The Economist: “Ireland’s government has an unusual problem: too much money”

In September the European Court of Justice delivered a verdict in a long-running legal battle over whether Apple had benefited from unfair (and now closed) loopholes in Ireland’s tax code. As a result, the American tech firm will have to hand over €13bn ($14bn) to the Irish tax authorities, along with over €1bn of interest—an amount equivalent to 4.8% of the country’s annual national income. To the bemusement of other cash-strapped governments, the Irish authorities sided with Apple in its battles with Europe’s courts, arguing that the firm had done nothing wrong.

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Irish policymakers are aware that the tax base is narrow as well as bountiful. In 2022 just ten firms accounted for three-fifths of corporate-tax receipts. Moreover, corporation tax amounted to 27% of all receipts that year, more than double the oecd average. Recognising this vulnerability, the Irish government intends to treat the Apple windfall in the same way that Norway treated North Sea oil revenues: it will set up a sovereign-wealth fund. Two separate pots are being established. Ministers hope their combined value will reach €100bn by 2040, at which point they will start to spend the income generated.

The Economist

I have a rather straightforward answer if the Irish government doesn’t want – or know what to do with – this massive Apple fine: contribute this to the EU budget! It was after all the European Commission who fought this legal battle and won, while Ireland argued against it. And most of these profits on which Apple avoided taxes for years were generated in other EU countries, not on their operations in Ireland.

Windows Latest: “Bye USB, File Explorer gets Android storage integration”

Android storage integration in File Explorer is one of those Windows 11 cross-platform features that works really well. It works smoothly without hiccups, and I can now see all my documents, pictures, and files from my Android phone (Galaxy S23) in File Explorer.

It’s identical to accessing the storage using a USB cable, but thanks to deeper integration using Cross Device Experience Host, it’s completely wireless.

With Windows 11’s Android integration, you can open File Explorer and notice your phone’s name on the left sidebar. When you click the shortcut, your phone’s internal storage opens in the File Explorer.

Mayank Parmar

After seeing this article shared on Reddit, I tried it on my devices today and it is already up and running here. The initial beta announcement for the feature was in late July this year, so a relatively fast rollout. Kudos to Microsoft for including Windows 10 in the release (although a more cynic take would be that they felt bound to support it because of the slow adoption of Windows 11); hopefully this means I can use this equally well on my Surface tablet, which I don’t intend to update until Windows 10’s end-of-life.

Bloomberg: “Tesla Optimus Bots were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event”

Some attendees said on social media afterward that the robots had help and at least one video posted online purportedly from the Oct. 10 Cybercab event shows an Optimus bartender acknowledging that it was being assisted by a human. That wasn’t stated by Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk during his remarks on a webcast.

The use of human input raises questions over the capabilities and market readiness of the bot, which Musk said last week he expects to be the biggest product ever of any kind. The CEO told the crowd it will handle many household tasks and could eventually be available to consumers for $20,000 to $30,000 each.

What can it do? Musk said. It can be a teacher, babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.

Edward Ludlow & David Welch

Awkward for the part that ‘stole the show’ for some attendants to have been faked all along (I chuckled at the top comment on The Verge calling them Decepticons). The main event itself, the launch of Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi, was considered underwhelming due to its vagueness on technical details and the economics of the supposed robotaxi business – more of a concepts showcase than anything else. At least this time around the company was met with a frosty reaction on the stock markets, with shares dropping 9%, the worst decline in more than two months.

The Atlantic: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is”

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.

What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit, as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. She followed with: I can’t believe I just had to type that.

Charlie Warzel

Certainly bad to have people threatening meteorologists – talk about shooting the messenger! – and claiming that the hurricanes were unleashed by the government. At the same time, is any of this honestly surprising to anyone who followed American culture? Half the country is in full-blown denial about global warming; the more extreme weather disasters become, the more they need to escalate their denial and blame-shifting, lest they would be forced to face the bitter reality that they ignored the problem for decades, let oil companies get rich and shape the narrative, and now the consequences of inaction are becoming inescapable and threaten their privileged and wasteful lifestyles.

TechCrunch: “Meta confirms it may train its AI on any image you ask Ray-Ban Meta AI to analyze”

In other words, the company is using its first consumer AI device to create a massive stockpile of data that could be used to create ever-more powerful generations of AI models. The only way to “opt out” is to simply not use Meta’s multimodal AI features in the first place.

The implications are concerning because Ray-Ban Meta users may not understand they’re giving Meta tons of images – perhaps showing the inside of their homes, loved ones, or personal files – to train its new AI models. Meta’s spokespeople tell me this is clear in the Ray-Ban Meta’s user interface, but the company’s executives either initially didn’t know or didn’t want to share these details with TechCrunch. We already knew Meta trains its Llama AI models on everything Americans post publicly on Instagram and Facebook. But now, Meta has expanded this definition of “publicly available data” to anything people look at through its smart glasses and ask its AI chatbot to analyze.

Maxwell Zeff

I’ve been vaguely following the news around these new smart glasses from Meta to see how they would fare compared to Google’s failed attempt with Glass a decade ago, and Apple’s massive VR helmet. This reporting underscores what some remarked repeatedly about ad-driven companies like Google and Facebook: their products are built for the core purpose of data collection for ad targeting. The privacy implications are as egregious as with Google Glass: everything in the visual field of these glasses will likely end up in a facial recognition database and might get exposed publicly – in fact, some college students have already hacked the Ray-Ban Meta glasses to reveal the name, address, and phone number of anyone they look at.

ABC News: “Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user’s public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option”

But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge.

Shoebridge: The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?

Claybaugh: Correct.

Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

Jake Evans

Hardly surprising coming from Facebook – or any other American tech giant for that matter; the latest example being LinkedIn, which has covertly opted its users in to supply data for AI training without even bothering to update their terms of service.

This is why GDPR is so important in the EU, and why, despite all its critics and lackluster enforcement, the core of the legislation is sound and future proof. In simple terms, companies need to have legitimate reason, or consent, to use consumers’ data for new purposes. Training AI models is clearly a new purpose that doesn’t precisely have a legitimate reason, so companies should in theory ask for distinct consent before using the data.

Financial Times: “How Lidl accidentally took on the big guns of cloud computing”

Starting with a system built for internal use in 2021, Lidl owner Schwarz Group now offers cloud computing and cyber security services to corporate customers.

Its IT unit, Schwarz Digits — which became a standalone operating division in 2023 — has signed up clients including Germany’s biggest software group SAP, the country’s most successful football club Bayern Munich and the port of Hamburg. Last year, the unit generated €1.9bn in annual sales and it employs 7,500 staff.

We did not start with a commercial motivation in mind but just wanted to address our own needs, Christian Müller, co-chief executive of Schwarz Digits told the Financial Times in a rare interview. We’re on a very steep growth path.

A main selling point of its service is that all client data is processed and stored exclusively in Germany and Austria, which have stringent privacy and data protection laws.

Olaf Storbeck

Exciting development for a European business to build its own cloud computing system from the ground up – and striking how closely this origin story resembles Amazon’s AWS. I would say this is a good example of how regulation can foster business opportunities. It would probably have been faster and cheaper for Schwarz Group to contract an existing US cloud provider, but since their products are not prioritizing privacy, the more compliant answer was to build an internal solution.