The Weekly Weird #43

Switzerland kills the suicide pod, the One File approaches, spy-glasses fo' yo' asses, Roblox gets Hindenburg'd, China doesn't like it when you pull out

Oct 10, 2024

A hale and hearty hello from the mist-wreathed mountains of madness from which we survey the depths of dystopia! Welcome back to your Weekly Weird, everybody.

Up-fronts before we get cracking:

The next episode of 1984 Today! drops on Sunday 13 October. I speak with Hatun Tash, the Turkish ex-Muslim Christian evangelist whose ordeal at the hands of British police and angry mobs alike has made her a seemingly lone sentry on the stockade wall of free speech. Tune in to hear about the truly shocking campaign of violence and vitriol visited upon her, related by her with grace and good humour despite the circumstances.
The British government’s “bonkers” plan for net zero involves buying biomass from such human rights luminaries as North Korea and Afghanistan, reports The Guardian. I guess it makes a change from buying oil and gas from the equally principled nations of Saudi Arabia and Qatar…
Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidate and newly-minted watch salesman1, has cranked up the taste factor to 11 and is now lending his “name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC” to a God Bless The USA Bible. His video announcing the new twist on the Good Book is suitably priceless, as is his exhortation to “Make America Pray Again.” Unlike the video, the book does have a price: $59.99. For that, you’ll get a Bible oxymoronically described as “deliver[ing] an easy reading experience in the trusted King James Version translation.” There’s also a “The Day God Intervened” edition embossed with the date of the (first) failed assassination attempt against him, and a ‘hand-signed’ edition for the reasonable price of $1,000. The punchline? The God Bless The USA Bible is, you guessed it, made in China for around $3 per unit. Yes, that China.

Onwards!

Switzerland Kills The Suicide Pod

For the avoidance of doubt, the intention of the headline is for it to be read in the style of the titular line from the hit song Video Killed The Radio Star by The Buggles.

CNN reports: Use of ‘suicide capsule’ suspended pending criminal probe after American woman dies.

The American woman used the pod, called ‘Sarco’, to kill herself “in a forest in the northern Schaffhausen region near the German border,” which is about as bleak a sentence as was ever written.

From International Business Times:

Police in Switzerland's Schaffhausen canton stated Tuesday that multiple people were arrested on suspicion of inciting, aiding and abetting suicide after allegedly assisting in the willful euthanization of an elderly United States citizen. The elderly woman had reportedly been suffering from a severe autoimmune disease, the AFP reported.
Among the detainees are a photographer from The Dutch newspaper Volkskrant who attempted to photograph the capsule, and Florian Willet, co-president of The Last Resort, the group behind the creation of the capsule.
The arrests were made after law enforcement received a tip from a law firm indicating that assisted suicides were being conducted in a remote cabin in Merishausen. Criminal proceedings for those arrested have been opened.

The Sarco capsule “cost over $1 million to develop,” according to CNN. Exit International is the organisation behind it.

The One File Approaches

‘The One File’ is a name I picked up from a medical implant entrepreneur I interviewed a few years ago, who wanted to make it possible for people to carry their entire medical history around with them in a small Verichip-style implant. To me, the phrase encompassed more than medical records, conjuring up the rather anxiety-inducing idea of all personal data concentrated in one place.

To some, accessible, convenient, and conferring control to the user. To others, your humble correspondent included, hackable, ripe for abuse, and seriously concerning.

Take your pick.

The UK Biobank, “a large-scale biomedical database and research resource containing de-identified genetic, lifestyle and health information and biological samples from half a million UK participants” touted as “[t]he world’s most important health research database,” has announced that the new Labour government “made an announcement that paves the way for coded GP data (also known as primary care data) to be shared with consented cohorts.”

The press release continues:

NHS England (NHSE) will take responsibility for primary care data of all NHSE patients, and studies such as UK Biobank will be able to apply to make the de-identified data of their participants available to researchers.

Five days later, and purely coincidentally of course, The Times of London published an op-ed by Professor Dame Clare Gerada titled Opening GP data for research will help NHS save lives.

She explains the genesis of UK Biobank as arising from the kindness of “half a million people in the UK [who] volunteered to share their health data with researchers for the rest of their lives, even posthumously, to improve the lives of future patients.”

UK Biobank’s work has “led to more than 12,500 scientific studies and discoveries,” she says, but “much of the information about them has yet to be included in this vital work.”

Why?

The crucial data has been trapped in their GP records because of the workload and data governance implications for GPs.

Those pesky “data governance implications”, why won’t they just get out of the way of the free flow of information for the good of humanity?

Gerada continues playing the violin:

[T]o date, over-burdened GPs in England, among the hundreds of other things they must focus on, had to assess requests and give individual permission for the handful of volunteers at their practice each time a new study asked for information.
Thanks to this directive, NHS England will set up a system to do this at a national level.

Finally, one place where all the information can be concentrated, and to which access can be granted in a streamlined way that removes hurdles like “individual permission” and “data governance.”

Sounds great!

At the bottom of the article, one finds the following: “Professor Dame Clare Gerada is co-chair of the NHS Assembly and a UK Biobank board member.”

So the co-chair of the organisation whose job is “to advise the board of NHS England” is also a board member of UK Biobank, and the government just waved through a policy change to give NHS England’s data to UK Biobank, and the UK Biobank press release dropped five days before their board member gets an op-ed placed in the UK’s paper of record explaining how great this is?

Oh, and the France Identité app, which “aims to centralize various forms of identification for the management of personal data,” will integrate the French healthcare card, Carte Vitale, from 2025.

One File, ho!

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Spy-glasses Fo’ Yo’ Asses

Two Harvard students shared a video on social media showing their modification of Meta ‘smart’ glasses to integrate full real-time facial recognition using, among others, the “alarmingly accurate” PimEyes database.

The video demonstrates how having this sort of information about strangers makes it incredibly easy to break the ice, win trust, and forge a connection. In the wrong hands, this tech could be lethal.

From their paper, I-XRAY: The AI Glasses That Reveal Anyone’s Personal Details—Home Address, Name, Phone Number, and More—Just from Looking at Them:

The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it. Our goal is to demonstrate the current capabilities of smart glasses, face search engines, LLMs, and public databases, raising awareness that extracting someone’s home address and other personal details from just their face on the street is possible today.

The exercise, while an intellectual achievement, is also a perfect example of what J. Robert Oppenheimer called “technical sweetness,” defined by Kashmir Hill in her excellent book Your Face Belongs To Us as “that feeling scientists and engineers get when they solve an intellectual puzzle.”

She expands further:

When there is a long line of people working on a problem over years and decades, such as with automated facial recognition, everyone in the chain assumes that someone will reckon with the societal dangers of the technology once it is perfected. In the thrall of technical sweetness, it’s difficult to imagine that you are working on something that perhaps should not exist at all.

The Harvard students behind I-XRAY, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, explain how they made it work:

The project leverages five established technologies, which we have integrated to make I-XRAY function. For reasons of public security and privacy, we are not listing these specific technologies publicly.

So the ingredients in the secret sauce might be secret for a little while longer, but what’s the enabling factor?

What makes I-XRAY unique is that it operates entirely automatically, thanks to the recent progress in LLMs. The system leverages the ability of LLMs to understand, process, and compile vast amounts of information from diverse sources–inferring relationships between online sources, such as linking a name from one article to another, and logically parsing a person’s identity and personal details through text. This synergy between LLMs and reverse face search allows for fully automatic and comprehensive data extraction that was previously not possible with traditional methods alone. From the LLM extracted name, a FastPeopleSearch lookup can identify the person’s home address, phone number, and their relatives.

LLMs notwithstanding, this is something that Facebook and Google both figured out years (in Google’s case, decades) ago, and even those two titans of technological intrusion and function creep decided full real-time face recognition was a step too far.

Yeah, even the “move fast and break things” people pumped the brakes.

Now, two students who wrote some code on a smartphone have it at their fingertips.

Thankfully, they are using it to show people how invasive and dangerous this technology has become, and they even shared a handy guide to scrubbing your face from the databases that might identify you.

Perhaps, the next time a stranger opens with information only someone you knew would have, it isn’t because you’ve met before but forgotten them. Once we know that possibility exists, what does that mean for spontaneous and unsolicited human interaction?

Speaking of unsolicited human interaction…

Roblox Gets Hindenburg’d

Hindenburg Research, a short-seller known for publishing hard-hitting takedowns of companies they believe are overvalued or up to no good (while having a financial interest in a drop in their share price), just put out a report on the inexplicably popular (to anyone over the age of 10) online game Roblox.

The title pretty much says it all: Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids.

It turns out that my impression of Roblox as “inexplicably popular” isn’t unjustified.

From the Hindenburg report:

Our research indicates that Roblox is lying to investors, regulators, and advertisers about the number of “people” on its platform, inflating the key metric by 25-42%+. We also show how engagement hours, another key metric, is inflated by an estimated 100%+.

The “inflated key metrics” are, according to the report, not just misleading but fraudulent.

In 2023, Roblox told the SEC it is “unable to identify if a user has multiple accounts”. The company’s response to the SEC appears to be a flat out lie.
Multiple former employees told us that Roblox does internally track single users with multiple accounts, referring to the process as ‘de-alting’.
Interviews reveal Roblox effectively has two sets of books for counting users: one for internal business decisions, in which multiple accounts are ‘de-alted’, and one used by the finance team that reports higher metrics to investors.

Using the term “zombie engagement” to describe the way players are logged as ‘in-game’ despite being away from their screens, the report conjures a queasy picture of the online gaming world at large, in which bots can provide the illusion of activity while actual humans are few and far between.

The worst of it comes when Hindenburg calls out Roblox as “an X-rated pedophile hellscape,” using a level of detail which is unpleasant, extreme, and necessary to quote at length.

Roblox’s social media features allow pedophiles to efficiently target hundreds of children, with no up-front screening to prevent them from joining the platform.
For example, in 2018, prior to Roblox going public, a 29-year-old was caught by police with 175 hours of video footage of him grooming and engaging in explicit behavior with 150 minors using online platforms, namely Roblox.
[…]
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation in 2024 labeled Roblox “a tool for sexual predators, a threat for childrens’ safety”.
Numerous criminal indictments from 2019-2024 allege that sexual predators groomed children in-game, ranging from 8-14 years old, then kidnapped, raped or traded sexual content with them.
Following years of scandals, we performed our own checks to see if the platform had cleaned up its act. As a test, we attempted to set up an account under the name ‘Jeffrey Epstein’…only to see the name was taken, along with 900+ variations.
[…]
We attempted to set up a Roblox account under the name of another notorious pedophile to see if Roblox had any up-front pedophile screening: Earl Brian Bradley was indicted on 471 charges of molesting, raping and exploiting 103 children. The username was taken, along with multiple variants like earlbrianbradley69.
After we found a username, we listed our age as “under 13” to see if children are being exposed to adult content. By merely plugging ‘adult’ into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios” with 3,334 members openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors.
We tracked some of the members of “Adult Studios” and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography.
The chatrooms trading in child pornography had no age restrictions. Roblox reports that 21% of its users are under the age of 9, a number that is likely underestimated given that Roblox has no age verification aside from users seeking 17+ experiences.
Registered as a child, we were also able to access games like “Escape to Epstein Island” and “Diddy Party”. We found over 600 “Diddy” games, including “Survive Diddy” and “Run From Diddy Simulator”.

Eww.

“Roblox rejects the claims made in the Hindenburg Report,” reads the first sentence of the company’s press release in response, the entire body of which (with the exception of two vaguely-worded sentences in the opening paragraph) deals only with the financial allegations. The company makes no mention of the specifics of the allegations related to the grooming, abuse, and worse, of children.

Reuters, in their reporting on the allegations, likewise made no mention of the risks to children.

It therefore falls to your humble correspondent, as is tradition, to trot out the evergreen GIF.

And finally…

China Doesn’t Like It When You Pull Out

The New York Times reported this week on China’s response to long-standing concerns about its treatment of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, and the steps that Western companies have tried to take to “slave-proof” their supply chains.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said last week that it was investigating PVH, the corporate parent of the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, for allegedly taking “discriminatory measures” against products from Xinjiang, a region in China’s far west that produces a fifth of the world’s cotton.
At issue is whether PVH violated Chinese law by pulling back from purchasing cotton or garments from Xinjiang, where researchers have cited evidence of forced labor, mass arrests and confinement to re-education camps among the region’s predominantly Muslim ethnic groups, particularly the Uyghurs.
The investigation has made clear that China will not tolerate companies that shun Xinjiang. That puts some multinationals in a legal vise grip because a growing number of governments, including the United States and the European Union, restrict or ban imports from Xinjiang.

This isn’t the first time that corporate reticence to deal with goods produced under conditions of forced labour by the Uyghurs in Xinjiang has drawn fire, but the previous instance of discontent may surprise you.

In 2021, H&M, Nike and other brands faced a damaging backlash from consumers in China after the companies said they would break ties with Xinjiang.

Yes, Chinese consumers got mad at those companies because they wanted to stop buying the products of forced labour. Righteous.

The Chinese Communist Party stance, unsurprisingly, is that they can do no wrong and corporations asking too many questions are just ‘picking quarrels’.

China has banned independent investigations of labor conditions in Xinjiang and has cracked down broadly on due diligence firms, making it almost impossible for companies to prove how their goods were produced.
Nury Turkel, a lawyer and former chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, said repression and forced labor involving minorities were continuing, both within Xinjiang and around China.
China has stopped publishing the number of people sent to re-education camps. Those detainees have not been released but instead transferred to prisons, fields or factories, he said.

With the above in mind, here’s the official party line:

The Chinese government denies that human rights abuses have taken place. The government also portrays programs to send rural Xinjiang residents to jobs in distant factories as an effort to alleviate poverty, not forced labor.

Seems legit.