Tech
The Download: WeChat censorship, and effective altruism
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
WeChat users are begging Tencent to give their censored accounts back
On Weibo, the popular Chinese social media platform, hundreds of desperate users were writing “confession letters” this past week.
They are urgent pleas from people who have been banned from the Tencent-owned super app WeChat—begging representatives to restore their accounts on a service that has become an almost indispensable part of life in China.
Those affected believe it was because they had discussed a rare political protest in Beijing ahead of the historic 20th Communist Party Congress, which started on Sunday.
Being banned from WeChat isn’t a trivial matter. Individuals are blocked from using the many digital services tied to their accounts, from health QR codes to online subscriptions—demonstrating how swiftly, and effectively, China’s censorship machine works to silence dissent. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
If you’re interested in hearing more of the latest news from China, sign up to have China Report, Zeyi’s brilliant newsletter, land in your inbox every Tuesday.
Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more more the present
Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question “How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?”—and supplied clear methodologies for calculating the answer.
Directing money to organizations that use evidence-based approaches is the one technique the approach is most known for. But as it has expanded from a philosophy into a movement, its ideas of the “best” way to change the world have evolved as well—encompassing unlikely but existential threats to humanity, including AI revolt and biological warfare.
It’s no surprise that effective altruisms’ ideas have long faced criticism for reflecting white Western saviorism, alongside an avoidance of structural problems in favor of abstract math. But as believers pour even greater amounts of money into the movement’s increasingly sci-fi ideals, such charges are only intensifying. Read the full story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How Xi Jinping became unsurmountable
China’s president demands unwavering loyalty. (BBC)
+ His speech to the Communist party’s congress did not favor stronger ties with the west. (FT $)
+ Xi is known as “Chairman of Everything.” (New Statesman $)
+ Here’s what a third term of Xi would mean for the rest of the world. (Vox)
+ The USA’s anti-China restrictions are already biting. (Bloomberg)
2 Peter Thiel is pouring millions of dollars into the US midterm elections
He’s hellbent on overturning the current political system through right-wing nationalism. (The Guardian $)
+ Thiel is reportedly trying to obtain Maltese citizenship. (NYT $)
3 The metaverse is already floundering
Meta’s Horizon Worlds just isn’t compelling enough to attract regular visitors. (WSJ $)
+ Investors are spooked, too. (Economist $)
4 Should social media platforms do more to help those in crisis?
Platforms are both a potential exacerbator of mental distress and a lifeline, which makes this a minefield to navigate. (The Information $)
+ Establishing causation between social media and mental illness is enormously complicated. (Wired $)
5 Russians are following an online playbook to flee Putin’s war
The Telegram guide wants to help them integrate into new societies. (WP $)
+ Elon Musk has decided he will keep funding StarLink in Ukraine, after all. (The Guardian)
+ Russia has conducted renewed strikes in Kyiv. (FT $)
+ Ukraine is charming allies for more donations with humorous videos. (BBC)
+ Russia’s battle to convince people to join its war is being waged on Telegram. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Mexico is investigating whether its spyware purchase was legal
The previous Mexican administration had bought Pegasus spyware from the NSO group. (Reuters)
+ The hacking industry faces the end of an era. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Gas-running appliances are still a major problem in the US
Not only are they mini-polluters, they’re dangerous to boot. (Vox)
+ Climate change has ruined Alaska’s Snow Crab Season. (Motherboard)
8 Caregivers are tracking people with dementia using Apple AirTags
Experts are worried that tracking tech encourages a false sense of security. (WSJ $)
+ Dementia content gets billions of views on TikTok. Whose story does it tell? (MIT Technology Review)
9 This robot dog is an excellent goalkeeper
It stays cool in the face of penalty pressure, too. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ This robot just taught itself to walk. (MIT Technology Review)
10 The internet is united in fury at Dunkin’ Donuts
That’ll teach them not to meddle with their loyalty program. (Wired $)
Quote of the day
“He would need to sue everyone on the internet doing Pilates.”
—Christina Gadar, a Pilates instructor, tells the New York Times about an ongoing quarrel with physical therapist Sean Gallagher, who she and others claim has unfairly lodged copyright complaints about their use of Pilates-related materials online.
The big story
Inside Australia’s plan to survive bigger, badder bushfires
April 2019
Australia’s colonial history is dotted with fires so enormous they have their own names. The worst, Black Saturday, struck the state of Victoria on February 7, 2009. Fifteen separate fires scorched the state over just two days, killing 173 people.
While Australia is notorious for spectacular blazes, it actually ranks below the United States, Indonesia, Canada, Portugal, and Spain when it comes to the economic damage caused by wildfires over the past century.
That’s because while other nations argue about the best way to tackle the issue, the horrors of Black Saturday led Australia to drastically change its response—one of the biggest of which was also one of the most basic: taking another look at the way fire risk is rated. Read the full story.
—Bianca Nogrady
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Pandas are the masters of stripping bamboo efficiently.
+ Paddy Considine sounds like a thoroughly nice bloke.
+ Is nothing sacred? Now Irish dancing has been caught up in a cheating scandal.
+ Lots of new movies to look forward to? Yes please.
+ I love Mel the Skell and his seasonal outfits!
My senior spring in high school, I decided to defer my MIT enrollment by a year. I had always planned to take a gap year, but after receiving the silver tube in the mail and seeing all my college-bound friends plan out their classes and dorm decor, I got cold feet. Every time I mentioned my plans, I was met with questions like “But what about school?” and “MIT is cool with this?”
Yeah. MIT totally is. Postponing your MIT start date is as simple as clicking a checkbox.
COURTESY PHOTO
Now, having finished my first year of classes, I’m really grateful that I stuck with my decision to delay MIT, as I realized that having a full year of unstructured time is a gift. I could let my creative juices run. Pick up hobbies for fun. Do cool things like work at an AI startup and teach myself how to create latte art. My favorite part of the year, however, was backpacking across Europe. I traveled through Austria, Slovakia, Russia, Spain, France, the UK, Greece, Italy, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary.
Moreover, despite my fear that I’d be losing a valuable year, traveling turned out to be the most productive thing I could have done with my time. I got to explore different cultures, meet new people from all over the world, and gain unique perspectives that I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. My travels throughout Europe allowed me to leave my comfort zone and expand my understanding of the greater human experience.
“In Iceland there’s less focus on hustle culture, and this relaxed approach to work-life balance ends up fostering creativity. This was a wild revelation to a bunch of MIT students.”
When I became a full-time student last fall, I realized that StartLabs, the premier undergraduate entrepreneurship club on campus, gives MIT undergrads a similar opportunity to expand their horizons and experience new things. I immediately signed up. At StartLabs, we host fireside chats and ideathons throughout the year. But our flagship event is our annual TechTrek over spring break. In previous years, StartLabs has gone on TechTrek trips to Germany, Switzerland, and Israel. On these fully funded trips, StartLabs members have visited and collaborated with industry leaders, incubators, startups, and academic institutions. They take these treks both to connect with the global startup sphere and to build closer relationships within the club itself.
Most important, however, the process of organizing the TechTrek is itself an expedited introduction to entrepreneurship. The trip is entirely planned by StartLabs members; we figure out travel logistics, find sponsors, and then discover ways to optimize our funding.
COURTESY PHOTO
In organizing this year’s trip to Iceland, we had to learn how to delegate roles to all the planners and how to maintain morale when making this trip a reality seemed to be an impossible task. We woke up extra early to take 6 a.m. calls with Icelandic founders and sponsors. We came up with options for different levels of sponsorship, used pattern recognition to deduce the email addresses of hundreds of potential contacts at organizations we wanted to visit, and all got scrappy with utilizing our LinkedIn connections.
And as any good entrepreneur must, we had to learn how to be lean and maximize our resources. To stretch our food budget, we planned all our incubator and company visits around lunchtime in hopes of getting fed, played human Tetris as we fit 16 people into a six-person Airbnb, and emailed grocery stores to get their nearly expired foods for a discount. We even made a deal with the local bus company to give us free tickets in exchange for a story post on our Instagram account.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk
For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download onto devices is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type vulnerable to spying eyes.
QWERTY keyboards are inefficient as many Chinese characters share the same latinized spelling. As a result, many switch to smart, localized keyboard apps to save time and frustration. Today, over 800 million Chinese people use third-party keyboard apps on their PCs, laptops, and mobile phones.
But a recent report by the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group, revealed that Sogou, one of the most popular Chinese keyboard apps, had a massive security loophole. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
Why we should all be rooting for boring AI
Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense announced it is setting up a Generative AI Task Force, aimed at “analyzing and integrating” AI tools such as large language models across the department. It hopes they could improve intelligence and operational planning.
But those might not be the right use cases, writes our senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkila. Generative AI tools, such as language models, are glitchy and unpredictable, and they make things up. They also have massive security vulnerabilities, privacy problems, and deeply ingrained biases.
Applying these technologies in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible, or even why the problem occurred. The DoD’s best bet is to apply generative AI to more mundane things like Excel, email, or word processing. Read the full story.
This story is from The Algorithm, Melissa’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past
To better understand the role atmospheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate cycles, scientists have long turned to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where snow layers accumulate and compact over hundreds of thousands of years, trapping samples of ancient air in a lattice of bubbles that serve as tiny time capsules.
By analyzing those cores, scientists can connect greenhouse-gas concentrations with temperatures going back 800,000 years. Now, a new European-led initiative hopes to eventually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating back 1.5 million years. But that impressive feat is still only the first step. Once they’ve done that, they’ll have to figure out how they’re going to extract the air from the ice. Read the full story.
—Christian Elliott
This story is from the latest edition of our print magazine, set to go live tomorrow. Subscribe today for as low as $8/month to ensure you receive full access to the new Ethics issue and in-depth stories on experimental drugs, AI assisted warfare, microfinance, and more.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How AI got dragged into the culture wars
Fears about ‘woke’ AI fundamentally misunderstand how it works. Yet they’re gaining traction. (The Guardian)
+ Why it’s impossible to build an unbiased AI language model. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Researchers are racing to understand a new coronavirus variant
It’s unlikely to be cause for concern, but it shows this virus still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. (Nature)
+ Covid hasn’t entirely gone away—here’s where we stand. (MIT Technology Review)
+ Why we can’t afford to stop monitoring it. (Ars Technica)
3 How Hilary became such a monster storm
Much of it is down to unusually hot sea surface temperatures. (Wired $)
+ The era of simultaneous climate disasters is here to stay. (Axios)
+ People are donning cooling vests so they can work through the heat. (Wired $)
4 Brain privacy is set to become important
Scientists are getting better at decoding our brain data. It’s surely only a matter of time before others want a peek. (The Atlantic $)
+ How your brain data could be used against you. (MIT Technology Review)
5 How Nvidia built such a big competitive advantage in AI chips
Today it accounts for 70% of all AI chip sales—and an even greater share for training generative models. (NYT $)
+ The chips it’s selling to China are less effective due to US export controls. (Ars Technica)
+ These simple design rules could turn the chip industry on its head. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Inside the complex world of dissociative identity disorder on TikTok
Reducing stigma is great, but doctors fear people are self-diagnosing or even imitating the disorder. (The Verge)
7 What TikTok might have to give up to keep operating in the US
This shows just how hollow the authorities’ purported data-collection concerns really are. (Forbes)
8 Soldiers in Ukraine are playing World of Tanks on their phones
It’s eerily similar to the war they are themselves fighting, but they say it helps them to dissociate from the horror. (NYT $)
9 Conspiracy theorists are sharing mad ideas on what causes wildfires
But it’s all just a convoluted way to try to avoid having to tackle climate change. (Slate $)
10 Christie’s accidentally leaked the location of tons of valuable art 
Seemingly thanks to the metadata that often automatically attaches to smartphone photos. (WP $)
Quote of the day
“Is it going to take people dying for something to move forward?”
—An anonymous air traffic controller warns that staffing shortages in their industry, plus other factors, are starting to threaten passenger safety, the New York Times reports.
The big story
Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present
October 2022
Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question “How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?”—and supplied methods for calculating the answer.
It’s no surprise that effective altruisms’ ideas have long faced criticism for reflecting white Western saviorism, alongside an avoidance of structural problems in favor of abstract math. And as believers pour even greater amounts of money into the movement’s increasingly sci-fi ideals, such charges are only intensifying. Read the full story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Watch Andrew Scott’s electrifying reading of the 1965 commencement address ‘Choose One of Five’ by Edith Sampson.
+ Here’s how Metallica makes sure its live performances ROCK. ($)
+ Cannot deal with this utterly ludicrous wooden vehicle.
+ Learn about a weird and wonderful new instrument called a harpejji.
