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
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
As headline-grabbing catastrophes go, it was a delight. A quarter-mile-long ship, decks piled with 18,300 containers full of capitalism’s miscellaneous desiderata, skidded out of control and jammed itself sideways in the Suez Canal. Nothing tragic—no deaths, no injuries—just a fender bender that brought the estimated 15 percent of international trade to a halt. Confusion reigned as hundreds of tankers and freighters hung fire at each end of the canal, wondering what to do next.
As content, it felt extremely relatable. By the day it happened, March 23, the world had been under lockdown for a year, and we were all slowly going stir-crazy. The end was in sight—those vaccine doses were finally starting to flow—but we were still stuck. We all felt a bit like that lonely digger, scraping at the sand under the ship’s looming bow, helplessly outmatched but doing the best it could.
At the same time the mishap had kind of a snow day feel to it, the sense that the tedious obligatory course of things had been suspended for a while. For once the rich—the ship owners, the insurers, the global supply chain guys—were taking it on the chin while the rest of us ate popcorn. For seven days salvage experts flailed while economists fretted about the approximately $10 billion a day in lost trade. And then, before the episode turned boring, it was over. Working with the tides, tugboats hauled the Ever Given out of the sand and sent it on its way. Classic sitcom arc: Boat gets in a jam; boat gets out of jam; everybody learns a valuable lesson.
A mobile crane, its massive gripping arm raised like a scorpion’s tail, rolls up to a multicolored stack of shipping containers at the Pentalver storage yard near Felixstowe, the largest container port in Britain. The machine grabs the top box, backs up with a beep-beep-beep, and sets it down onto the asphalt with a clang. A worker in an orange safety vest kneels and, with a screeching spray of sparks, saws through the numbered steel bolt that seals the latch. The door swings open, and Jake Slinn, a lanky 22-year-old with a buzz cut and thick-rimmed black eyeglasses, steps forward to peer inside.
Slinn is a cargo salvage buyer. His two-man operation, JS Cargo & Freight Disposal, acquires containers filled with abandoned goods shipping lines want to get rid of. And business is booming in his line of work. Snarls in the global supply chain have left an estimated 3 million containers idling on ships queued up at ports around the world, according to Niels Larsen, president of Air & Sea North America at DSV, a global transport and logistics firm.
“When a product doesn’t reach its destination for a period of time, it often loses the value that it originally had,” says Tom Enders, owner of Michigan-based The Salvage Groups Inc. When that happens, customers sometimes refuse to accept the goods; other times, they simply abandon them. In either case, “shipping lines can contact a company like ours to recover as much value from it as they can,” he says. Continue reading Businessweek: When Shipping Containers Are Abandoned, the Cargo Becomes a Mystery Prize
CAS PIANCEY could feel his heart pounding as the elevator doors slid open onto a tiled corridor of the eighth floor of the K Wah Centre. He was sweat-grimed and wrung out after a day of scouring Hong Kong for traces of a mysterious corporate entity. This was his final stop. Ahead lay a door marked “Proxy CPA Co. Ltd.” Piancey reached for the buzzer, then paused. What if the people he was chasing were really here—and understood what he was after?
It was September 2018, and Piancey, a cryptocurrency journalist, had flown from Los Angeles on a hunch. (“Piancey” is a pseudonym; doxxing is an occupational hazard best conducted anonymously.) He suspected that a handful of very clever and not particularly scrupulous people had come up with a way to create money in any quantity at the stroke of a keyboard—artificial electronic dollar bills that could be swapped for the real stuff. If he was right, these people were pulling off the swindle of a lifetime, a scam that would dwarf Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. If he was wrong, he owed some serious apologies.
Piancey pressed the buzzer. A Chinese woman in her 40s appeared. “Hello, can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Tether. This is the listed address. Is this Tether?”
“No, no,” she shook her head. “I have never heard of Tether. Sorry.” She disappeared.
In a clearing on the edge of the Black Forest in southern Germany, a modified shipping container painted an immaculate white sits near a field of solar panels. Inside, ducts wrapped in insulating foil elbow between racks filled with cabinet tanks. Everything is motionless and silent, except for a soft whirring and humming. Michael Klumpp, a postdoc at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, turns a spigot and a clear liquid flows into a glass flask. The substance smells faintly of warm wax. Though it resembles oils derived from plants or petroleum, it does not come from any familiar source, but has literally been pulled from the thin air, transubstantiated from gas to liquid with the help of renewably generated electricity. On a mass scale, it could be used to fly airplanes or power heavy machinery, replacing petroleum in some situations. It even has a catchy name: eFuel.
The idea of turning air into liquid fuel may sound fantastical, but the underlying principle is as mundane as a head of lettuce. “It’s the same thing that plants do with photosynthesis,” says Roland Dittmeyer, leader of the project and director of the Institute for Micro Process Engineering at KIT.
PHOTOGRAPHER: IVAR KVAAL FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
Last November a small seabed-exploration company out of Houston called Ocean Infinity made the discovery of a lifetime–or so it seemed, until it made another three months later. First, Ocean Infinity successfully located the remains of the San Juan, an Argentine navy sub that had vanished while on patrol. Then it found the wreck of the Stellar Daisy, a South Korean bulk ore carrier. Both vessels had been missing for more than a year, which often means a wreck won’t ever be found. The two-year-old company’s secret was teamwork: a set of eight drone subs working in tandem to scan a much larger area in record time.
These successes could be part of a broader shift in how humanity understands the sea. We know far more about the surface of Mars than we do about the bottom of the ocean, but seabed-scanning technology is growing sophisticated enough to render the inky depths much more transparent. Seabed 2030, a joint project of two nonprofits, aims to map the entire ocean floor by its namesake year. Key to that effort is Kongsberg Maritime AS, the Norwegian company that made Ocean Infinity’s subs.
Bjorn Jalving, senior vice president of Kongsberg’s subsea division, says the Hugin, its flagship drone, is a testament to advances in robotic strength and stamina. Hugins can dive as deep as 20,000 feet and stay underwater for 72 hours at a stretch. Costing $5 million to $10 million apiece depending on the onboard instruments they have and the depths they can handle, the drones are hardy enough, Jalving says, that “you let them out in the ocean, and you know that they’ll come back.” They’re also packed with sensors, including sonar that can cover five times the area of models from a decade ago, with 10 times the detail.
The subs can also transfer, process, and share much larger amounts of data with distant control centers than was possible before. Five years ago, Fugro NV, the Dutch survey and geosciences company responsible for searching the Indian Ocean for the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, relied on crewed survey boats that towed sonar gear on long cables up and down the seafloor as shipboard analysts monitored incoming data. Today the company streams field data to command centers onshore and plans to do away with some crews entirely.
Since 2017, Seabed 2030 has single-handedly increased the percentage of the seabed that’s been surveyed from 6% to 15%, mostly by compiling data from the likes of Fugro and Ocean Infinity. Fugro keeps mapping even when it’s moving ships between jobs. Beyond potential benefits such as finding clearer routes for undersea internet cables or energy pipelines, the extra intel will help answer big scientific questions related to climate change, says Larry Mayer, who contributes to Seabed 2030 as director of the Center for Coastal & Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire. “How heat is distributed has to do with currents, and where those currents go is determined by where there are ridges and valleys and things,” he says. “It’s the most fundamental information that we can get.”
Just as the first sequencing of the human genome led to businesses sequencing many other people’s genomes, seabed mapping could one day become routine, or even just an ongoing process, helping to track things such as pollution, ocean warming, and fish stocks. “It will enable the world’s decision-makers to sustainably manage the oceans,” Jalving says.
For now, though, the oceans are keeping a great many secrets. After Fugro failed to find MH370, Ocean Infinity gave the search a shot last year, scanning 43,000 miles in five months—about 15 times the pace in 2014. That team, like Fugro’s, found nothing.
ReCaptcha inventor Luis von Ahn introduced Duolingo in 2012, hoping to help users master a new language. In minutes a day, the app promised, you could learn English, Spanish, French, or German—no books required, no instructors. And all for free.
The pitch sounded convincing enough. But in the first year after its debut, Duolingo had a hard time persuading hopeful linguists to keep up with the lessons. For every eight users who downloaded and tried Duolingo, seven never returned.
So von Ahn set out with his developers to make the app as addictive as Candy Crush and other popular games—in a good way. The addiction Duolingo cultivates, he says, isn’t harmful in the way the World Health Organization says compulsive video-game playing is; the organization classifies excessive video-gaming alongside opioid or amphetamine abuse. Duolingo really is about self-improvement, von Ahn says—time otherwise spent playing games, on social media, or doing nothing, is applied to developing a skill. What’s so bad about that?
Good or bad, Duolingo’s addiction rate is way up. Next-day retention is 55 percent, up from 13 percent in 2012. “That’s about as good as a middle-of-the-road game,” von Ahn says. And with about 300 million users, Duolingo is the largest language-teaching company in the world, by user base.
Boyan Slat, a Dutch 23-year-old who’s collected $30 million for his plastic-removal startup, is ready to test Ocean Cleanup’s System 001 prototype, but he hasn’t assuaged his expert critics.
Of all the things San Francisco has brought into the wider world, few have been as big and curious-looking as Ocean Cleanup’s System 001, the contraption an offshore supply ship towed to sea through the Golden Gate last month. Black, snakelike, and 2,000 feet long, System 001 was beginning a slow 1,300-mile journey to a remote garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. When it arrives in mid-October, it will spend a year drifting around and around in a circular current, gathering as much plastic as possible, like a gigantic pool skimmer.
The idea can be attributed to Boyan Slat, a slight, 23-year-old Dutchman of Croatian descent who wears his curly brown hair in a mop and favors sunglasses made of recycled plastic. He says he became concerned about ocean debris when he was 16, scuba diving off the coast of Greece. In the intervening seven years, with the help of a viral explainer video, he’s raised more than $30 million from Salesforce.com Inc. co-founder Marc Benioff, Palantir Technologies Inc. co-founder Peter Thiel, and others to try to prove that setups such as System 001’s can, in great enough numbers, help rid the ocean of plastic by 2050.
There’s just one problem, say ocean scientists: The device can’t possibly work on the scale imagined, and it could end up becoming just another piece of litter in the ocean. “People think that it’s an easy, sexy solution, but it’s not,” says Kim Martini, an oceanography postdoc at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Given that only single-digit percentages of the plastic entering oceans each year wind up in the garbage patches, “it’s clear that the problem is much bigger than what we’re able to solve,” admits Ocean Cleanup spokesman Joost Dubois.
Slat says Ocean Cleanup has conducted extensive modeling and prototype testing and that the outcry from his more credentialed peers (he dropped out of college) just proves he’s on to something. “If you don’t have any critics, it means that what you’re doing is easy and obvious,” he says.
The doorbell rings, and Katie Wenger, 13, leaps up from the family dinner table and throws open the front door. On the stoop of her family’s building in Chelsea stands a 26-year-old Yale graduate named Allison Kaptur. Formerly a financial analyst, Kaptur quit to teach herself how to program and now works as a facilitator at Hacker School, a “writers’ retreat for programmers,” with a sideline as a coding tutor. The two descend the stairs to a basement study, and Katie shuts the door. “I’ve got exciting news,” she says. “I’m going to launch a start-up! It’s called Let Us.”
“What will it do?”
“It’ll be like Chatroulette, but connected to Facebook.” Katie describes her concept for an online environment in which strangers can randomly meet and either just chat or interact educationally as student and teacher. Kaptur nods. “Okay,” she says. “A little later, we can talk about the pieces we would need to make that work.”
For most people, software programming’s social cachet falls somewhere between that of tax preparation and autism. But it’s catching fire among forward-thinking New York parents like Katie’s, who see it as endowing their children both with a strategically valuable skill and a habit for IQ-multiplying intellectual rigor. According to WyzAnt, an online tutoring marketplace, demand for computer-science tutors in New York City has doubled each of the past two years. And if one Silicon Alley–backed initiative pans out, within a decade every public-school kid in the city will have access to coding, up from a couple of thousand.
Read the rest in this week’s issue of New York magazine.
