TechCrunch: “Google revives RSS”

Chrome, at least in its experimental Canary version on Android (and only for users in the U.S.), is getting an interesting update in the coming weeks that brings back RSS, the once-popular format for getting updates from all the sites you love in Google Reader and similar services.

In Chrome, users will soon see a “Follow” feature for sites that support RSS and the browser’s New Tab page will get what is essentially a (very) basic RSS reader — I guess you could almost call it a “Google Reader”.

Now we’re not talking about a full-blown RSS reader here. The New Tab page will show you updates from the sites you follow in chronological order, but it doesn’t look like you can easily switch between feeds, for example. It’s a start, though.

Frederic Lardinois

An unexpected update from Google, considering how long they have neglected RSS since shutting down Google Reader. Maybe someone has finally decided to offer a product to compete with Twitter and Facebook, to attract people who are unsatisfied with algorithmic newsfeeds and are asking for a simple, chronological solution.

New York Magazine: “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis”

What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically”, from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.

There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap — no written confession, no incriminating notebook, no official accident report. Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation. It has been a full year, 80 million people have been infected, and, surprisingly, no public investigation has taken place. We still know very little about the origins of this disease.

Nicholson Baker

The author of this article goes out of his way to remind us at each step that he is not promoting a conspiracy theory about the virus’ origin, but merely discussing a plausible theory. Nevertheless, his arguments and assertions do resemble the methods employed by conspiracy theorists a lot, connecting convenient bits of facts and presenting them as established truth, while ignoring other, more likely explanations.

Mobile Dev Memo: “Apple robbed the mob’s bank”

With ATT, Apple has robbed the mob’s bank. In bolstering its ads business while severely handicapping other advertising platforms — but especially Facebook — with the introduction of a privacy policy that effectively breaks the mechanic that those platforms use to target ads, Apple has taken money from a party that is so unsympathetic that it can’t appeal to a greater authority for redress. Apple has brazenly, in broad daylight, stormed into the Bank of Facebook, looted its most precious resource, and, camouflaged under the noble cause of giving privacy controls to the consumer, fled the scene.

---

This is the odious specter of ATT: it’s an obvious commercial land grab dressed up as a moral crusade, and it will ultimately subvert the open web and the freemium business model. ATT doesn’t provide real consumer choice, and Apple has clearly privileged its own ad network with this new privacy policy in very obvious ways. And Apple has engineered all of this while being cheered on by parties that ape Apple’s commercial slogan regarding the righteousness of first-party data for ads targeting. Case studies will be written in decades to come about Apple’s astute attack on Facebook via an esoteric advertising identifier. If anything is clear from the (protracted) rollout of ATT, it is that Apple’s PR department deserves a pay raise.

Eric Benjamin Seufert

If there was any question about Apple’s true motives, the company recently hired a former product manager for ad targeting at Facebook (and then promptly fired him following a petition from its employees). In other words, Apple is perfectly comfortable tracking its users and selling ads against this targeted data, but is preventing others from doing the same, justifying anticompetitive practices with tenuous privacy promises…

New Statesman: “America’s race to net zero”

When you break down the items included in the package, its true modesty becomes clear. On passenger railway transport – an area in which the US lags far behind China and other advanced economies – the Jobs Plan proposes $10bn per annum over eight years. That, as the fine print states, should allow America to address Amtrak’s repair backlog; modernise the high-traffic Northeast Corridor; improve existing corridors and connect new city pairs. It will no doubt create good jobs. What it will not do is catapult the US into an age of high-speed rail travel to match that pioneered by Japan and China. The latter currently has 19,000 miles of high-speed track; America boasts 500 miles.

It is indicative of the lack of transformative ambition that the proposed spending on electric cars is larger than that targeted at public transport. Car culture, one of the symbolic essentials of the American way of life, is clearly non-negotiable. A total of $174bn is allocated to the electric vehicle sector, including spending on the motor industry, purchase subsidies and car-charging infrastructure.

---

The Jobs Plan proposes to allocate much funding to universities; but the core promise on clean energy R&D is to invest $35bn in the full range of solutions needed to achieve technology breakthroughs that address the climate crisis and position America as the global leader in clean energy technology and clean energy jobs. This sum, $35bn, is less than Americans spend annually on pet food and will be spread over eight years. Either you don’t dare ask for more, or you underestimate the scale of the technological challenge and believe that the full range of solutions needed for the US to make these breakthroughs and become a global leader will be as easy as buying dog treats.

Adam Tooze

Aside from its modest size and ambition, the fundamental question behind any US climate action plan is whether it can survive a change of administration, or even the elections for Congress coming up in 2022. The world cannot afford to have the United States, the largest emitter of CO₂, change its climate policies with each election cycle, to have a global effort delayed by a party allergic to any scientific evidence. Maybe US companies will continue to pursue green energy in the absence of active government support, but the process would be considerably faster with proper stimulus and central guidance – and some areas, like public transportation, railroad and car charging infrastructure, are mostly the government’s responsibility anyway.

The Verge: “Starlink review: Broadband Dreams fall to Earth”

In my week of testing, Starlink was perfectly fine for anything that buffers — I was able to stream Netflix and Disney Plus in 4K and jump around YouTube videos without significant issues — but doing something faster-paced, like quickly scrolling through TikTok videos, would run into delays.

Services that require a sustained, real-time connection, like Slack, Zoom, or gaming, simply weren’t usable for me, even when I was seeing the fastest speeds. I had high hopes that I could spend several days working over Starlink, and after just a few lost Slack messages and Zoom calls where my video dropped to low resolution and then froze entirely, I gave up. Many Starlink beta testers similar report experiences — consistent dropouts of a few seconds, every few minutes.

---

Maybe this will change as the company launches more satellites. Maybe it will eventually work better in areas that are dominated by tall trees. Maybe one day it will not drop out in wind and heavy rain. I didn’t give Starlink a formal review score because the whole thing is openly in beta and the company isn’t making many promises about reliability. But even when it’s final, you’re still looking at a service whose near-term, best-case scenario is being competitive with a solid LTE connection. I am no fan of cable companies and wireless carriers, but it’s simply true that my cable broadband and 5G service are both faster and more reliable than Starlink, and they will almost certainly remain that way.

Nilay Patel

I look forward to the solutions tweeted out by Elon Musk: ‘Let’s launch MORE satellites!’. Or better yet: ‘Cut down those pesky trees! Who needs oxygen when you can have spotty satellite Internet?!’

The Atlantic: “The Looting Network”

Before the war, almost no one Al Mohamad knew used Facebook. But as conflicts displaced communities, people across the Middle East turned to the social network to stay in touch with family and friends: From 2011 to 2017, users in Syria increased 1,900 percent.

During this time, ISIS was searching for more ways to finance its self-proclaimed government. Aleppo doesn’t have much oil, and operating a militant caliphate is expensive. So it expanded its revenue streams to include the extraction of Syria’s cultural-artifact reserves, eventually establishing a Department of Antiquity that managed the process and taxed looters 20 percent on all sales. On Facebook, it found a perfect place to sell its spoils. Online, looters now had access to a wide network of deep-pocketed dealers and collectors in America, France, Dubai, and elsewhere, and they could connect with many of them at once, Al Mohamad learned, simply by posting a photo of a looted artifact in a group. A mosaic that would sell for only $15 in Syria could fetch more than $35,000 from a buyer on Facebook; other artifacts could sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And because Facebook did not prohibit selling historical artifacts on its site, almost nothing was stopping ISIS from destroying UNESCO World Heritage sites and ransacking museums.

---

I became an archaeologist because I love my heritage, he told me in Istanbul. He hated what he was seeing in Facebook groups and in the pockmarked hills outside Aleppo: Centuries of history—his family’s heritage—sold to the highest bidder, via a platform that had made it unprecedentedly lucrative and scalable, but appeared to him to be indifferent to the consequences. Facebook is how our community has stayed connected during the war, but at the same time, it’s also helped destroy it, he said. For Syrians, this is real life, not an online life. Smuggling and trafficking these artifacts is a war crime, so why isn’t Facebook held to the standard of international law?

Jenna Scatena

When you set out to connect everyone on the planet, it turns out you end up connecting and enabling a lot of criminal activity as well.

Vox: “Vietnam defied the experts and sealed its border to keep Covid-19 out”

This strict approach to travel, global health experts say, is directly connected to Vietnam’s seeming defeat of Covid-19. Thirty-five people have reportedly died in total, and a little more than 2,700 have been infected with the virus during three small waves that have all been quickly quashed. Even on the worst days of the pandemic, the country of 97 million has never recorded more than 110 new cases — a tiny fraction of the 68,000 daily case high in the United Kingdom, which has a population one-third smaller than Vietnam, or the record 300,000-plus cases per day only the US and India managed to tally.

Last year, Vietnam’s economy even grew 2.9 percent, defying economists’ predictions and beating China to become the top performer in Asia.

---

At the same time, speaking out against travel bans had become synonymous with opposing nationalism and wall-building, said Lee. There were these progressive, human rights values that were upheld by not using travel measures.

But it’s now clear that the well-meaning advice and previous research findings didn’t match up with the situation the world was facing in early 2020. The new virus was different — more contagious and harder to stop. SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted prior to the onset of symptoms, if they ever occur — while with SARS and Ebola, for example, people are only contagious when they are very ill or symptomatic.

Julia Belluz

One of the more puzzling aspects of the pandemic for me was this constant insistence from many experts, including the WHO, that countries should not limit travel in an effort to contain the spread of the pandemic. Quarantines and movement restrictions have been used for centuries to keep disease out, even before people understood the mechanisms causing infection. It is blindingly obvious that, if you prevent infected people from entering a region, that place will be protected from the spread. Even if travel restrictions only delayed infections, they would still be valuable measures allowing countries more time to prepare their health systems – just as the initial lockdowns were supposed to.