YouTube appeared to be continuing its war on ad blockers, with users complaining that the company was slowing down the site for users it catches running an ad blocker. 9to5Google spotted this Reddit thread filled with users seeing poor loading performance with ad blockers enabled.
A video at the top of the Reddit post shows what some users are seeing: A video with an ad blocker on can’t load quickly enough to keep up with the playback speed (which isn’t on normal; it’s maybe 2x) and has to pause at around 30 seconds. Turning off the ad blocker immediately improves loading performance, with the white line on YouTube’s progress bar showing significantly more buffering runway. Users report that the ad-block detection causes strange issues, like “lag” that makes full screen or comments not work or Chrome being unable to load other webpages while YouTube is open.
YouTube has used all sorts of tactics to get people to turn off ad blockers and subscribe to YouTube Premium. The company previously has been showing pop-up messages saying ad blockers violate YouTube terms of service. Earlier, the company was caught adding a five-second delay to the initial site load for ad blockers. The changes have kicked off a cat-and-mouse game between Google/YouTube and the ad blocker community.
But the slowdowns may be a big accident from ad blockers altering YouTube’s code: Adblock Plus has published a bug report covering “performance issues” introduced by version 3.22 and says things should be fixed in version 3.22.1. uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill says the issue is limited to AdBlock Plus and its spinoffs and that blaming YouTube is “an incorrect diagnosis.”
Regardless of whether this is due to the updated Adblock code, it’s not the first time this has happened with YouTube. The straightforward thing would be to show more of these pop-ups and not send people on a wild goose chase after fake technical issues. Users in the thread certainly seem confused about why YouTube suddenly stopped working. The top comment says, “I thought there was something wrong with my internet connection,” while another high-ranking user’s comment was to plan to reinstall Chrome.
This post was updated on January 15 at 4: 20 pm ET with Adblock Plus’ bug report information and developer Raymond Hill’s statement.
Enlarge/ JANUARY 13: NFL Wild Card signage on field prior to an NFL Super Wild Card Weekend playoff game between the Miami Dolphins and the Kansas City Chiefs at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium on January 13, 2024, in Kansas City, Missouri.
Kara Durrette/Getty Images
The NFL playoffs started this past weekend, and with it came the first streaming-only playoff game. Usually, premium NFL games like the playoffs are on one of the major TV networks nationwide, but the Dolphin/Chiefs wildcard game was exclusively available on Comcast/NBC’s Peacock streaming service outside. NFL fans weren’t particularly happy about having to sign up for some random streaming service to watch a playoff game, but that didn’t stop many people from actually signing up, with Nielsen logging 23 million average streaming viewers for the game.
NBC says that 23 million viewers make the game “the most streamed event ever in US history” and “a milestone moment in media and sports history.” Nationally, the game was exclusively on Peacock, but local TV broadcasts were still available in the Miami and Kansas City metro areas, so 27.6 million people watched the game. The NFL hasn’t announced the ratings for the other playoff games yet, but last year, the wildcard round averaged 28.4 million viewers per game, so this got in range of that. On paper, this was one of the better games of the weekend, featuring the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs and the high-flying Dolphins’ offense, and it was in prime time, so with a traditional broadcast, this was probably due for above-average ratings. Peacock exclusivity reduced the audience somewhat, but it still attained NFL-class numbers.
Surprisingly, Peacock managed to survive pretty well. There aren’t widespread reports out there of major problems. Previously, the service had an exclusive regular-season game, a Bills-Chargers week 16 matchup on December 23 that drew 7.2 million viewers. That game helped work out the growing pains for Peacock, with users complaining of poor streaming quality and muted colors.
The NFL is basically the only institution keeping traditional broadcast TV alive. Of the top 100 highest-rated US TV broadcasts in 2023, a staggering 93 of them were NFL games. Lucrative TV contracts will keep most games on broadcast TV for the foreseeable future, but even the NFL is slowly transitioning to streaming. The weekly Thursday Night Football game is now exclusive to Amazon Prime; ESPN+ gets one exclusive game per season, and Peacock has these two games this year. The biggest NFL package, NFL Sunday Ticket, which gives fans about 13 out-of-market games every Sunday, moved from DirecTV to YouTube TV this season. The NFL even has its own streaming platform, NFL+, though it takes a backseat to partner services.
Fans looking to watch the game on Peacock this weekend were forced to fork over $5.99 for “one month” of the service. With the numbers the game turned in, it doesn’t seem like the NFL streaming transition will be slowing down any time soon.
Enlarge/ A Verizon store in New York on July 3, 2023.
Getty Images | Bloomberg
Verizon Wireless customers may get up to $100 each as part of a $100 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit over Verizon’s monthly “Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge.”
But as is typical in class-action settlements, Verizon isn’t admitting any wrongdoing. It also plans to keep charging the monthly fee and says it may raise it in the future.
Settlement notification emails with unique codes for submitting claims have been going out to eligible Verizon customers over the past week. The emails were still being distributed as of last night, so you might still be in line for a payout even if you haven’t received one yet. Postcard notices are also being sent.
Verizon’s Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge for wireless phones and other devices is $3.30 per line after being raised from $1.95 in mid-2022. It was originally called the “Administrative Charge” but was renamed to include “telco recovery” at around the same time as the price increase.
“Verizon has denied and continues to deny that it did anything wrong and that the lawsuit has any merit,” the settlement notification emails say. “Verizon states that it will continue to charge the Administrative Charge and that it has the right to increase the Administrative Charge.”
The emails direct customers to the settlement website. US-based customers “who received postpaid wireless or data services from Verizon and who were charged and paid an Administrative Charge between January 1, 2016 and November 8, 2023” are eligible and must file a claim by April 15, 2024, to receive a payment.
Verizon fee covers taxes, normal business costs
Like other vaguely explained telco fees, the Verizon charge makes the real price paid by consumers higher than the rates Verizon advertises. The fee is not mandated by the government, but Verizon tells customers that it covers regulatory obligations, taxes, and various expenses that are just part of the cost of doing business for an operator of a nationwide cellular network.
As Verizon’s website states, the charge helps cover a wide range of expenses, such as the “costs of complying with regulatory and industry obligations and programs, such as E911, wireless local number portability and wireless tower mandate costs; property taxes; and costs associated with our network, including facilities (e.g., leases), operations, maintenance and protection, and costs paid to other companies for network services.”
The class-action complaint filed in a New Jersey Superior Court alleged that “the Administrative Charge is never adequately or honestly disclosed to customers… Verizon utilizes the Administrative Charge to unlawfully charge its customers more per month for Verizon wireless services without having to advertise the higher monthly rates.”
The charge was introduced in 2005 at a rate of $0.40 per month, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit did not try to force Verizon to stop charging the fee but said Verizon should “honestly and adequately disclose the Administrative Charge and its true nature and basis in Verizon’s customer bills and in communications with Class members at or before the time the wireless services contract is created,” and reimburse users “for any and all undisclosed (or inadequately disclosed) extra-contractual fees they were forced to pay.”
Enlarge/ Meta has a verified program for users of Facebook and Instagram.
Getty Images | Chesnot
The trouble began three days before Christmas. When my sister-in-law Amy tried to log in to her Instagram account shortly before midnight, she was notified that an unauthorized user had tried to access her account. Instagram suggested that she change her password. Wanting to protect the security on her account—an important tool for her successful photography business—Amy did so.
She then tried to log in with her new password but first needed to enter a code to confirm her identity. The code had just been sent to the phone number on her account—a phone number once belonging to her ex-husband but now disconnected.
This was going to be a problem.
Fashion photography and new phones
Amy started her business by posting photos of her two daughters on Instagram, which is how brands like Walmart and Stella McCartney Kids found her. Over time, she expanded her following on Instagram and even used the service’s messaging capability to find and hire models for fashion shoots.
In August 2021, someone successfully hacked into her Facebook account, and as part of the recovery process, Meta recommended that Amy attach a new phone number to her account. So she changed her “recovery” phone number from her personal number to her husband’s number. The two of them were happily married, so this seemed like an easy decision. And because Meta owns Instagram as well, the change affected that service, too. Fast forward two years, and Amy was filing for divorce. As part of that process, Amy removed her husband from their phone service plan. He got a new plan and a new number—and the old number was disconnected.
In all of the turmoil, Amy didn’t remember that she had used her now ex-husband’s phone number for her Meta account recovery until—you guessed it—she received that note in the middle of the night, just days before Christmas.
Getting verified is the answer?
After a mostly sleepless night, Amy woke up on December 23 and scoured Instagram’s and Facebook’s various help pages. There was simply no way to get around the need to access the recovery phone number.
Amy tried calling and texting her ex-husband’s number, asking its new owner for help. But the number had not yet been re-assigned and likely wouldn’t be for months. So Amy spent some quality time on the phone waiting to talk to T-Mobile. Could she buy a new phone and get the old number assigned to it? No chance.
The reality is that Instagram offers little customer support for most users. There is no number to call and no real online support. If you find a telephone number online, it is almost certainly a scam.
But there is one way to get some help: pay up. The “Meta Verified” program costs $14.99 per month and includes “account support” as one of its benefits. So on Christmas Day, Amy pulled out her credit card and got herself verified.
It happened super fast, even on the holiday. Within 30 minutes of submitting her information—a process that involves a copy of a driver’s license—Amy got her verified checkmark. She promptly contacted Meta’s support team, and they said someone would soon reach out with an email link to get her back into her account.
China is still finding ways to skirt US export controls on Nvidia chips, Reuters reported.
A Reuters review of publicly available tender documents showed that last year dozens of entities—including “Chinese military bodies, state-run artificial intelligence research institutes, and universities”—managed to buy “small batches” of restricted Nvidia chips.
The US has been attempting to block China from accessing advanced chips needed to achieve AI breakthroughs and advance modern military technologies since September 2022, citing national security risks.
Reuters’ report shows just how unsuccessful the US effort has been to completely cut off China, despite repeated US attempts to expand export controls and close any loopholes discovered over the past year.
China’s current suppliers remain “largely unknown,” but Reuters confirmed that “neither Nvidia” nor its approved retailers counted “among the suppliers identified.”
An Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that the company “complies with all applicable export control laws and requires its customers to do the same.”
“If we learn that a customer has made an unlawful resale to third parties, we’ll take immediate and appropriate action,” Nvidia’s spokesperson said.
It’s also still unclear how suppliers are procuring the chips, which include Nvidia’s most powerful chips, the A100 and H100, in addition to slower modified chips developed just for the Chinese market, the A800 and H800. The former chips were among the first banned, while the US only began restricting the latter chips last October.
Among military and government groups purchasing chips were two top universities that the US Department of Commerce has linked to China’s principal military force, the People’s Liberation Army, and labeled as a threat to national security. Last May, the Harbin Institute of Technology purchased six Nvidia A100 chips to “train a deep-learning model,” and in December 2022, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China purchased one A100 for purposes so far unknown, Reuters reported.
Other entities purchasing chips include Tsinghua University—which is seemingly gaining the most access, purchasing “some 80 A100 chips since the 2022 ban”—as well as Chongqing University, Shandong Chengxiang Electronic Technology, and “one unnamed People’s Liberation Army entity based in the city of Wuxi, Jiangsu province.”
In total, Reuters reviewed more than 100 tenders showing state entities purchasing A100 chips and dozens of tenders documenting A800 purchases. Purchases include “brand new” chips and have been made as recently as this month.
Most of the chips purchased by Chinese entities are being used for AI, Reuters reported. None of the purchasers or suppliers provided comments in Reuters’ report.
Nvidia’s highly sought-after chips are graphic processing units capable of crunching large amounts of data at the high speeds needed to fuel AI systems. For now, these chips remain irreplaceable to Chinese firms hoping to compete globally, as well as nationally, with China’s dominant technology players, such as Huawei, Reuters suggested.
While the “small batches” of chips found indicate that China could still be accessing enough Nvidia chips to enhance “existing AI models,” Reuters pointed out that US curbs are effectively stopping China from bulk-ordering chips at quantities needed to develop new AI systems. Running a “model similar to OpenAI’s GPT would require more than 30,000 Nvidia A100 cards,” research firm TrendForce reported last March.
For China, which has firmly opposed the US export controls every step of the way, these curbs remain a persistent problem despite maintaining access through the burgeoning black market. On Monday, a Bloomberg report flagged the “steepest drop” in the value of China chip imports ever recorded, falling by more than 15 percent.
China’s black market for AI chips
The US still must confront whether it’s possible to block China from accessing advanced chips without other allied nations joining the effort by lobbying their own export controls.
In October 2022, a senior US official warned that without more cooperation, US curbs will “lose effectiveness over time.” A former top Commerce Department official, Kevin Wolf, told The Wall Street Journal last year that it’s “insanely difficult to enforce” US export controls on transactions overseas.
On top of that activity, a black market for chips developed quickly, selling “excess stock that finds its way to the market after Nvidia ships large quantities to big US firms” or else chips imported “through companies locally incorporated in places such as India, Taiwan, and Singapore,” Reuters reported.
The US has maintained that its plan is not to ensure that China has absolutely no access but to limit access enough to keep China from getting ahead. But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has warned that curbs could have the opposite effect. While China finds ways to skirt the bans and acquire chips to “inspire” advancements, US companies that have been impacted by export controls restricting sales in China could lose so much revenue that they fall behind competitively, Huang predicted.
Enlarge/ The Swarovski Optik Visio binoculars, with an excerpt of a 2014 xkcd comic strip called “Tasks” in the corner.
xckd / Swarovski
Last week, Austria-based Swarovski Optik introduced the AX Visio 10×32 binoculars, which the company says can identify over 9,000 species of birds and mammals using image recognition technology. The company is calling the product the world’s first “smart binoculars,” and they come with a hefty price tag—$4,799.
“The AX Visio are the world’s first AI-supported binoculars,” the company says in the product’s press release. “At the touch of a button, they assist with the identification of birds and other creatures, allow discoveries to be shared, and offer a wide range of practical extra functions.”
The binoculars, aimed mostly at bird watchers, gain their ability to identify birds from the Merlin Bird ID project, created by Cornell Lab of Ornithology. As confirmed by a hands-on demo conducted by The Verge, the user looks at an animal through the binoculars and presses a button. A red progress circle fills in while the binoculars process the image, then the identified animal name pops up on the built-in binocular HUD screen within about five seconds.
In 2014, a famous xkcd comic strip titled Tasks depicted someone asking a developer to create an app that, when a user takes a photo, will check whether the user is in a national park (deemed easy due to GPS) and check whether the photo is of a bird (to which the developer says, “I’ll need a research team and five years”). The caption below reads, “In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible.”
The xkcd comic titled “Tasks” from September 24, 2014.
It’s been just over nine years since the comic was published, and while identifying the presence of a bird in a photo was solved some time ago, these binoculars arguably go further by identifying the species of the bird in the photo (it also keeps track of location due to GPS). While apps to identify bird species already exist, this feature is now packed into a handheld pair of binoculars.
According to Swarovski, the development of the AX Visio took approximately five years, involving around 390 “hardware parts.” The binoculars incorporate a neural processing unit (NPU) for object recognition processing. The company claims that the device will have a long product life cycle, with ongoing updates and improvements. The company also mentions “an open programming interface” in its press release, potentially allowing industrious users (or handy hackers) to expand the unit’s features over time.
The Swarovski Optik Visio binoculars.
Swarovski Optik
The Swarovski Optik Visio binoculars.
Swarovski Optik
The Swarovski Optik Visio binoculars.
Swarovski Optik
The binoculars, which feature industrial design from Marc Newson, include built-in digital camera, compass, GPS, and discovery-sharing features that can “immediately show your companion where you have seen an animal.” The Visio unit also wirelessly ties into the “SWAROVSKI OPTIK Outdoor App” that can run on a smartphone. The app manages sharing photos and videos captured through the binoculars. (As an aside, we’ve come a long way from computer-connected gadgets that required pesky serial cables in the late 1990s.)
Swarovski says the AX Visio will be available at select retailers and online starting February 1, 2024. While this tech is at a premium price right now, given the speed of tech progress and market competition, we may see similar image-recognizing features built into much cheaper models in the years ahead.
Enlarge/ Billy Mitchell (left) and Twin Galaxies owner Jace Hall (center) attend an event at the Arcade Expo 2015 in Banning, California.
The long, drawn-out legal fight between famed high-score chaser Billy Mitchell and “International Scoreboard” Twin Galaxies appears to be over. Courthouse News reports that Mitchell and Twin Galaxies have reached a confidential settlement in the case months before an oft-delayed trial was finally set to start.
The settlement comes as Twin Galaxies counsel David Tashroudian had come under fire for legal misconduct after making improper contact with two of Mitchell’s witnesses in the case. Tashroudian formally apologized to the court for that contact in a filing earlier this month, writing that he had “debased myself before this Court” and “allowed my personal emotions to cloud my judgement” by reaching out to the witnesses outside of official court proceedings.
But in the same statement, Tashroudian took Mitchell’s side to task for “what appeared to me to be the purposeful fabrication and hiding of evidence.” The emotional, out-of-court contact was intended “to prove what I still genuinely believe is fraud on this Court,” he wrote.
a filing last month, Tashroudian asked the court to sanction Mitchell for numerous alleged lies and fabrications during the evidence-discovery process. Those alleged lies encompass subjects including an alleged $33,000 payment associated with the sale of Twin Galaxies; the technical cabinet testing of Carlos Pineiro; the setup of a recording device for one of Mitchell’s high-score performances; a supposed “Player of the Century” plaque Mitchell says he had received from Namco; and a technical analysis that showed, according to Tashroudian, “that the videotaped recordings of his score in questions could not have come from original unmodified Donkey Kong hardware.”
Tashroudian asked the court to impose sanctions on Mitchell—up to and including dismissing the case—for these and other “deliberate and egregious [examples of] discovery abuse throughout the course of this litigation by lying at deposition and by engaging in the spoliation of evidence with the intent to defraud the Court.” A hearing on both Mitchell and Tashroudian’s alleged actions was scheduled for later this week; Tashroudian could still face referral to the State Bar for his misconduct.
“Plaintiff wants nothing more than for me to be kicked off of this case,” Tashroudian continued in his apology statement. “I know this will not stop. I am now [Mitchell’s] and his counsel’s target. The facts support [Twin Galaxies’] defense and now [Mitchell] realizes that. He also realizes that he has dug himself into a hole by lying in discovery. I do not say that lightly.”
Mitchell, Tashroudian, and representatives for Twin Galaxies were not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.
Situated in a former sand and gravel pit just a few hundred feet from the Kennebec River in central Maine, the Riverside Station pumps half a million gallons of fresh groundwater every day. The well station processes water from two of five wells on either side of the river operated by the Greater Augusta Utility District, or GAUD, which supplies drinking water to nearly 6,000 local households. Most of them reside in Maine’s state capital, Augusta, just a few miles to the south. Ordinarily, GAUD prides itself on the quality of its water supply. “You could drink it out of the ground and be perfectly safe,” said Brian Tarbuck, GAUD’s general manager.
But in March 2021, environmental sampling of Riverside well water revealed trace levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or “forever chemicals,” as they’re better known. The levels at Riverside didn’t exceed Maine’s drinking water standard of 20 parts per trillion (ppt), which was a relief, Tarbuck said. Still, he and his colleagues at the utility were wary. PFAS have been linked to a variety of health problems, and Maine lawmakers at the time were debating an even stricter limit for the chemicals. Tarbuck knew a lower standard was coming someday. The only question was when.
As it turns out, a tougher standard is expected early this year. That’s when the US Environmental Protection Agency is set to finalize an enforceable cap on PFAS in drinking water that will require GAUD and thousands of other utilities around the country to update their treatment methods. The standard, which in regulatory terms is called a maximum contaminant level, or MCL, limits permissible amounts of the two most studied and ubiquitous PFAS compounds—PFOA and PFOS—to just 4 ppt in drinking water each. Roughly equivalent to a single drop in five Olympic-size swimming pools, this is the lowest concentration that current analytical instruments can reliably detect “within specific limits of precision and accuracy during routine laboratory operating conditions,” according to the EPA. Four other PFAS—PFHxS, PFNA, PFBS, and HFPO-DA (otherwise known as GenX Chemicals)—will be regulated by combining their acceptable levels into a single value. Utilities will have three to five years to bring their systems into compliance.
Agency officials estimate that between 3,400 and 6,300 water systems will be affected by the regulation, which is the EPA’s first ever PFAS standard and the first MCL set by the agency for any chemical in drinking water in over 25 years. PFOA and PFOS account for the majority of anticipated exceedances.
GAUD is now gearing up to spend $3 to 5 million on PFAS removal technology, according to Tarbuck, much of which will be passed on to its customers in the form of higher water bills. Nationally, the price tag of meeting the standard could top $37 billion in upfront costs, in addition to $650 million in annual operating expenses, according to the American Water Works Association, or AWWA, a nonprofit lobbying group representing water utilities. That’s far higher than the EPA’s cost estimate of $777 million to $1.2 billion and a significant burden for an industry already contending with other costly priorities, such as boosting cybersecurity and “replacing all those antiquated, leaking big water pipes that transport the water from the treatment plant to the service line” that connects to homes, said Marc Edwards, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech. Chris Moody, the AWWA’s regulatory technical manager, said most of the money will be spent in the next several years, as utilities race to install PFAS removal systems and other infrastructure needed to meet compliance deadlines.
In proposing the limits, EPA officials said that they had leveraged the latest science to protect the public from PFAS pollution. Environmental groups welcomed the move as long overdue. But the standard has drawn widespread criticism from the water utility industry and some scientists who say that in many places, small drops in PFAS water levels will matter little for exposure or health. “There are other strategies that get us to safer, public health protective approaches to PFAS that don’t involve the really strict standard that EPA is putting forward,” said Ned Calonge, an associate dean for public health practice at the Colorado School of Public Health and chair of a 2022 National Academies of Sciences report on PFAS exposure, testing, and clinical follow-up.
EPA officials estimate that between 3,400 and 6,300 water systems will be affected by the regulation, which is the agency’s first-ever PFAS standard
A key issue, critics say, is that the standard ensnares too many utilities with very small PFAS exceedances. Roughly 98 percent of drinking water utilities in the country, including GAUD, have maximum PFOA and PFOS levels below 10 ppt, according to the AWWA. When the levels are already so low, further reductions of a few parts per trillion “is not going to have much effect on total exposure intake,” wrote Ian Cousins, an environmental chemist at Stockholm University and one of the world’s leading researchers on PFAS exposure, in an email to Undark.
Drinking water is only one among many different pathways by which people can be exposed to PFAS. The chemicals are also in agricultural produce, fish, meat, outdoor soil, household dust, nonstick cookware, cosmetics, fast-food wrappers, stain- and water-resistant fabrics, and other products. Just how much these sources each contribute to PFAS exposure is a subject of ongoing research. But the EPA estimates that Americans get 80 percent of their PFAS intake from sources other than drinking water, and according to Cousins, dietary contributions likely account for most human exposure. The US Food and Drug Administration has required the phase out of some PFAS in food packaging. But “food is contaminated via bioaccumulation in agricultural and marine food chains,” Cousins said. “We cannot clean up our food in the same way that we can add a treatment process to our drinking water.”
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
Good morning. It’s January 15, and today’s image comes to us from Playa Grande, Mexico.
I realize that some readers may be tiring of seeing the Milky Way Galaxy, but not me! I love photos of our galaxy and so they are regularly featured in the Daily Telescope. However, this photo is truly special, as it highlights not just the heavens above, but one of the wonders here on Earth.
Alfonso Tamés sent me this image, and I can’t get enough of it. The photo showcases both our galaxy and a bit of the Orion Nebula in the sky and bioluminescence in the ocean—that is light being emitted by marine life in the sea. One of the most amazing nights I’ve ever had is kayaking in a bioluminescent bay in Puerto Rico, such an eerie and otherworldly experience.
It is fun to contemplate all of the life on display in this image, both what is known in the ocean and what may exist around all those stars above. Have a great week, everyone.
The term Luddite is usually used as an insult. It suggests someone who is backward-looking, averse to progress, afraid of new technology, and frankly, not that bright. But Brian Merchant claims that that is not who the Luddites were at all. They were organized, articulate in their demands, very much understood how factory owners were using machinery to supplant them, and highly targeted in their destruction of that machinery.
Their pitiable reputation is the result of a deliberate smear campaign by elites in their own time who (successfully, as it turned out) tried to discredit their coherent and justified movement. In his book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Merchant memorializes the Luddites not as the hapless dolts with their heads in the sand that they’ve become synonymous with, but rather as the first labor organizers. Longing for the halcyon days of yore when we were more in touch with nature isn’t Luddism, Merchant writes; that’s pastoralism—totally different thing.
OG Luddites
Weavers used to work at home, using hand-powered looms (i.e., machines). The whole family pitched in to make cloth; they worked on their own schedules and spent their leisure time and meals together. Master weavers apprenticed for seven years to learn their trade. It worked this way in the north of England for hundreds of years.
In 1786 Edmund Cartwright invented the power-loom. Now, instead of a master weaver being required to make cloth, an unschooled child could work a loom. Anyone who could afford these “automated” looms (they did still need some human supervision) could cram a bunch of them into a factory and bring in orphans from the poorhouse to oversee them all day long. The orphans could churn out a lot more cloth much faster than before, and owners didn’t have to pay the 7-year-olds what they had been paying the master weavers. By the beginning of the 19th century, that is exactly what the factory owners did.
The weavers, centered in Nottinghamshire—Robin Hood country—obviously did not appreciate factory owners using these automated looms to obviate their jobs, their training—their entire way of life, really. They tried to negotiate with the factory owners for fair wages and to get protective legislation enacted to limit the impacts of the automated looms and protect their rights and products. But Parliament was having none of it; instead, Parliament—somewhat freaked out by the French Revolution—passed the Combination Acts in 1801, which made unionizing illegal. So, the workers took what they saw as their only remaining avenue of recourse; they started smashing the automated looms.
The aristocrats in the House of Lords told them they didn’t understand, that this automation would make things better for everyone. But it wasn’t improving things for anyone the Luddites knew or saw. They watched factory owners get richer and richer, their own families get thinner and thinner, and markets get flooded with inferior cloth made by child slaves working in unsafe conditions. So they continued breaking the machines, even after the House of Lords made it a capital crime in 1812.
Merchant tells his story through the experience of selected individuals. One is Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose memoir of mistreatment in his 10 years of factory work is thought to have inspired Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Another is Lord Byron, who, like other Romantic poets, sympathized with the Luddites and who spoke (beautifully but futilely) in the House of Lords on their behalf. George Mellor, another figure Merchant spends time with, is one of the primary candidates for a real-life General Ludd.
Edward Ludd himself doesn’t qualify, as he was mythical. Supposedly an apprentice in the cloth trade who smashed his master’s device with a hammer in 1799, he became the movement’s figurehead, with the disparate raiders breaking machines all over northern England, leaving notes signed with his name. George Mellor, by contrast, was one of the best writers and organizers the Luddites had. He’d spent the requisite seven years to learn his cloth finishing job and in 1811 was ready to get to work. The West Riding of York, where he lived, had been home to wool weavers for centuries. But now greedy factory owners were using machines and children to do the work he had spent his adolescence mastering. After over a year of pleading with the owners and the government, and then resorting to machine breaking, there was no change and no hope in sight.
Finally, Mellor led a raid in which a friend was killed, and he snapped. He murdered a factory owner and was hanged, along with 14 of his fellows (only four were involved in the murder; the rest were killed for other Luddite activities).
Even as their bodies were still practically swinging on the gallows, the aristocracy and press were already undermining and reshaping the Luddite story, depicting them as deluded and small-minded men who smashed machines they couldn’t understand—not the strategic, grassroots labor activists they were. That misrepresentation is largely how they are still remembered.
Enlarge/ The influenza virus from an image produced from an image taken with transmission electron microscopy. Viral diameter ranges from around 80 to 120 nm.
Key indicators of seasonal flu activity declined in the first week of the year, signaling a possible reprieve from the high levels of respiratory virus transmission this season—but the dip may only be temporary.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its latest flu data for the week ending on January 6. Outpatient visits for influenza-like illnesses (ILI) were down that week, the first decline after weeks of rapid increases. Flu test positivity and hospitalizations were also down slightly.
Enlarge/ Percent of outpatient visits for respiratory illnesses by week.
But transmission is still elevated around the country. Fourteen states have ILI activity at the “very high” level in the current data, down from 22 the week before. And 23 states have “high” activity level, up from 19 the week before. (You can see the week-by-week progression of this year’s flu season in the US here.)
The CDC says it is monitoring for “a second period of increased influenza activity that often occurs after the winter holidays.”
Flu isn’t the only virus that seems to be letting up a little in the data, at least for now. COVID-19 data also showed some dips, with the CDC reporting that “Despite test positivity (percentage of tests conducted that were positive), emergency department visits, and hospitalizations remaining elevated nationally, the rates have stabilized, or in some instances decreased, after multiple weeks of continual increase.”
The CDC speculates that some of the declines in indicators could be due to people not seeking medical care during the holidays as they would otherwise. COVID-19 wastewater activity levels remain “very high,” with all regions showing high or increasing levels. The South and Midwest have the highest levels in the latest data, but there are some early indications that rises in the Midwest and Northeast may be slowing down.
Meanwhile, RSV activity remains elevated, though some areas are starting to see declines.
The CDC notes that it’s not too late to get vaccinated against COVID-19, flu, and (for those ages 60 and over) RSV. So far, 21 percent of adults have received the 2023–2024 COVID-19 vaccine, including 41.5 percent of people ages 65 and up. Around 363,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the US since September.
For flu, about 47 percent of adults have received their annual shot, including 74 percent of people ages 65 and up. On Thursday, researchers in Canada published the first estimates of flu vaccine effectiveness this season, finding the current annual shots are 61 percent effective against the most common strain of flu circulating in the US (influenza A(H1N1)pdm09) and 49 percent effective against the less common influenza A(H3N2) and 75 percent effective against influenza B.
The CDC estimates that there have been at least 14 million flu cases, 150,000 hospitalizations, and 9,400 deaths from flu so far this season so far, the agency reported. In the first week of this year, 13 children died of flu, bringing this season’s total to 40.
For the third time in less than a year, film studios with copyright infringement complaints against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to share information about users who have discussed piracy on the site.
In 2023, film companies lost two attempts to have Reddit unmask its users. In the first instance, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ruled in the US District Court for the Northern District of California that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech meant Reddit didn’t have to disclose the names, email addresses, and other account registration information for nine Reddit users. Film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium Media, had subpoenaed Reddit in relation to a copyright infringement lawsuit against Astound Broadband-owned RCN about subscribers allegedly pirating 34 movie titles, including Hellboy (2019), Rambo V: Last Blood, and Tesla.
In the second instance, the same companies sued Astound Broadband-owned ISP Grande, again for alleged copyright infringement occurring over the ISP’s network. The studios subpoenaed Reddit for user account information, including “IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address, and other account registration information” for six Reddit users, per a July 2023 court filing.
In August, a federal court again quashed that subpoena, citing First Amendment rights. In her ruling, Beeler noted that while the First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, the film producers had already received the names of 118 Grande subscribers. She also said the film producers had failed to prove that “the identifying information is directly or materially relevant or unavailable from another source.”
Third piracy-related subpoena
This week, as reported by TorrentFreak, film companies Voltage Holdings, which are part of the previous two subpoenas, and Screen Media Ventures, another film studio with litigation against RCN, filed a motion to compel [PDF] Reddit to respond to the subpoena in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The studios said they’re seeking the information concerning claims they’ve made that the “ability to pirate content efficiently without any consequences is a draw for becoming a Frontier subscriber” and that Frontier Communications “does not have an effective policy for terminating repeat infringers.” The film studios are claimants against Frontier in its bankruptcy case. The studios are represented by the same lawyers used in the two aforementioned cases.
The studios are asking that the court require Reddit to provide “IP address log information from 1/1/2017 to present” for six anonymous Reddit users who talked about piracy on Reddit. Although, Reddit posts shared in the court filing only date back to 2021.
Reddit responded to the studios’ subpoena with a letter [PDF] on January 2 stating that the subpoena “does not satisfy the First Amendment standard for disclosure of identifying information regarding an anonymous speaker.” Reddit also noted the two previously quashed subpoenas and suggested that it did not have to comply with the new request because the studios could acquire equivalent or better information elsewhere.
As with the previously mentioned litigation against ISPs, Reddit is a non-party. However, since the film companies claimed that Frontier had refused to produce customer identifying information and Reddit responded with a denial to the requests, the film companies filed their motion to compel.
The studios argue that the information requests do not implicate the First Amendment and that the rulings around the two aforementioned subpoenas are not applicable because the new subpoena is only about IP address logs and not other user-identifying information.
“The Reddit users do not have a recognized privacy interest in their IP addresses,” the motion says.
