chinese threat to grab headlines and make U.S. competitors (like Facebook or Cisco) happy, throw out some barely workable solution (like say the TikTok ban), then consider their job done. Once the cable networks are no longer interested they’ll just forget about the problem entirely.

Tyson Foods and the federal government refuse to show their math for a new sustainability label.

One species accounts for around 10 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions: the cow.

Every few months, like clockwork, environmental scientists publish a new report on how we can’t limit planetary warming if people in rich countries don’t eat fewer cows and other animals. But meat giant Tyson Foods, in conjunction with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), has a different solution: “climate-friendly” beef.

Tyson claims that its “Climate-Smart Beef” program, launched last year and supported with taxpayer dollars, has managed to cut 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from a tiny fraction of its cattle herd. Those cattle are then slaughtered and sold under the company’s Brazen Beef brand with a USDA-approved “climate-friendly” label, which is now for sale in limited quantities but could soon land in your local supermarket’s meat aisle.

It sounds nice — Americans could continue to eat nearly 60 pounds of beef annually while the world burns. But it’s just the latest salvo in the meat industry’s escalating war against climate science, and its campaign to greenwash its way out of the fight for a livable planet.

Show me the math

Tyson’s climate-friendly beef website is full of earnest marketing phrases like this one: “If we’re showing up for the climate, then we’ve got to show our work.” Yet that “work” is nowhere to be found.

Despite requests for transparency from scientists and dogged journalists, Tyson and the USDA haven’t opened up their emissions ledgers, so the program remains a black box.

Tyson and consulting firm Deloitte, which worked on Tyson’s program, both declined interview requests for this story. Where Food Comes From, a private company that audits food labels for animal welfare, safety, and sustainability claims — including Tyson’s “climate-friendly” label — did not respond to an interview request.

Last year, when I asked to see Tyson’s environmental accounting model, the USDA said I’d need to submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The nonprofit organization Environmental Working Group did that — but all 106 pages of the documents it received were heavily redacted to, as the USDA put it, protect “trade secrets.”

Tyson’s sole known supplier for Brazen Beef, Adams Land & Cattle Co., is a sprawling cattle feedlot operation in Nebraska.

Google Maps/Environmental Working Group

“I’m not surprised, but I’m concerned,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group. “Where’s the evidence? Where are the receipts?”

“If [Tyson’s] Brazen Beef could carry this claim,” Faber added, then “what’s to stop other companies from making similar claims based on science and other data that’s simply unavailable to all of us?”

The USDA didn’t respond to a request for comment about the FOIA documents.

Tyson also worked with environmental nonprofit juggernauts The Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense Fund to develop its Climate-Smart Beef program, which the company touts on its website and in advertisements. Environmental Defense Fund said in an email that it integrated its nitrogen emissions model into Tyson’s environmental accounting, while The Nature Conservancy noted that it reviewed and provided recommendations on data used in Tyson’s model but wasn’t otherwise involved in its Climate-Smart Beef program.

Both organizations declined an interview request for this story when it was first published last year. Earlier this year, during interviews for a related story, both groups said companies need to be transparent about their climate goals but stood by their collaboration with Tyson Foods.

What makes beef climate-friendly, according to Tyson Foods

So what exactly does Tyson say its ranchers and farmers are doing to achieve a 10 percent emissions reduction? We can look to their website to get a vague sense, but it helps to first understand how cattle pollute the planet.

The 1.5 billion cows farmed worldwide for cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes each year accelerate climate change in three main ways: they eat grass and/or grain, like corn and soy, causing them to burp out the highly potent greenhouse gas methane; they poop a lot, which releases the even more potent nitrous oxide, as does the synthetic fertilizer used to grow the grain they’re fed; and they take up a lot of land — a quarter of the planet is occupied by grazing livestock, some of which could be used to absorb carbon from the atmosphere if it weren’t deforested for meat production.

Raphael Alves/Washington Post via Getty Images

To achieve a 10 percent emissions reduction, Tyson’s website mentions that grain farmers who supply feed to its cows employ practices like planting cover crops and reduced tillage, which are good for soil health but haven’t been proven to cut emissions. There’s also mention of “nutrient management,” which usually means reducing fertilizer over-application, but no details on emissions savings are provided.

Among other practices, Tyson also lists “pasture rotation,” which entails moving cattle around more frequently with the goal of allowing grass to regrow, which can provide a number of environmental benefits, but many climate scientists are skeptical it can meaningfully reduce emissions.

Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University who’s written about Tyson’s climate-friendly beef label, told me the methods Tyson is talking about are admirable, but that doesn’t mean the 10 percent reduction claim is justified. Some practices may be good for land stewardship but don’t reduce emissions. For those that can reduce emissions, savings will be marginal.

“These are razor-thin distinctions in a country that already produces meat incredibly efficiently, and our tools are not cut out [to measure] these thin margins,” Hayek said. “You can’t call that [climate-friendly], in any good conscience.”

And because emissions from US cattle operations vary widely, “There’s simply no reliable way to estimate a change in greenhouse gas emissions as small as 10 percent on any one farm — let alone a complex network of them,” Hayek and political economist Jan Dutkiewicz wrote in the New Republic last September.

Tyson’s claims are brazen but unsurprising given how the USDA collaborates with industry. When it comes to animal welfare claims on meat packages, for example, the USDA more or less allows meat producers to operate on an honor system.

Just as important as showing its math is knowing where the starting line for emissions reduction begins. Tyson says it has reduced the carbon footprint of some of its beef by 10 percent, but 10 percent relative to what? What’s the benchmark?

Nobody knows. A 2019 study by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association found that the average American steer emits 21.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per kilogram of carcass weight. But in 2021, the USDA approved a low-carbon beef program (unrelated to Tyson) that uses a benchmark nearly 25 percent higher than the 2019 study, as noted by Wired last year.

In September, when asked what benchmark the USDA uses to approve a 10 percent emissions reduction claim, the agency again said I would need to file a FOIA request. In the document it sent to Environmental Working Group, the portion on benchmarks was redacted.

But even if we give Tyson and the USDA the benefit of the doubt, there’s a stubborn truth about beef: It’s so high in emissions that it can never really be “climate-friendly.”

Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To be sure, the US beef industry has reduced its emissions over the years, and it’s much lower than most countries. But relative to every other food product, beef remains the coal of the food sector.

“Beef is always going to be and always will be the worst [food] choice for the climate,” said Faber of Environmental Working Group, which has also petitioned the USDA to prohibit “climate-friendly” claims on beef products altogether. “And no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that.”

What Tyson’s done here is equivalent to making a Hummer 10 percent more fuel-efficient and calling it climate-friendly — it’s greenwashing, and surveys show that most consumers know far too little about food and climate change to navigate this brave new world of so-called “climate-friendly” meat.

Consumers will be deceived by “climate-friendly” meat claims

Meat and dairy production account for 15 to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and leading environmental scientists say we must drastically reduce livestock emissions and eat more plant-based meals. That message, however, hasn’t broken through to the general public, nor to policymakers.

In an online survey conducted last year in partnership with market research consultancy firm Humantel, Vox polled consumers about which parts of the food sector they think contribute most to climate change. Meat and dairy production came in dead last, even though it’s the top contributor in the list.

In another question, “what we eat” was (incorrectly) ranked as a smaller contributor to extreme weather than refrigerant chemicals, single-use plastics, and air travel.

Most respondents did rank plant-based meat alternatives as more climate-friendly than beef by a decent margin. However, plant-based meat and grass-fed beef were almost tied, even though plant-based meat has a drastically smaller carbon footprint (and grass-fed beef is generally worse for the climate than conventional beef).

Other surveys have found similar results, demonstrating Americans’ limited understanding of emissions from the food system. Throw “climate-friendly” beef into the mix and consumers are sure to be misled and possibly persuaded that beef can indeed be good for the climate.

However, meat companies could face legal consequences over misleading environmental claims. Earlier this year, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, the world’s largest meat company, over its claim that it will achieve net zero emissions by 2040. James argued that such a goal was unsubstantiated and unachievable.

Cashing in on consumers’ desire to shop more sustainably — and their misunderstanding of what actually makes food sustainable — could lead to more of what Tyson wants: increased beef consumption after decades of decline and stagnation. That would be a disaster for the climate at a time when the window to act is closing.

The USDA and government agencies around the world know what must be done to slash food emissions. Now they just need to follow the science, resist industry greenwashing, and cut back on the burgers.

Update, May 8, 2024, 2:40 pm: This story, originally published September 8, 2023, has been updated to include documents obtained by Environmental Working Group through a Freedom of Information Act request.

A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!

If you hear a low rumble from the skies between noon and 1 PM this Saturday, look up.  You may see some of the more than 50 vintage and modern aircraft expected to fly over the National Mall—considered one of DC’s most restricted flight zones—during an event celebrating general aviation, a broad term that encompasses […]

The post Dozens of Vintage Planes Will Fly Over the National Mall This Saturday first appeared on Washingtonian.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

After reversing its position on remote work, Dell is reportedly implementing new tracking techniques on May 13 to ensure its workers are following the company's return-to-office (RTO) policy, The Register reported today, citing anonymous sources.

Dell has allowed people to work remotely for over 10 years. But in February, it issued an RTO mandate, and come May 13, most workers will be classified as either totally remote or hybrid. Starting this month, hybrid workers have to go into a Dell office at least 39 days per quarter. Fully remote workers, meanwhile, are ineligible for promotion, Business Insider reported in March.

Now The Register reports that Dell will track employees' badge swipes and VPN connections to confirm that workers are in the office for a significant amount of time.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Julian Stratenschulte)

The field of dentistry is lagging on adopting evidence-based care and, as such, is rife with overdiagnoses and overtreatments that may align more with the economic pressures of keeping a dental practice afloat than what care patients actually need. At least, that's according to a trio of health and dental researchers from Brazil and the United Kingdom, led by epidemiologist and dentist Paulo Nadanovsky, of the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro.

In a viewpoint published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, the researchers point out that many common—nearly unquestioned—practices in dentistry aren't backed up by solid data. That includes the typical recommendation that everyone should get a dental check-up every six months. The researchers note that two large clinical trials failed to find a benefit of six-month check-ups compared with longer intervals that were up to two years.

A 2020 Cochrane review that assessed the two clinical trials concluded that "whether adults see their dentist for a check‐up every six months or at personalized intervals based on their dentist's assessment of their risk of dental disease does not affect tooth decay, gum disease, or quality of life. Longer intervals (up to 24 months) between check‐ups may not negatively affect these outcomes." The Cochrane reviewers reported that they were "confident" of little to no difference between six-month and risk-based check-ups and were "moderately confident" that going up to 24-month checkups would make little to no difference either.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, aka LockBitSupp (credit: UK National Crime Agency)

Since at least 2019, a shadowy figure hiding behind several pseudonyms has publicly gloated for extorting millions of dollars from thousands of victims he and his associates had hacked. Now, for the first time, “LockBitSupp” has been unmasked by an international law enforcement team, and a $10 million bounty has been placed for his arrest.

In an indictment unsealed Tuesday, US federal prosecutors unmasked the flamboyant persona as Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, a 31-year-old Russian national. Prosecutors said that during his five years at the helm of LockBit—one of the most prolific ransomware groups—Khoroshev and his subordinates have extorted $500 million from some 2,500 victims, roughly 1,800 of which were located in the US. His cut of the revenue was allegedly about $100 million.

Damage in the billions of dollars

“Beyond ransom payments and demands, LockBit attacks also severely disrupted their victims' operations, causing lost revenue and expenses associated with incident response and recovery,” federal prosecutors wrote. “With these losses included, LockBit caused damage around the world totaling billions of US dollars. Moreover, the data Khoroshev and his LockBit affiliate co-conspirators stole—containing highly sensitive organizational and personal information—remained unsecure and compromised in perpetuity, notwithstanding Khoroshev’s and his co-conspirators' false promises to the contrary.”

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Press freedom is in a state of emergency in Israel and Gaza.

Israel’s decision to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in the country signaled an escalation in an already hostile environment for journalists covering the war in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has previously called Al Jazeera a “mouthpiece for Hamas,” accused the Qatar-based news network of threatening Israel’s national security and used powers granted under an emergency law to shutter the outlet. He has not identified what specifically about Al Jazeera’s coverage the government believed crossed that line.

“The government headed by me unanimously decided: the incitement channel Al Jazeera will be closed in Israel,” Netanyahu wrote Sunday on X in Hebrew.

For years, many experts in Israeli politics have been warning about the country’s gradual embrace of far-right undemocratic principles. Now, as Israel prepares for an imminent invasion of Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, the Netanyahu government is impinging on freedom of the press in a way that may limit oversight and should put the world’s liberal democracies on guard.

“This move sets an extremely alarming precedent for restricting international media outlets working in Israel,” Carlos Martinez de la Serna, program director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement. “The Israeli cabinet must allow Al-Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely in Israel, especially during wartime.”

What we know

Months ago, the Israeli government adopted an emergency law to censor foreign journalists deemed threats to national security while the war in Gaza proceeds.

Pro-Iranian channel Al Mayadeen was previously censored under the law, with Netanyahu’s security cabinet citing its “wartime efforts to harm [Israel’s] security interests and to serve the enemy’s goals” following the October 7 attack by Hamas, which receives funding from Iran. Two of the network’s journalists were subsequently killed in an Israeli bombing in southern Lebanon.

The government has been talking about invoking the law against Al Jazeera since at least early November, when communications minister Shlomo Karhi claimed the network had “photographed and published” the positioning of IDF forces, “broadcast military announcements by Hamas,” and “distorted facts in a way which incited masses of people to riot.”

On Sunday, the government finally brought down the ax, restricting the network’s ability to broadcast from Israel and to be viewed by Israelis, as well as seizing broadcast equipment. The block is in place for 45 days, with the option of a 45-day extension.

In a statement, Al Jazeera called the decision a “criminal act that violates human rights and the basic right to access of information.” It’s not clear how the decision will impact the network’s ability to cover the war from Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Why does it matter?

The decision to shut down Al Jazeera is the latest escalation against journalists trying to cover the war both in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Throughout the war, Israel has said that it cannot guarantee journalists’ safety in Gaza and has denied foreign journalists access to the region. As of May 3, at least 97 journalists and media workers have been killed over the course of the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. By some counts, that’s more than were killed during the entire two-decade Vietnam War.

Journalists covering the war have also faced assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship, as well as contended with communications blackouts in Gaza. There are also multiple reports of killings of reporters’ family members in Palestine.

Under international law, journalists don’t constitute a separate, protected class from civilians overall. However, because it is illegal to intentionally target civilians or launch an attack that does not distinguish between military targets and civilians, it is also illegal to intentionally target journalists.

Media cannot be considered military targets even when they are being employed for propaganda purposes unless they make an “effective contribution to military action” or they “incite war crimes, genocide or acts of violence,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Nevertheless, independent investigations from Reporters Without Borders have alleged that Israel has intentionally targeted journalists on multiple occasions.

For Israel, which is increasingly losing the international war of public opinion, all of this is a means of undermining independent reporting that could further damage its image abroad. It could also obscure the reality on the ground. The war has made independent reporting difficult, with dozens of outlets’ offices destroyed, in addition to journalists being killed. In that vacuum, Hamas and Israel frequently offer dueling narratives that are often impossible to verify.

I think it best to start this post off with an admission: I had no idea that “broccolini” was not the name of an actual vegetable, but rather a trademarked brand name. I can’t see your faces, obviously, but I imagine some sizable percentage of them also have a look of mild surprise on them.

Well, it’s true. “Broccolini” is a registered trademark of Fresh Del Monte Produce, distributed by its subsidiary, Mann Packing. And if you’re wondering how it’s possible that the term is out there in grocery stores and restaurants all over the place without the trademark symbol appended next to it, that’s because for 25 years FDMP has declined to enforce the mark. I’ve dug around a bit and I cannot come up with examples of lawsuits or C&D notices being sent out regarding this trademark. That, generally speaking, is how marks lose their distinctive nature and become generic.

Well, FDMP wants to unring that bell, it seems. The company has put out all kinds of press releases and social media campaigns to educate the public about its trademark, the history of the hybrid plant, and to remind everyone that it has a trademark it may choose to enforce.

“The term Broccolini is more than just a name to us—it’s a symbol of our company’s commitment to quality and innovation,” says Melissa Mackay, Vice President of Marketing, Fresh Del Monte Produce. “We helped develop Broccolini baby broccoli more than a quarter of a century ago as a broccoli and Chinese kale hybrid from an exclusive seed that produces long, tender, and edible stems you simply can’t get anywhere else.”

According to a press release, while some restaurants may advertise that they’re selling broccolini, there is little evidence they are serving actual Broccolini®—the trademark for that proprietary type of baby broccoli created over 25 years ago by Sakata Seed Company.

For the time being, the company has said this is an educational campaign only. But it sure also feels like it is trying to lay the groundwork for enforcement somewhere down the line. Broccolini has reportedly seen an uptick in popularity in grocery stores and restaurants in recent years and you can almost smell the executives at FDMP wanting to control that market more. And the company is hinting as much in its public statements.

“While this campaign is intended as an educational opportunity to remind the foodservice industry that our product name cannot legally be used generically, we are serious about protecting our trademark,” explains Mackay. “It’s important for consumers to understand the Broccolini difference and know that the name matters. If restaurant menus are not accurately referring to the product by name, it can be misleading to customers who expect a certain level of flavor and quality.”

Serious about protecting your trademark? Why start now?

Joking aside, the point is that after all these years of not enforcing the mark, I would think it would be trivially easy for a defendant at trial to conduct polling of the public asking them if they have any idea, as I didn’t, that “broccolini” is a trademark and not the generic name of a vegetable. Whether FDMP actually wants to try to sue anyone so that we can find out if I’m right remains to be seen.

Enlarge / Google Fit seems like it's on the way out. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Google)

Google is killing off the Google Fit APIs. The platform originally existed to sync health data from third-party fitness devices to your Google account, but now it's being killed off. Deprecation of the APIs happened on May 1, and Google has stopped accepting new sign-ups for the API. The official shutdown date is June 30, 2025.

The Google Fit API was launched in 2014, just a few weeks after Apple announced Healthkit in iOS 8. The goal of both platforms is to be a central repository for health data from various apps and services. Instead of seeing steps in one app and weight in another, it could all be mushed together into a one-stop-shop for health metrics. Google had a lot of big-name partners at launch, like Nike+, Adidas, Withings, Asus, HTC, Intel, LG, and app makers like Runtastic and RunKeeper.

Fast-forward to 2024, and we get the familiar story of Google being unable to throw its weight behind a single solution. Today, Google has three competing fitness APIs. There is a "Comparison Guide" on the Android Developer site detailing the differences between the "Health Connect" API, the "Fitbit Web API" and the "Google Fit REST API."

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Rather than going to beaches to catch Wigletts, some Pokémon Go players are trying to bring the beaches to themselves. (credit: Niantic)

Ah, Pokémon Go. The hottest mobile game of 2016 remains a potent force to this day, pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from tens of millions of monthly active players.

Part of what keeps the game fresh is a continuous trickle of new Pokémon. The game began with just the original 151 monsters back in 2016 and has gradually caught up to the current generation of Switch games in bits and pieces over the last eight years. The game is currently in the process of adding monsters from Scarlet and Violet, and that's where this story begins.

Two of the latest additions to the Pokémon Go roster are Wiglett and Wugtrio, riffs on the designs of Diglett and Dugtrio, who live on beaches and look kind of like garden eels. Pokémon Go uses a biome system that restricts certain Pokémon to certain types of real-world terrain, like forests, mountains, and beaches. As aquatic Pokémon, Wiglett and Wugtrio show up in the beach biome.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Based on estimates from the Crowd Counting Consortium, the Washington Post shows the increasing number of protests on college campuses over the past few weeks.

A set of maps show the locations, and a set of packed-circle charts show the increase of three weeks. Larger circles indicate larger crowd size. Darker yellow and black border indicate police presence.

Tags: college, protest, Washington Post

Enlarge / A dog gets examined by veterinary technicians in Texas. (credit: Getty | Michael Paulsen)

Two separately owned dogs in New Jersey tested positive last year for a dreaded, extensively drug resistant bacterial strain spread in the US by contaminated artificial eye drops manufactured in India. Those drops caused a deadly multi-state outbreak in humans over many months last year, with at least 81 people ultimately infected across 18 states. Fourteen people lost their vision, an additional four had eyeballs surgically removed, and four people died.

The preliminary data on the dogs—presented recently at a conference of disease detectives hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—highlights that now that the deadly outbreak strain has been introduced around the US, it has the potential to lurk in unexpected places, spread its drug resistance to fellow bacteria, and cause new infections in people and animals who may have never used the drops.

The two dogs in New Jersey were not known to have received the drops linked to the outbreak: EzriCare Artificial Tears and two additional products made by the same manufacturer, which were recalled in February 2023. Such over-the-counter products are sometimes used in animals as well as people. But the dogs' separate owners said they didn't recall using the drops either. They also didn't report any exposures in health care settings or recent international travel that could explain the infections. One of the dogs did, at one point, receive eye drops, but they were not an outbreak-associated brand. The only connection between the two dogs was that they were both treated at the same veterinary hospital, which didn't stock the outbreak-associated eyedrops.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Change Healthcare, the health care services provider that recently experienced a ransomware attack that hamstrung the US prescription market for two weeks, was hacked through a compromised account that failed to use multifactor authentication, the company CEO told members of Congress.

The February 21 attack by a ransomware group using the names ALPHV or BlackCat took down a nationwide network Change Healthcare administers to allow healthcare providers to manage customer payments and insurance claims. With no easy way for pharmacies to calculate what costs were covered by insurance companies, payment processors, providers, and patients experienced long delays in filling prescriptions for medicines, many of which were lifesaving. Change Healthcare has also reported that hackers behind the attacks obtained personal health information for a "substantial portion" of the US population.

Standard defense not in place

Andrew Witty, CEO of Change Healthcare parent company UnitedHealth Group, said the breach started on February 12 when hackers somehow obtained an account password for a portal allowing remote access to employee desktop devices. The account, Witty admitted, failed to use multifactor authentication (MFA), a standard defense against password compromises that requires additional authentication in the form of a one-time password or physical security key.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Richard Lautens)

The US Drug Enforcement Administration is preparing to reclassify marijuana to a lower-risk drug category, a major federal policy change that is in line with recommendations from the US health department last year. The upcoming move was first reported by the Associated Press on Tuesday afternoon and has since been confirmed by several other outlets.

The DEA currently designates marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, defined as drugs "with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." It puts marijuana in league with LSD and heroin. According to the reports today, the DEA is moving to reclassify it as a Schedule 3 drug, defined as having "a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence." The move would place marijuana in the ranks of ketamine, testosterone, and products containing less than 90 milligrams of codeine.

Marijuana's rescheduling would be a nod to its potential medical benefits and would shift federal policy in line with many states. To date, 38 states have already legalized medical marijuana.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Tesla is laying off around 500 staff who have worked on its Supercharger network, plus its new vehicle development team and its public policy team. (credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

There's more chaos at Tesla this week. The Information reports that last night, the company's erratic CEO Elon Musk emailed workers with news that he has dismissed a key pair of executives—one responsible for the Supercharger network and the other head of new vehicle development.

The electric car maker posted its quarterly results last week, and they paint a poor picture, with shrinking sales and plummeting profit margins. While Tesla once had a strong first-mover advantage and benefited from Musk's marketing savvy, the company has frequently ignored the many hard-learned lessons of the auto industry.

Customers not turned off by Musk's antics instead are losing interest with a product lineup of two EVs that are ancient in car years (the Models S and X) and two EVs that are merely old (the Models 3 and Y). The Models 3 and Y are also the only two vehicles that Tesla sells in volume. Any other automaker would have a second-generation Model 3 ready to go either this year or next, but at Tesla, the product pipeline is empty.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Of the DC region’s many fish, the one of poorest repute is the snakehead. An invasive species that arrived in 2002, the snakehead has been branded a scourge of the rivers, an existential threat to the ecosystem. It’s said to be crowding out other fish, like bass and perch, while spreading unchecked due to a […]

The post Maryland Has Renamed an Invasive Fish. Will It Matter? first appeared on Washingtonian.

How corporate greed plays a role in making bird flu outbreaks — and egg prices — worse.

Egg prices are rising again. The culprit, again: bird flu.

At least, that’s the surface-level reason. In the current wave, according to the CDC, the H5N1 bird flu has been found in over 90 million poultry birds across almost every state since 2022, and has even spread to dairy cattle, with over 30 herds in nine states dealing with an outbreak at the time of this writing.

The last time bird flu struck US farms, in early 2022, egg prices more than doubled during the year, reaching a peak of $4.82 for a dozen in January 2023. During the bird flu outbreak in 2014 to 2015, egg prices also briefly soared.

While prices now are still nowhere near the peak they reached in January 2023, they’ve been creeping up again since last August, when a dozen large eggs cost $2.04. As of March, we’re bumping up against the $3 mark, which is a nearly 47 percent increase. It’s also a huge increase from the price we were used to a few years ago: In early 2020, a dozen eggs were just $1.46 on average.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu is highly contagious and obviously poses a big risk to hens. But the fact that bird flu outbreaks keep battering our food system points to a deeper problem: an agriculture industry that has become brittle thanks to intense market concentration.

The egg market is dominated by some major players

The egg industry, like much of the agricultural sector, is commanded by a few heavyweights — the biggest, Cal-Maine Foods, controls 20 percent of the market — that leave little slack in the system to absorb and isolate shocks like disease.

Hundreds of thousands of animals are packed tightly together on a single farm, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has explained, where disease can spread like wildfire. According to the government and corporate accountability group Food & Water Watch, three-quarters of the country’s hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens are crammed into just 347 factory farms.

The system also uses genetically similar animals that farms believe will maximize egg production — but that lack of genetic diversity means animal populations are less resistant to disease.

When a hen gets infected, stopping the spread is an ugly, cruel business; since 2022 it has led to the killing of 85 million poultry birds. For the consumer, it often means paying a lot more than usual for a carton of eggs.

Preventing any outbreaks of disease from ever happening isn’t realistic, but the model of modern industrial farming is making outbreaks more disruptive.

And it’s not just these disruptions driving price spikes. Egg producers also appear to be taking advantage of these moments and hiking prices beyond what they’d need to maintain their old profit margins.

“It is absolutely a story of corporate profiteering,” says Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch.

Cal-Maine’s net profit in 2023 was about $758 million — 471 percent higher than the year prior, according to its annual financial report. Most of this fortune was made through hoisting up prices; the number of eggs sold, measured in dozens, rose only 5.9 percent.

Last year, several food conglomerates, including Kraft and General Mills, were awarded almost $18 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging that egg producers Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms had constrained the supply of eggs in the mid- to late 2000s, artificially bumping prices. A farmer advocacy group last year called on the FTC to look into whether top egg producers were price gouging consumers.

Are we doomed to semi-regular price surges for eggs?

Our food system didn’t become so consolidated — and fragile — by accident. We got here because of three big reasons, Wolf says: by not enforcing environmental laws, by not enforcing antitrust laws, and by giving away “tons of money” to the agriculture industry.

During the New Deal era, the federal government put in place policies that would help manage food supply and protect both farmers and consumers from sharp deviations in what the former earned and the latter paid. Under Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in the 1970s, though, those policies started getting chipped away; Butz’s famous motto was for farmers to “get big or get out.” The spread of giant factory farms is in part a product of this about-face in managing supply.

Because our food system is so concentrated and intermingled, it also means any single supply chain hiccup — whether due to disease, wars, or any other reason — can have ripple effects on others, affecting prices in a vast number of essential consumer goods and services. “When we have things like E. coli outbreaks, it’s hard to know where the problem lies because the way that we process and manufacture is so hyper-industrialized that you then have a problem with millions of pounds of food,” says Wolf.

Thankfully, the Biden administration has been making some strides in loosening up food industry consolidation, often by shoring up enforcement of long-existing antitrust laws. But there’s still more we could do. There are bills that have been introduced to Congress, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Price Gouging Prevention Act, that would give the FTC the authority to first define what counts as price gouging and then crack down on companies that raise prices excessively.

The cycle of food chain snags and higher prices doesn’t have to keep repeating.

“We are maximizing profit truly over everything else — over the welfare of the animals, over the rights and wages of people who work in the food system, for even consumers who are at the grocery store,” Wolf says. “None of this is inevitable — we shouldn’t have to be here.”

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Let’s start off this post by noting that I know that some people hate anything and everything having to do with generative AI and insist that there are no acceptable uses of it. If that describes you, just skip this article. It’s not for you. Ditto for those who insist (incorrectly) that AI is nothing but a “plagiarism machine” or that training of AI systems is nothing but mass copyright infringement. I’ve discussed why all of that is wrong elsewhere.

Separately, I will agree that most uses of generative AI are absolute shit, and many are problematic. Almost every case I’ve heard of journalistic outfits using AI are examples of the dumbest fucking ways to use the technology. That’s because addle-brained finance and tech bros think that AI is a tool to replace journalists. And every time you do that, it’s going to flop, often in embarrassing ways.

However, I have been using some AI tools over the last few months and have found them to be quite useful, namely, in helping me write better. I think the best use of AI is in making people better at their jobs. So I thought I would describe one way in which I’ve been using AI. And, no, it’s not to write articles.

It’s basically to help me brainstorm, critique my articles, and make suggestions on how to improve them.

As a bit of background, let me explain how we work on articles at Techdirt. We try to make sure that no article goes out into the world until it’s been reviewed by someone other than myself. Most of the reviews are for grammar/typos, but also other important editorial checks along the lines of “does everything I say actually make sense?” and “what things might people get mad about?”

A while back, I started using Lex.page. Some of what I’m going to describe below is available for free accounts, and some in the paid “Pro” accounts. I don’t know the current limits on free accounts, as I am paying for a Pro account and what’s included in what may have changed.

Lex is an AI tool built with writers in mind. It looks kind of like a nice Google Docs. While it does have the power to do some AI-generated writing for you, almost all of its tools are designed to assist actual writers, rather than do away with their work. You can ask it to write the next paragraph for you, but I’ve never used that tool. Indeed, for the first few months I barely used any of the AI tools at all. I just like the environment as a standard writing tool.

The one feature I did use occasionally was a tool to suggest headlines for articles. If I thought my own headline ideas could be stronger, I would have it generate 10 to 15 suggestions. The tool rarely came up with one that was good enough to use directly, but it would sometimes give me an idea that I could take and adjust, which was better than my initial idea.

However, I started using the AI more often a couple of months ago. There’s a tool called “Ask Lex” where you can chat with the AI (on a Pro account, you can choose from a list of AI models to use, and I’ve found that Claude Opus seems to work the best). I initially couldn’t think of anything to ask the AI, so I asked people in Lex’s Discord how they used it. One user sent back a “scorecard” that he had created, which he asked Lex to use to review everything he wrote.

I changed around the scorecard for my own purposes (and I keep fiddling with it, so it will likely change more soon), but the current version of the score card I use is as follows:

This is an article scorecard:

Does this article:

#1 have a clear opening that grabs the reader score from 0 to 3

#2 clearly explain what is happening from 0 to 3

#3 clearly address the complexities from 0 to 3

#4 lay out the strongest possible argument 0 to 3

#5 have the potential to be virally shared 0 to 3

#6 is there enough humor included in the article 0 to 3

Given these details, could you score this article and provide suggestions on how to improve ratings of 0 or 1?

I created a macro on my computer, so with a few keyboard taps, I can pop that whole thing up in the Ask Lex box and have it respond.

I’ll note that I don’t really care that much about the last two items on the list, but I have them in there for two reasons. First, as a kind of Van Halen brown M&M check, to make sure the AI isn’t just blowing smoke at me, but knows when to give me low ratings. Second, somewhat astoundingly, there are times (not always, but more frequently than I would have thought) when it gives really good suggestions to insert a funny line somewhere.

I’m going to demonstrate some of how it works, using the article I wrote last week about the legal disclaimer on the parody mashup of the Beach Boys singing Jay-Z’s 99 Problems. Here’s what it looked like when I ran my first draft against the scorecard:

The responses here are fairly generic, but I can dig deeper. While it said my opening was good, I wondered if it could be better, so I asked it for suggestions on a better opening. And its suggestions were good enough that I actually did rewrite much of my opening. My original opening had jumped right in to talking about “There I Ruined It,” and Lex suggested some opening framing that I liked better. Of course, it also suggested a terrible headline, which I ignored. It’s rare that I take any suggestion verbatim, but this time the opening was good enough that I used a pretty close version (again, this is rare, but it does often make me think of better ways to rewrite the opening).

Then, I know that above I said that I don’t much care about the humor, but since this story involved a funny video, I did ask if it had any suggestions on ways to make the article funnier. And… these were not good. Not good at all. So I basically ignored them all. However, sometimes it does come up with suggestions that, again, at least get me to add an amusing line or two into a piece. Even if they weren’t good for this article, I figured I should share them here so you get a sense of how it doesn’t always work well, but at least gets me to think about things.

Somewhat amusingly, when I ran this very article through the same process I’m discussing here, it suggested adding “more personality” to the piece. I asked it if it had suggestions on where, and its top suggestion was to “lean into the absurdity of some of the AI suggestions” in this part, but then concluded with an awful joke.

So, yeah, it’s suggesting I joke about how shit its jokes are. Great work, AI buddy.

I also will sometimes ask it for better headlines (as mentioned above). Lex has a built-in headline generator tool, but I’ve found that doing it as part of the “Ask Lex” conversation makes it much stronger. On this article we’re discussing, it didn’t generate any good suggestions, so I ignored them. However, I will admit that it came up with the title of the follow-up article: Universal Music’s Copyright Claim: 99 Problems And Fair Use Ain’t One. That was all Lex. My original was something much more boring.

Also, just this weekend, I added a brand new macro, which I like so far, in which I ask it to generate other headline ideas, based on some criteria, and then ask it to compare that to my existing headline that I came up with myself. I’ve only been using this one for a day or two, and didn’t use it on the fair use article last week, but here’s what it said about this very article you’re reading now:

Then my next step is to input another macro I created as a kind of gut check. I ask it to help me critique the article, highlighting which points are the weakest and can be made stronger, which points are strongest and could be emphasized more, and which points readers might get upset about and which I should improve. Finally, I ask it if anything is missing from the article.

Again, I don’t always agree with its suggestions (including some of the ones here), but it often makes me think carefully about the arguments I’m making and seeing how well they stand up. I have strengthened many of the things I say based on the responses from Lex that just get me to think more carefully about what’s written.

Occasionally I’ll ask it for other suggestions, such as a better metaphor for something. When I wrote about Allison Stanger’s bonkers congressional testimony a couple weeks ago, I was trying to think of a good example to show how silly it was that she thought Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) were the same thing as decentralized social media. I asked Lex for suggestions on what would highlight how absurd that mistake is, and it gave me a long list of suggestions, including the one I eventually used: “saying ‘social security benefits’ when you mean ‘social media influencers’.”

Finally, after I go through all of that, I do use it to also do some basic editing help. Recently, Lex introduced a nice feature called “checks” which will “check” your writing and suggest edits on a variety of factors. Personally, the only ones I’ve found useful so far are the “Grammar” check and the “Readability” check.

I’ve tried all the rest, and don’t currently find them that useful for my style of writing. The grammar check is good at catching typos and extra commas, and the readability check is pretty good at getting me to chop up some of the run-on sentences that my human editors get frustrated with.

I do want to play more with the “Audience” one, but my attempts to explain who the Techdirt audience is to it hasn’t quite worked yet. The team at Lex tells me they’re working to improve it.

There are a few more things, but that’s basically it. For me, it’s a brainstorming tool and a kind of “gut check” that helps me review my work and make it as strong as it can be before I hand it off to my human editors who will review it. I feel like I’m saving them time and effort as well by giving them a more complete version of each story I submit (and hopefully getting them less frustrated about having to break up my run-on sentences).

The important parts are that I’m not trying to replace anyone. I’m certainly not relying on it for actually writing very much. And I know that I’m going to reject many of the things it suggests. It’s basically just another set of eyeballs willing to look over my work and give me feedback. And, it does so quickly and is less sick of my writing quirks.

It’s not revolutionary. It’s not changing the world. But, for me, personally, it’s been pretty powerful, just in helping me to be a better writer.

And yes, this article was reviewed with the same tools, which obviously prompted me to include one of its suggestions in that screenshot above. I’ll leave the other suggestions that it made, and I took, up to your imagination.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Authentication service Okta is warning about the “unprecedented scale” of an ongoing campaign that routes fraudulent login requests through the mobile devices and browsers of everyday users in an attempt to conceal the malicious behavior.

The attack, Okta said, uses other means to camouflage the login attempts as well, including the TOR network and so-called proxy services from providers such as NSOCKS, Luminati, and DataImpulse, which can also harness users’ devices without their knowledge. In some cases, the affected mobile devices are running malicious apps. In other cases, users have enrolled their devices in proxy services in exchange for various incentives.

Unidentified adversaries then use these devices in credential-stuffing attacks, which use large lists of login credentials obtained from previous data breaches in an attempt to access online accounts. Because the requests come from IP addresses and devices with good reputations, network security devices don’t give them the same level of scrutiny as logins from virtual private servers (VPS) that come from hosting services threat actors have used for years.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

If you build a gadget that connects to the Internet and sell it in the United Kingdom, you can no longer make the default password "password." In fact, you're not supposed to have default passwords at all.

A new version of the 2022 Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act (PTSI) is now in effect, covering just about everything that a consumer can buy that connects to the web. Under the guidelines, even the tiniest Wi-Fi board must either have a randomized password or else generate a password upon initialization (through a smartphone app or other means). This password can't be incremental ("password1," "password54"), and it can't be "related in an obvious way to public information," such as MAC addresses or Wi-Fi network names. A device should be sufficiently strong against brute-force access attacks, including credential stuffing, and should have a "simple mechanism" for changing the password.

There's more, and it's just as head-noddingly obvious. Software components, where reasonable, "should be securely updateable," should actually check for updates, and should update either automatically or in a way "simple for the user to apply." Perhaps most importantly, device owners can report security issues and expect to hear back about how that report is being handled.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Farm cats drinking from a trough of milk from cows that were just milked. (credit: Getty | )

On March 16, cows on a Texas dairy farm began showing symptoms of a mysterious illness now known to be H5N1 bird flu. Their symptoms were nondescript, but their milk production dramatically dropped and turned thick and creamy yellow. The next day, cats on the farm that had consumed some of the raw milk from the sick cows also became ill. While the cows would go on to largely recover, the cats weren't so lucky. They developed depressed mental states, stiff body movements, loss of coordination, circling, copious discharge from their eyes and noses, and blindness. By March 20, over half of the farm's 24 or so cats died from the flu.

In a study published today in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers in Iowa, Texas, and Kansas found that the cats had H5N1 not just in their lungs but also in their brains, hearts, and eyes. The findings are similar to those seen in cats that were experimentally infected with H5N1, aka highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI). But, on the Texas dairy farm, they present an ominous warning of the potential for transmission of this dangerous and evolving virus.

The contaminated milk was the most likely source of the cat's fatal infections, the study authors concluded. Although it can't be entirely ruled out that the cats got sick from eating infected wild birds, the milk they drank from the sick cows was brimming with virus particles, and genetic data shows almost exact matches between the cows, their milk, and the cats. "Therefore, our findings suggest cross-species mammal-to-mammal transmission of HPAI H5N1 virus and raise new concerns regarding the potential for virus spread within mammal populations," wrote the authors, who are veterinary researchers from Iowa, Texas, and Kansas.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments