Author: Jeff Wise

Slate: Is Elon Musk Right That Flight Tracking Is an Invasion of Privacy?

Elon Musk, who in November bragged that his free-speech absolutism was so pure that wouldn’t ban an account devoted to tweeting his plane’s in-flight location, reversed course with a vengeance earlier this week. He banned not only the @ElonJet account but all the accounts belonging to its creator, Florida college student Jack Sweeney. Then Thursday night he went still further, suspending more than a half-dozen prominent journalists who had been covering the controversy.

In his defense, Musk argued that tweeting information about his flights was equivalent to “doxxing,” a practice in which online harassers publish a victim’s address, phone number, or other personal information in order to encourage other people to harass them.

“Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk tweeted Thursday night. (He said that a stalker had used the information to track his young child in a car, though he doesn’t have appeared to have filed a police report, and he hadn’t used his jet on the day in question.)

The controversy has put the spotlight on a previously little-discussed area of aircraft operations and raised the question: Why is aircraft location information made available freely and instantaneously?

It turns out there is actually a very good reason. Continue reading Slate: Is Elon Musk Right That Flight Tracking Is an Invasion of Privacy?

New York: Do You Have a Right Not to Be Lied To?

The Big Lie took a beating in the midterms. Of the six 2020 election deniers vying to take control of a battleground state’s election systems, not a single one was victorious. But democracy isn’t exactly safe from being undermined by a campaign of falsehoods orchestrated by Donald Trump, who is trying to retake the White House. In response to Trump’s ascent and other challenges across the world to shared truths that stitch together societies, some scholars have begun to argue that it’s time to reconsider the meaning of freedom of speech. “The question is gaining traction among legal academics,” says Richard Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law School.

It’s a fraught undertaking, to be sure. In the United States, the First Amendment protects speech to a degree rare elsewhere in the world. But these are extraordinary times. It’s not just that lies have become more common in the age of MAGA, perverting the public’s ability to make informed decisions. It’s also that the societal norms holding lies in check have faded. “Trump has made it more fashionable to lie,” says David Schultz, a law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, “and there seem to be few political or legal consequences for lying.” Continue reading New York: Do You Have a Right Not to Be Lied To?

Businessweek: The Golden Era of AI Chess Makes Things Tricky for Players

The chess world was reeling when 13 of America’s best players convened in early October for the US Chess Championship in St. Louis. The previous month, top-ranked Magnus Carlsen, 33, suffered a surprising defeat in the same city at the hands of 19-year-old upstart Hans Niemann. Carlsen accused his opponent of cheating—without providing evidence—while Niemann proclaimed his innocence.

There was little prospect of closure as Niemann, broad-shouldered with a mop of curly hair, settled into the match room in St. Louis. (Carlsen wasn’t competing.) Chess seemed to return to its usual form: a game of profound intensity played in churchlike quiet. Niemann started the two-week-long event strong, stumbled through a string of losses, then pulled it together to finish in the middle of the pack, about what you’d expect from a player at his level. Nothing about his tournament play raised any eyebrows. “Even people who were extremely critical of him are saying that his performance is not really noteworthy,” says chess journalist Greg Keener.

Hours after the last game was played on Oct. 20, and shortly before the first drinks were poured at the awards ceremony, the next bombshell dropped. Niemann had filed a $100 million defamation suit against Carlsen and a number of co-defendants. The game had never seen anything like it. As chess YouTuber Levy Rozman put it, “This is probably the most shocking development in the world of chess ever.”  (Carlsen’s manager didn’t respond to an interview request; Niemann declined to comment.) Continue reading Businessweek: The Golden Era of AI Chess Makes Things Tricky for Players

New York: Has Long COVID Always Existed?

Stephanie Taylor was on a flight home to California from New York in 2008 when she started to feel ill. When she stood up to disembark, she felt so dizzy that she would have fallen over if another passenger hadn’t caught her. She took to bed with aches, swollen limbs and joints, and a fever that spiked to 104. Over time, painful pustules formed on her fingers and in her nose and ears. Exertion would send her crashing into a state of near paralysis. Unable to eat solid food and too weak to stand in the shower, she had to be spoon-fed and washed by sponge. Her doctors suspected a viral infection but couldn’t identify a pathogen, and so she remained bedridden with extreme fatigue as her small video production business teetered on the edge of failure.

Emily Taylor, her 25-year-old daughter, gave up the lobbyist job she loved in Washington, D.C., and moved back west to take care of her mother, shuttling her from physician to physician. “I’m not exaggerating, we probably saw 30 different doctors,” she says. None could pinpoint what was wrong, and few were sympathetic to their plight. “The experiences ranged from ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you’ to outright hostile.” Four years after Stephanie first fell sick, they found an endocrinologist who pored over mountains of medical records during a two-hour appointment and asked for more time to study her condition. “And three months later that doctor came back to us and said, ‘I think you have this illness called chronic fatigue syndrome,’” she says. Continue reading New York: Has Long COVID Always Existed?

New York: The Eternal Disappointment of the Return of Supersonic Travel

Air travel is about to get a hell of a lot faster — at least that’s what the headlines say. “American Airlines to buy supersonic jets amid clamor for ultra-fast travel,” declared the Washington Post on Wednesday morning. “World’s fastest airliner ‘Overture’ to usher in new era of supersonic travel,” the New York Post proclaimed. They were pegged to American Airlines’ announcement that it had placed orders for 20 supersonic Overture jets from a start-up called Boom. The planes will carry up to 80 passengers at Mach 1.7. Better yet, they’ll burn a special fuel that will make them carbon neutral.

It’s all very exciting, if it happens. But there are many reasons to believe it won’t — not least that, for years, similar claims have continuously come up empty. “It’s just PR,” says aviation analyst Brian Foley. Supersonic air transportation is, he says, “still a long way off,” adding, “It’s fun to dream.”

To hear Boom tell it, the project is moving along at a blistering pace, and later this year the company says it will break ground on a factory in North Carolina. “We’ll begin production in 2024, with the first Overtures coming off the line in 2025,” Boom president Kathy Savitt says. Flight testing and certification will follow in short order. “We estimate that the very first passengers will be able to fly an Overture by the end of 2029,” she says.

Boom has made similarly ambitious claims before. Back in 2016, the company said it would be making three-hour transatlantic flights by 2023. In the meantime, it hasn’t even flown a scale model. “It’s always a decade in the future,” says Foley. Continue reading New York: The Eternal Disappointment of the Return of Supersonic Travel

New York: What Happened to Paxlovid?

Paxlovid, the COVID antiviral developed by Pfizer, was hailed as a miracle drug against COVID-19 when it was approved for use by the FDA in December. But it was nowhere to be found during the Omicron wave that followed and now is little discussed and underused, with doses reportedly piling up on pharmacy shelves. Has Paxlovid failed to live up to the hype as a pandemic game changer, or is it another effective defense against COVID that’s been unjustly snubbed by a misinformed public?

For a frontline view I turned to my brother-in-law, John Emy, a doctor of internal medicine who practices with CareMount Medical in Manhattan and has been prescribing Paxlovid to his patients with COVID. He said he’s a fan — with qualifications. “I think it’s a great drug. It’s certainly very effective. It starts working pretty quickly,” he told me over the phone while walking to work. “Usually within 24 hours, the symptoms start to improve.” He wondered how badly it was really needed, though. “It’s probably wasted on the mildly ill,” he said. “Before we had Paxlovid, plenty of people who had mild symptoms would get over it and they were fine.”

Five hours later, he texted me that he’d thought of another argument for taking Paxlovid. “By reducing viral load quickly it could reduce contagiousness,” he wrote, before dropping the lede: “I woke up feeling not great, but then much worse on the subway after I spoke with you. I have COVID.” Continue reading New York: What Happened to Paxlovid?

New York: The Hunt for the Butchers of Bucha

Lena, a corporate executive living in Germany, left her native Ukraine in the 1990s but stays in regular contact with her extended family there. When Russia struck the family’s town soon after the invasion started, they sent Lena photos of bomb damage. Around the same time, she was searching for news about the war on social media when she came across an appeal by Ben Strick, an open-source investigator, for images to geolocate. She sent him one picture, and then more. “After three or four images, he offered me to join the team on a voluntary basis,” she says. “So I did.”

Today, Lena spends three hours a day of her spare time working with Strick’s team at the Center for Information Resilience, a U.K.-based nonprofit dedicated to countering misinformation, part of a worldwide community of open-source intelligence (OSINT) researchers studying the war in Ukraine. Like the rest of the world, the team has been shaken by the images from Bucha, where Russian forces are accused of executing civilians and torturing Ukrainian soldiers. For the past week, Lena and her colleagues have contributed to a collective effort to identify and locate the perpetrators — a task that’s especially relevant to Lena because her family members are currently living under Russian occupation as Bucha’s residents were. “Right now, it’s pretty peaceful where they live, but I don’t think it will stay that way. The fights will come,” she says. (Out of concern for their safety, she asked me to change her name.) Continue reading New York: The Hunt for the Butchers of Bucha

New York: The Superyacht Market Just Lost Some of Its Best Customers. It Doesn’t Care.

The 2022 Palm Beach International Boat Show is getting under way this weekend in Florida with all the lavishness you’d expect: $1.2 billion worth of boats glistening along the inland waterway, a VIP pavilion with open bar, and an accompanying contemporary-art fair. What it won’t have is many customers from the country that until recently was the second-largest market in the world for high-end yachts. Russia, which according to market observers has made up 9 percent of the total superyacht market, has been abruptly sidelined by the west’s unprecedented economic sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine. You’d never know it from the way the yacht market is booming.

“2022 started extremely well and we have seen strong sales activity across the board, which we expect to continue,” says Richard Lambert, head of sales at the yacht-brokerage firm Burgess, which sold more than $2 billion worth of yachts last year.

Losing a tenth of your customer base isn’t such a big deal, apparently, when the market is white-hot. For one thing, the sort of person who might buy a superyacht — often defined as any vessel for personal use over 131 feet in length — is in plentiful supply these days. Though the COVID pandemic triggered a worldwide recession, it saw the number of the world’s billionaires climb from 2,095 to 2,755 and their cumulative wealth increase by 60 percent, or $5 trillion.

If the sudden disappearance of Russian yacht buyers does ultimately have an effect, it may only be at the very highest end of the market. “Clients from Russia and the Middle East have a higher average length of yachts,” says Merijn de Waard, founder and director of SuperYacht Times. “They are more keen on the very big boats.” According to the publication’s statistics, the average Russian-owned superyacht is 200 feet long, compared to 177 feet for American-owned ones. Of the 13 superyachts that are over 140 meters in length (459 feet), nine are owned by Arab royalty and four of them are owned by Russians. Or maybe five. Italian authorities are currently holding the 459-foot Scheherazade in a small port on the Tuscan Coast. The owner might be the richest Russian of all, Vladimir Putin — no one’s completely sure. Continue reading New York: The Superyacht Market Just Lost Some of Its Best Customers. It Doesn’t Care.

New York: Is the U.S. Facing Another COVID Wave?

COVID is like Michael Myers in Halloween: just when you think it’s finally out of the picture, it comes back to threaten you again. Coronavirus cases in the U.S. have been plummeting for weeks, and hospitalizations are near an all-time low. But with another Omicron variant pushing up case numbers around the world, it seems depressingly plausible that at least one more wave — the sixth, if you’re counting — could be headed America’s way.

Omicron BA.2 is similar to the variant that caused this winter’s spike, BA.1. But it has 20 different mutations, four of them on a crucial region of the spike protein. These disparities are likely part of the reason BA.2 appears to be considerably more transmissible than the original Omicron — 33 percent, according to one Danish study. BA.2 is also thought to infect vaccinated people more easily than its forebear, though, fortunately, it does not appear to be any deadlier. First detected in the Philippines in November, the variant spread widely in South Africa and India in December and has since become the dominant strain around the world.

It’s hitting parts of Asia particularly hard. China, which imposed strict, widespread lockdowns during the early days of the pandemic and has maintained a “Zero COVID” strategy since, mostly avoided the waves that hit the U.S. and Europe. Then BA.2 showed up. In the last few weeks, the number of cases in China has surged from 300 a day to more than 3000. In response, the Chinese authorities have re-imposed lockdown measures affecting more than 50 million people. Continue reading New York: Is the U.S. Facing Another COVID Wave?

New York: The DIY Intelligence Analysts Feasting on Ukraine

Alex McKeever, a part-time furniture mover in Ridgewood, Queens, woke up Wednesday and started scrolling on his phone. Like many of us, he’s been obsessed with the invasion of Ukraine and has been spending ten hours a day trying to piece together what was happening from news coverage and social media. That morning, McKeever, who is 30, saw that someone had tweeted a video of destroyed vehicles in a suburb of Kyiv called Bucha. It appeared to be the aftermath of a significant battle. The blackened wreckage of numerous Russian military vehicles lay scattered and smoldering along the road. Where exactly, McKeever wondered, had it taken place?

He wasn’t idly musing. For the last six years, McKeever has been active in open-source intelligence, or OSINT, which involves gathering and analyzing online information in much the same way that government intelligence professionals analyze classified data: identifying when and where events took place, who was involved, what kinds of weapons were used, and so on.

The movement began in 2011, when internet hobbyists began studying social-media posts to identify war crimes and human-rights violations in Syria. It grew steadily in the years that followed, then accelerated when Russian forces started massing near Ukraine late last year. OSINT findings proved vital in validating the Biden administration’s claims throughout February that an attack was imminent, and they informed subsequent coverage by traditional print and broadcast outlets. That exposure, in turn, drew a wave of new volunteers, many of them eager to help the Ukrainian cause. “I’ve had 50, 60 people a day getting in touch, offering their skill sets,” says Ross Burley, executive director of the Centre for Information Resilience, a U.K. nonprofit focused on countering misinformation. “We’ve had teachers, engineers, doctors. It’s staggering how everyone is coming together for this.” Continue reading New York: The DIY Intelligence Analysts Feasting on Ukraine