The Weekly Weird #44

Dude where's my Bitcoin?, (a fifth of) Gen-Z think Hitler had 'some good ideas', submitting to Apple really means submitting, FaRT in Sweden and Karachi, attack of the boner bots

Mike Freedman

Oct 16, 2024

Welcome back to your Weekly Weird, where we whistle while we worry!

Upfronts:

Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement that they will restart the reactor at Three Mile Island to provide nuclear power for their incredibly consumptive AI needs, and Amazon’s purchase of a nuclear-powered data centre, Google is the latest tech giant to go nuclear. According to The Guardian, the Googz “has ordered six or seven small nuclear reactors (SMRs) from California’s Kairos Power, with the first due to be completed by 2030 and the remainder by 2035.” Who could have guessed that AI would be power-hungry?
The US Department of Agriculture has approved a Wyoming company called CattleProof, “whose primary product is a proprietary software platform combining Electronic ID (EID) tags and a decentralized network to create immutable records of individual livestock,” to track cows using blockchain technology. Each individual bovine will have its electronic tag, health information, and whereabouts logged and tracked on the company’s proprietary ledger. CattleCoin coming soon?
Democratic Party presidential candidate and (according to Wikipedia) gun-owning Baptist step-mom Kamala ‘Mamala’ Harris received unwanted attention this week for a campaign video produced by an apparently unaffiliated group called Creatives For Harris, in which six actors playing men declare that they are men, that they are not afraid of women, and that they are ‘man enough’ to vote for one of the women of whom they are not afraid. Their lines of monologue are delivered in an alternatively belligerent and uncomfortable cadence in stereotypically ‘manly’ settings like a home gym, a farm, a mechanic’s workshop, and the back of a pick-up truck. The video is a baffling attempt to satirise the kind of man who wouldn’t vote for Harris while trying to recruit undecided male voters by insinuating that they are afraid of women, and are also not ‘man enough’ to be emotional in front of a horse.

Onwards!

Dude Where’s My Bitcoin?

In the latest case of Finders vs. Keepers1, amateur Bitcoin miner James Howells is suing Newport Council, the local government in his area of Wales, after they persistently blocked him from recovering a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin that his partner threw away by mistake in 2013.

From WalesOnline:

Mr Howells, 39, is suing the council for £495,314,800 in damages, which was the peak valuation of his 8,000 Bitcoins from earlier this year.
[…]
Mr Howells says he has assembled a team of experts who would carry out the £10million dig at no cost to the council. He is also offering the council 10% of the coins' value if recovered…£41m based on today's rate.

Because he “recruited the council's former head of landfill to his team,” Howells even claims to know in which area of the landfill the hard drive is interred.

How hard would it be to exhume the long-lost Bitcoin?

The dig would take 18 to 36 months followed by around a year of remediation work. But the council has rejected Mr Howells' pleas for a search due to environmental concerns.

Well, it’s okay to not want a landfill to be turned into an environmental disaster zone…

[Howells and his team] have also vowed to help the council "modernise" the landfill which has repeatedly been in breach of its permit since 2020 over levels of arsenic, asbestos, methane and other substances. Pointing to damning reports from Natural Resources Wales the claim says: "These compliance reports call into question whether the [council] is a fit and competent landfill operator."

Oh.

The question of ‘finders, keepers’ gets brought up as well:

Lawyers for the council have argued it now legally owns the hard drive because it was dumped at the tip. But Mr Howells' barristers, Dean Armstrong KC, Maria Mulla, and Bruce Drummond, have denied this on the basis that he never intended to abandon the hard drive or the intellectual property on it.

Summing up the intransigence of the local council, Howells opined that “[i]f they had spoken to me in 2013 this place would look like Las Vegas now. Newport would look like Dubai. That's the kind of opportunity they've missed.”

Case ongoing.

(A Fifth Of) Gen-Z Think Hitler Had ‘Some Good Ideas’

According to the Daily Mail, who commissioned the poll:

When broken down by age group, 21 percent of those under the age of 29 said Hitler had good ideas, compared with 16 percent of those between the ages of 30 and 49, seven percent for voters between 50 and 64 and just five percent for those over 65.

The Mail has previously found from its polling that 20% of 18 - 29 year-olds had a ‘completely positive’ or ‘somewhat positive’ view of Osama bin Laden, the dialysis patient and beard model credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks.

One wonders how the questions are being phrased by the pollsters to get that sort of result, but it’s a surprising statistic for a generation known to be, at least vocally, interested in equality and safety.

The Daily Mail are on shaky ground when it comes to pearl-clutching over what people think of Hitler, considering that the founder of the paper was a friend of ol’ Adolf and supported him, Mussolini, and Oswald Mosley’s British Fascist ‘Blackshirts’ in the 1930s. You can read Viscount Rothermere’s infamous op-eds ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ and ‘Give the Blackshirts a Helping Hand’ online. That said, even The Guardian is willing to let bygones be bygones, so perhaps it doesn’t matter anymore.

The Mail doesn’t make clear what ‘good ideas’ have revitalised interest in Hitler for the under-30s, but I doubt it’s the autobahn. Their poll also seems to jibe with a noticeable recent trend. For example, “22% of Millennials and Gen Z [in the Netherlands] feel it is acceptable for an individual to support neo-Nazi views,” according to a 2023 study, and “nearly one-quarter (23%) believe the Holocaust is a myth or the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated”. A 2020 study found that “11 percent of U.S. Millennial and Gen Z respondents believe Jews caused the Holocaust.”

How? By being too swole?

Meanwhile, Volkswagen, Hugo Boss, Porsche, IBM, and Siemens are all still massive global brands who probably advertise in the Mail, so the ghosts still walk the halls regardless.

Plus ça change…

Submitting To Apple Really Means Submitting

This one was brought to my attention by a fellow Weirder, so, as a word of encouragement, if you’re a Weirder and you see something that might be weird enough for the Weird, hit me up. I’m always interested.

Are you sitting on a new idea for a hit show or movie and considering sending it in to Apple, in case they make an exception to their ‘no unsolicited submissions’ policy just for you?

Don’t.

An ‘unsolicited’ submission is anything that the company haven’t invited, or that hasn’t been brought to them through a preferred partner or established agent. Hardly any production company or studio accept unsolicited submissions. As Apple explain, quite rightly, “[t]he sole purpose of this policy is to avoid potential misunderstandings or disputes when Apple’s products or marketing strategies might seem similar to ideas submitted to Apple.”

Companies that produce films and shows usually deal with unsolicited submissions by having a protocol, like auto-deleting emails and sending a notification to the sender explaining that their unsolicited submission was destroyed without being read. Apple, however, have taken a different and potentially legally questionable approach.

According to Apple’s own terms and conditions (emphasis mine):

If, despite our request that you not send us your ideas, you still submit them, then regardless of what your letter says, the following terms shall apply to your submissions.
You agree that: (1) your submissions and their contents will automatically become the property of Apple, without any compensation to you; (2) Apple may use or redistribute the submissions and their contents for any purpose and in any way; (3) there is no obligation for Apple to review the submission; and (4) there is no obligation to keep any submissions confidential.

So if I send a script, which according to law is automatically copyrighted by my having written it, and I include a copyright symbol and note on the title page, and state clearly in a cover letter that all rights are reserved, Apple thinks that a single paragraph buried five slashes deep on their website (apple.com/uk/legal/intellectual-property/policies/ideas.html) changes my rights, even if I haven’t read their attempted evisceration thereof?

Huh?

From the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (emphasis mine):

As an author you automatically have copyright over your script, unless you assign it to someone else. You do not have to go through any formal procedure – if you wrote it, and you have not infringed someone else’s copyright, then the copyright is yours. Copyright means that no one can use (copy) your work without your permission.
As an author you also have moral rights over what you have written, unless you waive them in a contract. Moral rights include the right to be identified as the author or director of a work as appropriate, the right to object to the derogatory treatment of a work and the right to object to false attribution of a work.

Are we going to have a test case for this, or have corporate lawyers just decided that you can “assign” or “waive” your rights passively, i.e. without confirmation, foreknowledge, proper notification, and an actual signature showing consent?

FaRT in Sweden And Karachi

Facial recognition technology (FaRT) is about to get wafted up the noses of the Swedes and Pakistanis.

According to Biometric Update:

The Swedish police want to use facial recognition in real time to crack down on serious crimes.
Government investigators [in Sweden] have already drafted a bill that will make it possible to use the technology. The regulation, however, still needs to be completed before it can be tabled, National Police Chief Petra Lundh told publicly funded radio broadcaster Sveriges Radio last week.
Lundh also noted that the legislation must comply with the EU AI Act and could potentially be temporary until crime rates settle down.

Sure, “temporary.” That’s always how government power works, they give it up when they don’t need it anymore.

The FaRT roll-out would sit within a broader permissiveness towards biometric data use in criminal investigations.

The Swedish government has been working on expanding the use of biometric data in policing on other fronts.
In September, the Swedish Legislative Council announced it does not object to a government proposal to expand police access to DNA and biometric databases for investigating serious crimes. The proposal was submitted to the Council in July and includes a wider collection of biometric data during investigations, introducing new biometric registries and matching with the Migration Agency’s fingerprint and facial photo registry. The new regulation also allows for the use of DNA-based genealogy during investigations of murder and aggravated rapes.

Karachi, in Pakistan, has a new Safe City Project that sounds just delightful.

The Karachi Safe City Project uses advanced surveillance systems with digital technology to improve public safety. Facial recognition and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) are tools included to enable law enforcement to detect criminals, suspicious individuals, and vehicles in real-time. Facial recognition technology from Hikvision compares captured faces to criminal databases, while ANPR scans and identifies license plates to detect stolen or suspicious vehicles.

Note that Hikvision is the infamous Chinese tech company enabling the tracking, interning, and subjugation of the Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region.

The system is pretty comprehensive.

The system relies primarily on real-time CCTV footage, which the CPO command center monitors. These AI-powered cameras enable continuous observation of high-risk areas, allowing for speedier response to possible attacks and improved overall situational awareness. The initiative incorporates digital tools such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, smart ID cards, and automobile registration systems to expedite identity verification processes. These innovations improve the accuracy of tracking individuals and vehicles, decreasing human error. Together, these technologies aim to improve security, deter crime, and maintain the smooth running of Karachi’s law enforcement and traffic management systems.

This new all-seeing approach to crime is happening in a country where, in June 2024, a man was captured by a mob who stormed a police station at which he was being held and then tortured and burned him alive for allegedly desecrating a Quran.

According to Amnesty International:

In June 1996, the federal cabinet approved the abolition of the death penalty for women. Following protests by Islamic groups, the government later clarified that the intended abolition does not extend to death sentences imposed as hadd punishment or as qisas…

You read that correctly. Islamic groups protested a bill abolishing the death penalty until the government reassured them that they would still be allowed to carry out capital punishment based on religious doctrine.

The moratorium on the death penalty still hasn’t materialised.

In 2013, a woman was executed by stoning on the order of a tribal court for having a mobile phone. In 2024, a Christian woman was sentenced to death for blasphemy after forwarding a WhatsApp message, and “a 22-year-old student [was sentenced] to death and…a teenager [given] a life sentence in two separate cases after finding them guilty of insulting Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.”

Against this backdrop, where being raped can get a woman a death sentence for adultery, and forwarding an allegedly blasphemous message on WhatsApp is a capital offence (as is having the phone to do it with, apparently), the government wants to bring in panoptic surveillance to enforce the law.

What could go wrong?

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Attack Of The Boner Bots

Realbotix, a publicly-traded company that manufactures lifelike robotic dolls for fun and profit, is currently engaged in a charm offensive to win over investors.

In the ‘charm offensive’ video link, you’ll hear COO Matt McMullen explain that he spent many years “building these realistic figures,” by which of course he means his invention of the RealDoll, a silicone-fleshed sex doll he began making in his garage in 1997.

McMullen, in his quest for the perfect automated lady-partner, has taken the RealDoll robotic.

Meet Aria, a fully-articulated robot with facial motors that allow extra expressiveness.

Here’s an interview with the CEO of Realbotix, explaining the intention behind the product without ever using the word ‘sex’.

The now-defunct media outlet Vice covered the company’s robo-prototype Harmony in a short video a few years ago, in which the doll/robot has the same inexplicable Scottish accent as Aria seems to have today.

On September 26, 2024, in a move so meta that it would blow even Jean Baudrillard’s mind, Realbotix appointed its own robot to be an advisor to its board of directors.

From the company’s press release:

Aria, Realbotix’s AI-enabled humanoid robot and brand ambassador, has accepted a non-executive role as an advisor to the board of directors of Realbotix. Management believes this is the first time that an AI enabled robot has ever been utilized in this type of role.

One wonders what they mean by the word ‘utilized’.

A bold mission statement ends the press release:

Our mission is to create robots and AI that are indistinguishable from humans in appearance and social interaction. Realbotix replicates the physical and emotional aspects of being human, in hardware and software. This versatility makes our robots and their personalities customizable and programmable to suit a wide variety of use cases.

Sexy.